Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c3.17

c3.17

Dharampal's own description of his initiation into Indian historiography is so fascinating it must be recounted in some detail. Soon after he got associated with the Quit India movement in 1942, he became attracted to the idea of the village community. Perhaps this was partly due to his being with Mirabehn in a small ashram community in a rural area in the Roorkee-Haridwar region from 1944 onwards. But when in 1948, he heard of the Jewish Kibbutzim in Palestine, this interest was evoked again and he visited them in late 1949 for some two weeks. He came away from the visit, however, with the feeling that the Kibbutzim model was not something that could be replicated in India. Later, along with other friends, he did attempt to launch a small village near Rishikesh in which all families had an equal share of the land, etc. The village, however, could not mould itself into a community: it lacked homogeneity. It also had practically no resources at all when it began. Later, in 1960, Dharampal got to know of village communities in Rajasthan which had *Bees Biswa* village panchayats, and some *Sasana* villages near Jagannath Puri in Orissa which were established some 700 years earlier and were still prosperous and functional in the early 1960s.