Local Government in Ancient India c6.s3: § 3
Local Government in Ancient India c6.s3
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§ 3
c6.s3.1
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:
c6.s3.2
(*a*) As assemblies of elders, heads of families, &c., meeting on more or less equal terms to regulate common life.
c6.s3.3
(*b*) As constituted into central units under a single well-defined authority, generally an absolute head, such as the tribal head, patriarch, &c.
c6.s3.4
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.
c6.s3.5
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.
c6.s3.6
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.
c6.s3.7
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.