Studies in Cola History and Administration c10.18

c10.18

committee. We learn from the inscriptions of the twelfth and fourteenth years of Parāntaka I that Uttaramerūr was divided into twelve śēris (streets, as Mr. Venkayya renders the word). We shall see that an attempt to get the standing committees of the Sabhā to represent the śēris as such had to be given up within a couple of years after it started. But the people of each of the śēris—the names of eight of them occur in the inscriptions *—often became trustees for charitable funds. † Manifestly the most important, after the Sabhā, among such groups united by the bond of contiguity, was the Ūr of the village. ‘Ūr’ may not at first sight seem to convey the notion of a specific corporate body with separate functions in the local economy of a place and an independent existence of its own. A superficial acquaintance with the texts of the numerous Tamil inscriptions in which these terms occur is enough, however, to lead one to the conclusion that it is often necessary, in the contexts, to interpret these words as conveying the idea of a body analogous to the Sabhā in many respects, and that a vague translation of Ūr and Ūrōm into ‘village’ and ‘we, the inhabitants of the village’ is hardly satisfactory. Uttaramerūr, moreover, is not the only place where we get evidence of the Ūr existing by the side of the Sabhā in the same locality.