Local Government in Ancient India c4.2

c4.2

Some of my critics take exception to the cumulation of Northern and Southern evidence on the subject of local bodies in Ancient India. The ‘physical and cultural unity of India’ is the *bête noire* of *soi-disant* orientalists of this class. A barren identity or a dead uniformity of structure and function is all that they understand by unity of type. The unity of a group, e.g. the halogen group, of a biological zone, or of a polymeric or a homologous series, is a concept which baffles these unilinear intelligences, these lengths without breadth, these ‘surfaces’ without depth or comprehension. Fresh investigation has only confirmed the conclusion that local government in Northern India and that in Southern India belong to the same series in the order of sociological development. Their tribal origins and rudiments may have been diverse and heterogeneous, but there is no mistaking the essentially Indian stamp impressed upon those institutions. This is the same phenomenon of ‘convergence’ and environmental adaptation in *social and cultural evolution*, which has been so powerful a factor in determining race origins and race types in *physical anthropology*. Negrito or Kolarian, Dravidian or Mongoloid, all ethnic contributions, in this melting-pot of the Ages, have been incorporated into a common Indian mould, of which the artificer was the Indo-Aryan consciousness, itself the inheritor of divers indigenous traditions.