Local Government in Ancient India c7.5

c7.5

In treating the passages from literary works, and especially our law-books, as also those from the inscriptions, it is to be understood that the institutions to which they refer will be found to have exercised three classes of functions, viz. (*a*) industrial and commercial, (*b*) administrative, and (*c*) social or customary, including civic, educational, and religious. Each of these functions was exercised in accordance with definite rules and usages, some of them unwritten, others embodied in written agreements or charters as between the state and the assembly, or between the assembly and its members. The laws of associations, to which we shall refer later on, should therefore be understood to have a general scope and applicability, as comprehending the totality of these interests. A variety of terms has also to be used in correspondence with the variety of the institutions and of the functions they performed. Those terms, though necessarily general and almost abstract in their character, do not imply any looseness of social structure or function in relation to these institutions, but, on the contrary, indicate an organic inter-adaptation of social life and interests as well as a variety and flexibility characteristic of periods of exuberant growth.