Local Government in Ancient India c6.s2.4

c6.s2.4

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.