Chandragupta Maurya and His Times c6.4

c6.4

*Rural Republics.* Ancient India was built upon the basis of decentralisation on principle. It did not believe in centralisation of authority, resulting in a system of over-government of the people. It believed in the self-government of the group, in the extension of self-government from the sovereign at the top through all grades and strata of society down to the lowest classes in the villages. Every village was self-governing. There were also unions of villages as self-governing federations. Ancient India was thus built up as a vast rural democracy. Society was functioning apart from the State proper as a separate entity in defined spheres of self-government. Rural politics was independent of state-politics and of the vicissitudes of political fortune affecting the State or the Sovereign at the top. India owes the preservation of her culture to her self-governing villages or rural republics in which it was centred through the long course of her history which has seen so many political revolutions and changes of sovereignty. The position is very well summed up in the words of Sir Charles Metcalfe giving evidence before a Select Committee of the House of Commons [Report, 1832, Vol. III, App. 84, p. 331]: “The Indian 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.”