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Local Government in Ancient India c6: Introduction

Local Government in Ancient India c6

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English

Contents

Introduction

§ 1

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ONE of the characteristic features of ancient Hindu civilization is the marked development of associated life it exhibits. That development was achieved in varying degrees in the different spheres of life. We find it in those of religion, learning, politics, civics, and economics. In all these spheres organizations grew up on what may be regarded as a democratic or popular basis to fulfil the ends of national life. A proper presentation of Hindu culture in all its aspects and phases should take into account these diverse developments of the associated life, the many manifestations of the democratic principle which that culture represents. In the present work an attempt will be made to trace one particular line of that development, to dwell upon the workings of the democratic principle in one particular sphere.

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The subject of Local Self-Government in ancient India has both historical and practical interest. We owe largely to her elaborate system of local government the preservation of the integrity, independence, and individuality of Hindu culture, despite the world-shaking and catastrophic political movements to which that culture was frequently exposed in the course of her history. That provided a sort of Noah’s ark in which were safely protected the vital elements of Hindu civilization against the overwhelming political deluges that swept over the country from time to time. As Sir George Birdwood has truly remarked : ‘ India has undergone more religious and political revolutions than any other country in the world; but the village communities remain in full municipal vigour all over the peninsula. Scythian, Greek, Saracen, Afghan, Mongol, and Marāthā have come down from its mountains, and Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, and Dane up out of its seas, and set up their successive dominations in the land; but the religious trades-union villages have remained as little affected by their coming and going as a rock by the rising and falling of the tide ’.¹ This is indeed an echo of an earlier utterance of Sir Charles Metcalfe : ‘The village communities are little republics, having nearly everything they can want within themselves, and almost independent of any foreign relations. They seem to last where nothing else lasts. Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down; revolution succeeds to revolution; . . . but the village community remains the same. . . This union of the village communities, each one forming a separate little state in itself, has, I conceive, contributed more than any other cause to the preservation of the peoples of India, through all the revolutions and changes which they have suffered, and is in a high degree conducive to their happiness, and to the enjoyment of a great portion of freedom and independence'.¹

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¹ *Industrial Arts of India*, p. 320.

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¹ *Rep. Select Comm. of House of Commons*, 1832, vol. III, app. 84, p. 331.

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The fact is that India presents the rare and remarkable phenomenon of the state and the society co-existing apart from, and in some degree of independence of, each other, as distinct and separate units or entities, as independent centres of national, popular, and collective life and activity. Both of them were independent organisms with distinct and well-defined structures and functions of their own and laws of growth and evolution. The limits of state-interference were accordingly so defined and fixed as not to encroach upon the sphere of the activities of the social organization. A policy of non-interference was recognized as the ideal policy of the state, the functions of which were ordinarily restricted to 'the irreducible minimum', viz. the protection of life and property and realization of the revenue for the proper execution of that duty. There was a well-understood delimitation of the respective boundaries of the political and the social organization, both of which were co-operating agencies for the promotion of the common weal. This peculiar and predominant tendency in ancient and mediaeval Indian politics is in marked contrast with that of European or Western politics generally. In the West the predominant tendency has been towards a progressive extension of state interference and state control so as to bring within its limits all the main departments of social life and national activity until the ideal is attained of a complete nationalization or socialization of all the means and processes of life itself. The state, beginning as an agent of society, becomes its master and representative; society is merged in the state to which it surrenders its functions, dropping its independent life. Thus in the West the king or the repository of the sovereign power is the head of the state as well as of society, including even the church in some cases. In ancient India the king was head of the state, but not of the society. He had a place in the social hierarchy, but it was not the highest place. As the symbol of the state he appeared to the people like a remote abstraction with no direct touch with their daily life which was governed by the social organization. The points of contact between the state and the ordinary interests of the daily life of the people were indeed very few.

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In bringing out this contrast between the tendencies of Indian and Western politics and political thought it is not meant that Western administrations leave no room for local self-government or have no place for the autonomous local and municipal bodies. The assumption indeed goes against the very nature of things. For it is physically impossible to administer properly the manifold interests of civilized life in the comparatively larger states of the modern world from one central government. Indeed, as Sidney Webb well points out, if we consider the most progressive countries of the West, such as the United Kingdom, Germany, France, or the United States, we shall find that by far the largest part of their government is now that which is not carried on in the capital cities by the dignified departments of state under the control of the Central National Assembly or Parliament, ‘but that which is being administered locally in village, or parish, or commune, in municipality, or county, or district’, under the control and in the interests of the local people in these limited areas. ‘In England, for instance, the aggregate of parish councils, district councils, borough councils, and county councils happens to be, in magnitude or volume of business, greater than all the Government Departments put together.’ In these advanced countries the local bodies between them spend more money, undertake more enterprises, employ more officials, and legislate more extensively than the central government.¹ But, granting all this, it is evident that these organizations of local government are mostly the creation of the central government; that these local bodies owe their present form and constitution to a process of decentralization, delegation, or devolution of powers determined by the national legislature; that they are thus in the ultimate analysis but wheels of a common machine, parts of a single plant, and are not by any means 'extra-legal' associations, devoid of any statutory warrant, and, therefore, in the eye of the law, possessed of no authority whatsoever.²

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¹ See Sidney Webb's Preface to Dr. John Matthai's *Village Government in British India*, a work to which I owe some valuable suggestions.

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² It should be borne in mind that in the body of the text reference is made only to modern conditions as they exist in England and other countries of the West. Of course, the writer is aware that in many respects there is a remarkable approximation between early and mediaeval conditions of local government in England and those prevailing in ancient India.

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In respect of local self-government as it developed in India, however, we shall find that the Indian institutions are practically *sui generis*, representing a type which may be sharply distinguished from the type represented by the corresponding institutions in modern polity. The fundamental difference is that, while, in the latter case, the state, as a fully developed and completely constituted body, consciously creates autonomous centres within itself by devolution and delimitation of its own functions, in the former the communal institutions, guilds, and local bodies have an independent origin and growth out of fluid and inchoate conditions of tribal life and organization. When the state comes to supervene or be superimposed upon these, it has to treat with them more or less on terms of equality and recognize their pre-existing rights by conventions and agreements which operate as charters regulating their mutual relations. Thus the varied interests of the communal life, such as administrative, judicial, civic, commercial, or industrial, are assured by the voluntary co-operation of independent and integral units of a common body politic.

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The foregoing characterization of the system of local government in ancient India and the relations that obtained between state and society as independent organizations and centres of national life will also perhaps help us to explain and account for the somewhat perplexing phenomenon of the rise of the few empires in early Indian history administering vast and varied areas and, on two occasions, a territory more extensive than British India, stretching from Afghanistan to Mysore. It is difficult even to conceive how it was physically possible, in the absence of the modern means and facilities of communication, to control a continent from one centre in an isolated corner of India such as that at Pāṭaliputra when the news of a disturbance beyond the north-western frontier in Central Asia or Arachosia would probably take six months' time to reach the headquarters of government. And yet the growth of such an imperial authority is attested by sober history. It is not sufficiently recognized that India in the olden times was not a land of jungles and wastes, but a land of abundant agriculture, brisk trade, numerous arts and crafts, convenient roads and trade-routes with wells and rest-houses, shade-giving groves and fruit-bearing trees at regular intervals, and prosperous cities. The Greek writers on Alexander's campaigns speak of 2,000 regular towns in the Panjāb alone.

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But these material factors, though they go a great way, do not by themselves exhaust or constitute that assemblage of conditions which make the governance of empires of such colossal dimensions at all feasible. The fact is that for an adequate explanation of this puzzling phenomenon we have to look beyond the material and the objective, the physical and the natural, to the subjective and the spiritual aspects of the situation. Man's inventiveness is meant to triumph over the difficulties of his natural environment. And so the natural difficulties in the way of the Mauryan empire were solved by human statesmanship, by the application or evolution of a system of administration giving effect to an extensive decentralization and utmost latitude to the operations of local government, so that numerous autonomous centres were at work to cope with the administrative requirements of an extensive territory. This appropriate administrative machinery was not, however, be it understood, so much the creation of the new empire-builders—and Aśoka at least is very careful in distinguishing his *innovations* from his *inheritances*¹—as a legacy and a heritage handed down to them from older days.

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They found an administrative machinery, fairly adequate to its purposes, already in existence and operation, that had stood the test of centuries, the strain of political revolutions, ministering to the normal needs of national life in the deeper strata of society, unaffected by the political currents that disturb the upper strata, or the changes in ruling dynasties, and all the while conserving the vital elements in the culture of the race. It was such a machinery that made the way smooth for the emperors whose task was only to fight their way to the throne, win battles, maintain their power, and adapt the pre-existing administrative institutions to the requirements of the new times with their new problems. The most brilliant of the Indian emperors can be credited with but few administrative innovations. The fact of the matter is that, just as the aloofness of society from the state has been the main means of its self-preservation when the state is engulfed in political revolutions, and the independent development of local government has provided, like the shell of the tortoise, a haven of peace where the national culture can draw in for its own safety when political storms burst over the land—so also does this system serve to lighten considerably the burden of a new administration, with the result that the addition of mere territory does not materially add to its difficulties.

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The administration of the Mauryan empire was possible because it did not cherish the ambition of setting up a centralized government consciously legislating for, and controlling the life of, every part of that vast whole, but aimed only at an elastic system of federalism or confederation in which were incorporated, along with the central government at the metropolis, as parts of the same system, the indigenous local administrations. The essence of this imperial system was thus a recognition of local autonomy at the expense of the authority of the central government, which was physically unfit to assert itself except by its enforced affiliation to the pre-existing system of local government.¹

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¹ See Rock Edict III, VI, VIII, Kalinga R.E. II, P.E. IV, V, &c.

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¹ The absence of proper physical facilities, factors, or conditions is perhaps one of the reasons why empires in ancient India have been so few and short-lived. The following observations of J. S. Mill (*Representative Government*, p. 4) are very interesting and appropriate on the point: ‘In the ancient world, though there might be, and

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In the same way, the existence of a system of social self-government in practical independence of the ruling powers and unaffected by the vicissitudes of fortune to which they are naturally exposed will account for the somewhat remarkable fact that, even during the period of so much unrest and unsettlement under the Muhammadan rulers, Hindu India was able to show a good record of material, mental, and moral progress. Hindu India was able to live her usual life, to continue the course of her normal intellectual and spiritual progress, in her own socio-economic system in which the Muhammadan had no place. The alien kings took possession of the political capital, but they had to live in the mere suburbs of the real metropolis of India. In this sense the so-called Muhammadan period of Indian

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often was, great individual or local independence, there could be nothing like a regulated popular government, beyond the bounds of a single city-community; because there did not exist the physical conditions for the formation and propagation of a public opinion, except among those who could be brought together to discuss public matters in the same *agora.*... There have been states of society in which even a monarchy of any great territorial extent could not subsist, but unavoidably broke up into petty principalities, either mutually independent, or held together by a loose tie like the feudal; because the machinery of authority was not perfect enough to carry orders into effect at a great distance from the person of the ruler. He depended mainly upon voluntary fidelity for the obedience even of his army, nor did there exist the means of making the people pay an amount of taxes sufficient for keeping up the force necessary to compel obedience throughout a large territory.' history may be regarded as rather wrongly named, because it continued to be a period of the usual Hindu activity, the normal course of which was hardly interrupted by the political changes of the times, which were nothing new to Indian history. The culture of the race kept up its uninterrupted flow, as is evident from the many intellectual and religious movements, and the appearance of many great men in the realms of both thought and action which characterize the period.

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In the eighth century we have the great Brahman preacher and reformer Kumārila, who recalled the people to the simpler Vedic religious rites and ceremonies in the midst of the confusion and corruptions of numerous sects. The ninth century is famous for another gift from South India, Śaṅkarācārya, the profound Sanskrit scholar and writer, an eloquent preacher and a great religious reformer and organizer, who travelled throughout India in pursuit of his spiritual *digvijaya*, and imparted to Hinduism that broad philosophical basis and certain new elements which helped it to establish itself once again as the dominant and popular religion of India. The ascendancy of the Rājputs then followed in the later centuries, which meant an accession of strength to Hinduism, as is evident from the multiplicity of sects and the sectarian controversies of the times, producing a crop of religious and philosophical literary works composed generally in Sanskrit, of which the most numerous were those written by the Śaiva worshippers of Kashmīr. The intellectual history of those centuries is represented by such famous names as Bhavabhūti, a member of the court, first of Yaśovarman of Kanauj and afterwards of Lalitāditya (A. D. 730); Māgha; Padmagupta (A. D. 950); Śrī-Harṣa, the author of the *Naiṣadha* (A. D. 1150), and courtier of Jayacandra of Kanauj; Bhaṭṭa Nārāyaṇa (A. D. 850) of the Pāla court of Bihar; Rājaśekhara (A. D. 900) of the court of Kanauj; Jayadeva (A. D.

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1100), and the Kashmīrian poets Somadeva, Kṣemendra, and Bilhaṇa of the twelfth century; and the chronicler Kalhaṇa, author of the *Rājataraṅgiṇī*. In the twelfth century Southern India witnessed the great Liṅgāyat revival under Basava, and the Vaiṣṇavite revival under Rāmānuja, followed by the great Brāhmaṇa teacher of the Kanarese country, Madhva Pūrṇaprajña, who died towards the close of the same century. Later on, a fresh instance of Hindu vitality is found in the growth of the Vijayanagara empire, which was at once a centre of both political and literary life, as represented by the famous Sāyaṇācārya and his school. The same period also saw the birth (further south) of Vedāntadeśikācārya, the renowned Vaiṣṇavite scholar and poet. There was also a similar Vaiṣṇavite revival in Northern India due to the appearance of Rāmānanda and of his disciple Kabīr, whom both Hindus and Muhammadans equally honoured. Bengal under her Muhammadan rulers was also showing phenomenal literary and religious activity round Vaiṣṇavism as its mainspring. She even won the heart of her alien ruler Nāsir Shāh (1282–1325), who ordered the first Bengali rendering of the *Mahābhārata*, and is immortalized by the poet Vidyāpati through his dedication to him of one of his poems. It was about this time that Kīrtivāsa was translating the *Rāmāyaṇa* into Bengali and Mālādhar Basu was employed by Husain Shāh to translate the *Bhāgavata Purāṇa*.

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The same period saw Vidyāpati Thākur singing the songs of Vaiṣṇavism in Bihar in the Maithili dialect; Caṇḍīdās singing in Bengal; and Mīrā Bāī in Mewār, until the spiritual soil and environment of the country were ripe for the birth of the two great religious leaders, each the founder of an independent sect of Vaiṣṇavism, viz. Vallabha Ācārya, who has still numerous followers in Central India, Bombay, and Gujarāt; and Śrī-Caitanya of Navadvīpa in Bengal (1485–1527), who was the cause of a profound intellectual and religious renaissance, the founder of a renovated Vaiṣṇavism. He deluged the country with floods of spiritual enthusiasm that produced a bountiful crop of saints and singers and a vast and varied devotional literature. Thus the vitality of the national culture and civilization of the Hindus was still asserting itself while Tamerlane was harrying the political India under the Sultans of Delhi, and she was about to pass under Mogul monarchy. But Bengal was not merely active in poetry and religion, for Kullūka Bhaṭṭa was then writing his famous commentary on Manu and Jīmūtavāhana his great legal work *Dāyabhāga*, a task that was done for Bihar and the West in the eleventh century by Vijñāneśvara in his *Mitākṣarā*.

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It is indeed a remarkable fact that, under the adverse political conditions of the rule of the Sultans Hindu society evolved new means of self-protection against alien influence by means of rigorous domestic legislation as embodied in some of the most important *smṛti* compilations which were all produced during this period. Thus Mādhavācārya, Viśveśvara Bhaṭṭa, Caṇḍeśvara, Vācaspati Miśra, Pratāparudra, Raghunandana, and Kamalākara all flourished during this period and fixed Hindu social and domestic manners and customs in different parts of the country by their writings.

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Under the Mogul Monarchy, as a literary historian of India so aptly remarks, 'Brahmanism remained with its undying vitality of intellectual life to continue its own course unmoved. The glorious reign of Akbar had seen an outbreak of native genius that, in its own lines, rivals that seen in England in Elizabethan times’,¹ for, besides the many minor men of letters, there appeared in the Indian literary firmament the two shining stars, Sūrdās and Tulsīdās, whose masterpieces, according to Sir G. Grierson, are not far behind the work of Spenser and Shakespeare.

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¹ Frazer’s *Literary History of India*, p. 364.

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The phase of thought and religious emotion which uttered itself in the rapturous poetry of Jayadeva received a continued expression through the great mystics of the Middle Ages, such as Vallabha, Mīrā Bāī, Vidyāpati, and the like, and the greater poets of Akbar's days, such as Kṛṣṇadās and the blind bard Sūrdās, while *Tulsi-krit-Rāmāyaṇa* constitutes in itself the Vedas, Upaniṣads, and Purāṇas of the unlettered millions of Hindustān, to whom it presents their sole norm of conduct. In the reign of Jahāngīr the religion taught by Tulsīdās was spread throughout Ajmer and Rajputana by the disciples of Dādū, a cotton cleaner of Ahmadābād, and founder of the Dādupanth sect.

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Hindu India offers further evidence of her progress and capacity to bring forth great men. In 1469 was born Nānak, the founder of the religion of the Sikhs, and by the time of the fifth Guru, Arjuna (1581–1606), when the *Ādi Granth* formed the scriptures of the people, the Sikh faith had spread throughout the Jāt population of the Panjāb and roused the fears of the Mogul monarchs. Arjuna was arrested and died from torture, but the event only fired his sect. Guru Har Govind (1606–45) roused the Sikh disciples to arms against the murderers of his father and sent them forth to blackmail the local governors of the Emperor Shāh Jahān. The ninth Guru, Teg Bahādur (1664–75) was cruelly tortured along with some Brāhmans at Delhi, which only led to the national determination of the Sikhs to wage a religious war against Islam in India, to overthrow the Moslem political power and found a new empire on its ruins. The first step taken by the tenth Guru, Govind Singh (1666–1708), was to summon the aid of the Brāhmans of Benares, propitiate the goddess Durgā, to whom six disciples offered themselves as sacrifices, and initiate himself and all his followers as members of the Khālsā or ‘special property of the Guru’. Thus Sikhism and the Sikh power were most remarkable examples of the continued vitality and fertility of the motherland even under the depressing conditions of an alien domination.

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Lastly, we have one more conspicuous example of the same facts in the growth of the Marāthā power for which the short-sighted bigotry of Aurangzeb was responsible. Indeed, it would appear that when the tyranny of Moslem rule was at its worst the life of Hindu India, far from being choked by the political powers, was asserting itself best and evolving out of its prolific vitality new means of meeting the oppression. Aurangzeb’s cold contempt for Śivājī, ‘the mountain rat’, made it possible for that chief to weld the Marāthā peasantry into a powerful soldiery whom a religious fanaticism and hatred of Islam developed into a power capable of exacting a tribute of one-fourth of all the revenue up to the limits of the English factory at Surat, away to the Marāthā ditch dug round Calcutta as a defence against their raids. It is, however, to be borne in mind that this Hindu political power had, like most things Hindu, a religious origin and mission. The Guru of Śivājī was Rāmadās, the Brāhman, at whose feet he offered all his wealth and kingdom, which he consented to receive back only as a gift of his Guru, whose servant he always deemed himself; and accordingly the Marāthā national flag was the red-ochre-coloured cloth worn by Sannyāsins. The other great spiritual leader of the movement was the Śūdra poet, Tukārām, whose asceticism and constant preaching and singing roused the slumbering spirit of the Marāthā nation, and gave them a faith to live for and die for, the faith in Śrī-Kṛṣṇa as the only way to salvation. As Frazer has justly remarked, ‘The potential force of such a religious impulse is too often lost sight of by those who judge Indian life from a Western standpoint.’

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The above broad and brief survey of the intellectual and spiritual progress and achievements of Hindu India, even under the adverse conditions of an aggressively alien rule, will, I hope, serve to establish the fact that these were ultimately due to a system of organization which had an independent existence and life of its own and was impenetrable to the foreign political powers who were unable to touch it for good or evil. The culture of the race was conserved and promoted through the indigenous machinery of appropriate institutions handed down from time immemorial, which embraced the manifold spheres of national life, economic and educational, social and religious. Thus the genius of the race was never in danger of being choked and stifled, for it was never in want of the adequate means of its self-expression. Thus also have Hindu culture and civilization been enabled to persist through the ages in spite of adverse political conditions, endowed with a singular capacity to survive the effects of alien rule and overcome the influence of political environment in general to which so many cultures and civilizations have succumbed in human history. Thus has Hindu India, fortified in the peculiar institutions she has evolved, been enabled to combat successfully the otherwise irresistible influences of the state or political sovereignty, irrespective of the nationality or personnel of such sovereignty for the time being.

§ 2

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The subject of Local Self-Government in ancient India, besides its historical interest, is also possessed of an eminently practical interest. There are at present in India two contending schools of political thought proposing two different principles of administrative reform. One of these seeks to introduce self-government ‘from above’ and the other ‘from below’. The truth perhaps lies in a duly combined application of both the principles, but, whatever may be the truth of the matter, it may, perhaps, be pertinent to point out that no form of provincial or central government which is organized merely ‘from above’, however mechanically and ideally perfect, can be a living and healthy growth unless it can draw its sustenance from the congenial subsoil of a people’s political instincts, habits, and traditions as expressed in the indigenous local bodies, the natural foundations of *all* government. Political reconstruction must recognize its limiting conditions. The local bodies are the outcome of natural groupings and associations which should be cherished and given a fuller scope in any scheme of genuinely national self-government. After all, it is the efficiency of the local institutions which matters most to the major part of the people, and, if self-government is the road to that efficiency, it should certainly be applied first to a sphere which directly touches the daily interests of popular life and its real welfare. It is, indeed, a mistaken judgement that seeks to associate self-government in India exclusively with that part of government which concerns India as a whole, for a people cannot be deemed to be essentially self-governing and enjoying the blessings of free institutions if they are without the right of administering themselves their local affairs and interests, on which their daily well-being depends. Besides, local government is itself the best school of political training for the masses living in the villages who cannot take part in the provincial or the central government except through their few representatives, and it is also to be cherished as a school of social service and a most efficient factor of social progress. Viewed in this light, the study of the ancient Indian local institutions will be interesting both to the government and to the people. The government, which has already committed itself in several resolutions and minutes to the task of developing local government on the indigenous basis as far as possible, will find from such study materials and the lines on which the reconstruction should proceed. To the people it will bring a new inspiration, a fresh stimulus to national self-respect that will look back with pride upon the record of institutions which gave them at once the blessings of self-rule and a means of self-preservation amidst adverse political conditions.

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The sphere of local government also exhibits a noteworthy democratic development in ancient India. A study of the institutions reflecting that development will throw considerable clear light not only on our early economic history, now shrouded in obscurity, but also on some of the basal factors of ancient Hindu culture and civilization. Respect for tradition and authority and a blind faith, rather than discriminating judgement, are generally supposed to be the primary formative factors of early Hindu society, despite the many manifestations of the democratic principle in such characteristically Hindu institutions as the joint family, the communal holding of land in the typical village community, and the like, as well as in the numerous self-governing, ‘kingless’ states in ancient India, the existence of which is attested by sober history.

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It is too often forgotten that a great deal of socialism and communism (representing advanced democratic ideals of the modern age) is held in solution in the Indian social system. It finds appropriate expression through various institutions which all imply strong collectivistic or communistic sense and intuitions in the people, combined with a due restraint of that aggressive individualism and keen proprietary instinct which, under the influence of the Roman Jurisprudence, emphasizing private property and the sacredness of creditors’ rights over those of debtors, have given, in the opinion of the most thoughtful sociologists and political philosophers, a somewhat wrong direction to the development of nations and states in Europe.

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Thus these local institutions have a place all their own in the life of a people which the process of political integration can never affect. The continuity of such institutions—which, as will appear, are yet in a sense functioning in different parts of the country as regards local justice, the organization of rural service, the employment of communal labour, the care of the village common and burial-ground, of the school and shrine, of tanks and irrigation channels, of feeding-houses and hospitals, and the like—is a matter of special concern to India with her particular need of the kind of ‘social tissues’ they develop. It is also necessary to preserve a type of communalist experiments in politics which, though specially Indian, have yet their uses and lessons for the state-constructions of the future.

§ 3

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It may perhaps be objected that the so-called democratic institutions, such as the village communities of ancient and mediaeval India, are merely survivals or continuations of tribal communism developing by mere aggregations and worked into compound forms. To make this objection is to mistake the fundamental tendencies reflected in the history of the evolution of tribal communities. That history shows that such communities may be either of the following types:

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(*a*) As assemblies of elders, heads of families, &c., meeting on more or less equal terms to regulate common life.

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(*b*) As constituted into central units under a single well-defined authority, generally an absolute head, such as the tribal head, patriarch, &c.

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The first type is characteristic of the so-called Aryan peoples and follows a line of evolution which in Europe developed into the democratic city-states, with further differentiation of functions, and the control of particularist tendencies by the development of central organs and by means of segregation, geographical as well as cultural; while in India the type culminated in the democratic institutions for the expression of corporate life, rural and urban.

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The second type, characteristic of the so-called Semitic peoples, developed into the great ancient monarchies of the East, such as the Egyptian, the Assyrian, and the Babylonian, by a mere re-duplication of similar parts. It may also be noted in this connexion that the Saracenic culture exhibits a crucial phenomenon in socio-political history, because there democracy has developed out of the absolutist institutions of the second type under the equalizing and levelling influences of Islamic religion.

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Finally, it should also be understood that the Indian development of the local bodies really and fundamentally represents a distinctive type which must not be confounded with the rudiments of tribal self-government, invariably characteristic of primitive societies. The Indian institutions have developed differentiated structures and functions of their own, while the characteristic tendency of all tribal institutions (in the intermediate folk-stage) is to resolve into the original mass out of which they arise. Hence the councils of chieftains and elders in tribal communities, which are the repositories of tribal customs, derive their authority direct from the primary bodies which are represented *per capita* only and not by classes as in the Indian assemblies and unions.

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We should therefore guard ourselves against these preliminary prejudices, objections, and misconceptions to which we are liable in studying the ancient local institutions of India by a reference to the history of tribal evolution and the fundamental distinction exhibited therein in the types of tribal culture-systems and institutions.

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