The Indian Village: ‘Myth and Reality'

M. N. Srinivas

I
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century the Indian village has been the subject of discussion by British
administrators, scholars in diverse fields, and Indian nationalists. The early administrators' reports, a few of which
were included in documents placed before the British Parliament, obtained wide circulation owing to the fortuitous
circumstance that two outstanding thinkers of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Sir Henry Maine, made use of
them in the course of their reconstructions of the early history, if not prehistory, of social institutions the world over.
Both the administrators' reports and the writings of Marx and Maine influenced the thinking of Indian nationalists
and scholars. The first-hand and intensive studies of villages carried out by social anthropologists since the end of
the Second World War have necessarily resulted in a critical appraisal of the earlier views and conceptions. Since
some social anthropologists had themselves been influenced, consciously and unconsciously, by the earlier views
their critical examination of them may be regarded as an attempt at self-exorcism.
Anthropologists who are active in researching into village India are subjecting to critical examination not only the
views of earlier writers but also those of their colleagues. Thus, in 1957, Dumont and Pocock asked the question
whether the village was indeed the `social fact which it has for so long been assumed to be'. Again, 'A field worker
takes a village as a convenient centre for his investigations and all too easily comes to confer upon that village a kind
of sociological reality which it does not possess'. They conclude that 'the conception of "village solidarity" which is
said to "affirm itself' seems all too often to be a presupposition imposed upon the facts'. 'Village solidarity is nothing
other than the solidarity of the local section of the dominant caste, and the members of the other castes are loyal
not to the village as such but to the dominant caste which wields political and economic power'.
In contrast to the village, caste has 'social reality'. The village is only the dwelling-place of diverse and unequal
castes.
Inequality, which the first [British] administrators did not stress because they found it natural and
inevitable, disappears from the picture for many modern Indians, who assume a 'community' to be an
equalitarian institution. In contrast to this widespread mentality are the outright statements of Percival
Spear, of 0' Malley, and of Srinivas: 'In a joint village, there are two classes of men, one with proprietary
rights, and the other without them, power resting exclusively with the former'.
The first influential account of the Indian village appeared in the celebrated Fifth Report from the Select Committee
on the Affairs of the East Indian Cy. (1812), and Louis Dumont has traced its authorship to one of the great British
administrators, Sir Thomas Munro. After listing the various village functionaries the Fifth Report concluded:
Under this simple form of municipal government, the inhabitants of the country have lived from time
immemorial. The boundaries of the village have been but seldom altered; and though the villages
themselves have been sometimes injured and even desolated by war, famine and disease, the same
name, the same limits, the same interests and even the same families, have continued for ages. The
inhabitants gave themselves no trouble about the breaking up and divisions of kingdoms; while the
village remains entire, they care not to what power it is transferred or to what sovereign it devolves, its
internal economy remains unchanged.
The above statement represented both an oversimplified and idealized account of the village in pre-British India and
with slight alterations it was to be repeated by writer after writer for the next 150 years. The next influential account
of the Indian village was in Sir Charles Metcalfe's Minute included in the Report of the Select Committee of the
House of Commons, 1832. Metcalfe revived Munro's characterization of villages as 'little republics' which were
'almost independent of foreign relations'. Instead of the unchanging internal economy of the Fifth Report, Metcalfe
used the expression, 'having nearly everything that they want within themselves'. (It is surprising to find even
Dumont crediting the Indian village with 'economically almost perfect self-sufficiency'.) Finally, the village
communities to which their inhabitants had a profound attachment as evidenced by their returning to them after
periods of war, famine, and pestilence, were responsible for the preservation of the people of India, their freedom
and happiness.
According to Dumont, Tor the observer of things Indian, there is something idyllic and Utopian about them [the
descriptions], and a reader of Stockes' [sic] admirable book [1959] is tempted to father this idealization on the
romantic and paternalist minds of the period: Munro, Elphinstone, Malcolm and Metcalfe'. Romantic and paternalist
they probably were, but how could they have failed to take note of the grinding poverty, disease, ignorance, misery,
and inequalities of day-to-day living in the villages?
Both Marx and Maine made their own contribution to extant oversimplifications and misconceptions about the
nature of Indian villages. According to Dumont, `Although Marx and Maine are poles apart in other respects, they
come together retrospectively as the two foremost writers who have drawn the Indian village community into the
circle of world history. In keeping with contemporary—Victorian—evolutionary ideas and preoccupations, both saw
in it a remnant or survival from what Maine called "the infancy of society". Both saw in nineteenth-century India the
past of European society. Yet another point of agreement between the two was their belief in the absence of private
ownership of land in India.' When pristine communal ownership of land was viewed alongside political autonomy,
economic autarky, and vast numbers of people living in tiny republics which lasted while dynasties above them rose
and fell, there emerged a picture of a happy pre-colonial past which educated Indians found nostalgic. Pristine
communal ownership was interpreted to mean the absence of economic inequalities. The destruction of Indian
handicrafts, especially handlooms, for which India was famous in the pre-nineteenth-century world, owing to their
inability to compete with goods produced by the British factories and mills, provided a potent case for ending alien
rule which had brought in so much misery.
Marx, who was totally preoccupied with economic and social change, found Indian villages singularly resistant to
change. He made no attempt to conceal his dislike of them and all that they implied and stood for:
. these idyllic village communities . . . had always been the solid foundation of oriental despotism . . .
they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool
of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical
energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of
land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetuation of unspeakable cruelties, the
massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than
that of natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. . . . We
must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by
slavery, that they subjected man to external circumstances instead of elevating man [to be] the
sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-. developing social State into never-changing
natural destiny.
All this explained the static nature of Indian society and its passivity, and British rule, while exploitative, had set in
motion economic forces leading to the welcome destruction of traditional Indian society. Britain was producing 'the
only social revolution ever heard of in Asia. [Marx] believed that England had a double mission in India: to annihilate
the old Asiatic society and to lay the foundations of a Western society'.
According to Marx, the basis of the self-sufficiency of the village was in the 'domestic union of agricultural and
manufacturing pursuits'. 'The "peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hand-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture"
gives the villages self-sufficiency. The spinning and weaving are done by the wives and daughters'. Again, 'the
simplicity of the organization for production in these self-sufficing communities' provided the key to the secret of
their immutability 'in such striking contrast with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic States, and the
never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the economic elements of society remains untouched by the
storm-clouds in the political sky'.
Marx also noted the existence of caste and slavery in the context of the village. He referred to the prevalence of a
strict division of labour within the village which operated 'with the irresistible authority of a law of nature'. But he
was not able to weave slavery into his analysis of the village presumably because in his ideal scheme it was a
characteristic of a later stage of economic development. It did not really belong there. He just contented himself
with mentioning it.
Marx had no kind words for British rule either. He denounced the commercial exploitation of India by the East India
Company.
India, the great workshop of cotton manufacture for the world, since immemorial times, became now
inundated with English twists and cotton stuffs. After its own produce had been excluded from England,
or only admitted on the most cruel terms, British manufactures were poured into it at a small and
merely nominal duty, to the ruin of the native cotton fabrics once so celebrated.
Again,
it was the British who broke up the Indian hand-loom and destroyed the spinning-wheel. England began
with driving the Indian cottons from the European market; it then introduced twist into Hindustan and
in the end inundated the very mother country of cotton with cottons. . .. British steam and science
uprooted, over the whole surface of Hindustan, the union between agriculture and manufacturing
industry.
Marx was strengthening the armoury of the Indian nationalists.
The idea of primitive communism of property was a basic idea of the nineteenth-century evolutionists, and Maine
saw in the village communities of North-Western Provinces (later called United Provinces) the prevalence of
communal ownership. Generalizing from partial information he declared,

2
 We have so many independent reasons for suspecting that the infancy of law is distinguished by the
prevalence of co-ownership, by the intermixture of personal with proprietary rights, and by the
confusion of public with private duties, that we should be justified in deducing many important
conclusions from our observation of these proprietary brotherhoods, even if no similarly compounded
societies could be selected in any other part of the world.
The 'Village Community' is 'known to be of immense antiquity', great stability, and it is 'more than a brotherhood of
relatives and more than an association of partners'. 'It is an organized society, and besides providing for the
management of the common fund, it seldom fails to provide, by a complete staff of functionaries, for internal
government, for police, for the administration of justice, and for the apportionment of taxes and public duties'.
After his experience as the Law Member of the Viceroy's Council (1862-9), Maine came to have a slightly better idea
of the complexity of. Indian villages: 'Even when the village-communities were allowed to be in some sense the
proprietors of the land which they tilled, they proved on careful inspection not to be simple groups, composed of
several sections, with conflicting and occasionally with irreconcilable claims'.
Dumont has criticized Maine for his failure to understand that 'the constitution of the village had to be put in
relation to caste on the one hand, and to political power or traditional kingship on the other' (Dumont, 1966, p. 85).
Maine did regard villages as forming part of wider kingdoms but Dumont senses a 'contradiction' in the way in which
the relation between the two was formulated: 'The contradiction comes up forcibly in another passage [of Maine]:
"[the kings] swept away the produce of the labour of the village-communities and carried off the young men to serve
in their wars but did not otherwise meddle with the cultivating societies" '. He concedes that 'Maine and other
writers with him are probably right in assuming that kings did not interfere with the principles on which the villages
were constituted, and one must distinguish between material or factual inter-dependence and juridical or moral
intervention'. Since 'all over the country the villagers agreed to deliver to the king a substantial part of the produce'
they did recognize their dependence on him. And Dumont concludes, 'Such a high degree of factual dependence
cannot but be reflected, occasionally at any rate, in the constitution of the village and even in the ideology of its
members'. In Section, II, I shall be considering the question of the relation between the king or other higher political
entity and the villages, and for the present I merely note that both Marx and Maine lent the weight of their authority
to such misconceptions as economic autarky and political autonomy of the Indian village. Since both also thought
that communal ownership of' land was the pristine practice in Indian villages, it followed from this that villages were
equalitarian communities. Though both mentioned caste, they do not seem to have understood how the institution
worked or its implications for communal ownership.
The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw an upsurge in nationalist sentiment in India and. it is understandable
that Indian writers viewed the political and economic changes brought about by British rule from a nationalist angle.
The economic exploitation of India, the continuous drain of wealth from India to Britain, the ruin of Indian
handicrafts, and the consequent impoverishment of the peasantry became familiar themes with them.'
The general result of' the nationalist interpretation of' Indian economic history has recently been summed up by
Dharma Kumar in the following terms:
British rule, and the flooding of India with foreign manufactures, destroyed domestic industries, and so
drove the artisan on to the land. The British introduced in certain areas a system under which land
revenue was assessed at high rates and was payable in cash, and which held individuals responsible for
payments. This led to the destruction of the old village communities. The British brought about changes
in the law which made it possible to sell land; it went either to the State for non-payment of taxes, or to
the money-lender for non-payment of debt. This turned the peasant into a landless labourer. Supporters
of this theory concede that there were some landless labourers before the British took power, but their
numbers, so it is held, were insignificant.
Gandhi, who placed the peasantry in the forefront of the national consciousness by his political campaigns on their
behalf in Champaran (Bihar) and Khaira (Gujarat) districts,' felt the need to do something immediately to lessen their
poverty and misery. He urged Indians to use hand-spun and hand-woven cloth and converted its wearing into a
national cult. It was a part of his swadeshi movement and it included the boycott of foreign, especially British, goods.
The swadeshi movement was a powerful weapon in the hands of a subject people who yearned for their freedom.
Certain elements in Gandhi's world-view made him a strong advocate of the village as against the State and the big
city: he was a philosophical anarchist(' influenced by Ruskin, Tolstoy, and Thoreau. He had a deep suspicion of the
power of the State, a hatred of the enslaving machine, and unlike most educated Indians was a staunch believer in
the necessity of manual labour for everyone. He was also in the tradition of genuine spirituality, practising and
preaching plain living and high thinking.

3
Gandhi's programme of rural reconstruction involved the revival of handicrafts and panchayats, and the removal of
untouchability. He wanted panchayats to arrive at decisions on the basis of consensus, as he was convinced that
ordinary democratic processes resulted in the suppression of minority views and interests.
To sum up: The erroneous, idealized, and oversimplified view of the Indian village first propounded by the early
British administrators was later cast into the framework of universal history by Marx and Maine. Both of them,
Maine more unqualifiedly than Marx, believed in the antecedence of communal ownership over the institution of
private property, and Maine actually claimed to have discovered its existence in villages of the North-Western
Provinces. It may be noted, in passing, that the theory of the primitive communism of property was popular with
nineteenth-century Europeans who saw it everywhere around them. As against this, Marx supported, at least before
he came upon Morgan's Ancient Society, the theory of the (east) Indian origin of communism in property:
A ridiculous presumption has latterly got abroad that common property in its primitive form is
specifically a Slavonian, or even exclusively Russian form. It is the primitive form that we can prove to
have existed among Romans, Teutons, and Celts, and even to this day we find numerous examples, ruins
though they be, in India. A more exhaustive study of the Asiatic, and especially of the Indian forms of
common property, would show how from the different forms of primitive common property, different
forms of its dissolution have developed. Thus, for instance, the various original types of Roman and
Teutonic property are deducible from different form of Indian common property.?
The communal ownership of land certainly has equalitarian implications. Marx loathed the Indian village and the
kind of' life which was possible in it, and he regarded its disappearance as a result of the economic forces and
technology introduced by the British, as both necessary and inevitable. It is therefore surprising to find a few Indian
Marxists such as A. R. Desai presenting what Dharma Kumar has aptly called 'Golden Age' descriptions of the Indian
village. But against this there have been many others, Marxists and non-Marxists, who have refused to subscribe to
the equality thesis.' Indian social anthropologists and sociologists who have carried out field studies of villages since
independence have certainly emphasized the existence of caste and other inequalities. In fact, there is a feeling
among their colleagues in economics, political science, and history that they have paid too much attention to caste.
In view of this it is surprising indeed to find Dumont writing that many modern Indians assume a community to be an
equalitarian institution.
I shall consider in the next two sections the concept of the self-sufficiency of the Indian village, first in the political
and then in the economic sense. After that I shall take up the question whether the Indian village is a community or
just an architectural and demographic entity.

II
Notwithstanding the frequency with which the term 'little republics' was used, neither the British administrators nor
Marx or Maine regarded villages as self-governing in the full political sense. Such criticism as has to be directed
against them pertains only to the manner in which they formulated the relationship between villages and the wider,
inclusive political system.
It is, however, possible formally to acknowledge the existence of the State while ignoring it in actual discussions of
the village community. Thus, while the fact of the payment of taxes by the village to the State finds mention
generally, it is stated that but for this payment villages are autonomous.
To state, as many moderns have done, that 'apart from' this remittance villages were independent and
the villagers the owners of the land, will not do. . . . [Elphinstone] went to the crux of the matter when
he wrote: 'though under a settled government, it [the village] is entirely subject to the head of the State,
yet in many respects it is an organized Commonwealth'. The idealization begins when dependence on
the State is forgotten, and the village is considered as a 'republic' in all respects.
It seems unlikely that villagers were entirely indifferent to the fate of the kingdom of which they were a part. They
would have had a natural preference for a 'good' king and a distaste for a 'bad' one judged by such criteria as the
share of the crop he collected by way of tax, and the effectiveness of the protection he offered them aginst robbers,
marauding troops, etc. Apart from this, the fact that occasionally the king or chieftain hailed from a locally dominant
caste resulted in his caste fellows in various villages in the kingdom rallying to his aid in a crisis. In medieval Gujarat,
for instance, local Rajput chieftains and their allies, the Koli chieftains, fought, for a period of 400 years, the Muslim
conquerors who had displaced the Rajput king of Gujarat.
The administrators also highlighted the great ability of the village communities to survive temporary disaster, but
this again was an exaggeration as Baden-Powell pointed out:
As to the villages being unchangeable, their constitution and form has shown a progressive tendency to
decay, and if it had not been for modern land-revenue systems trying to keep it together, it may well be

4
 doubted whether it would have survived at all. No doubt there are cases in which villages have been re-
established by the descendants of a former body driven out by disaster. but the invitation of the ruler
has much to do with the return: he desires to re-establish deserted estates for the sake of his revenue;
and old landholders are the best; while an old headman family has an obvious capacity for inducing
cultivators to restore the village. When villages are refounded, it is however just as often by totally
different people.
While one must conclude that there was a tendency to exaggerate the quantum of autonomy as well as the stability
of the villages, the early writers were only trying to characterize a situation in which the lowest level of the political
system,.viz. the village, enjoyed a considerable measure of autonomy as well as discreteness from the higher levels.
It was also far more stable than units at the higher levels. The latest scholar to comment on this phenomenon is
Frykenberg. His remarks on Guntur District in Andhra Pradesh during the period 1788-1848 hold good for other
regions and periods as well:
Villages survived forces and innovations of central authority. Institutions above the villages were
seemingly much less durable. Struggles for village and district positions took place whenever a new
regime sought to enforce its authority; but power at high levels was much more transient and its danger
passed away. Perpetual strife, counter-marching armies, and rapid rising and falling of fortunes are said
to have occurred as each king tried to spread the umbrella of his authority over the plains.
One aspect of the relationship between the State and the village which writers have generally commented upon is
the former's 'extractive' role. According to Marx, the 'structure of government in Asia had consisted from time
immemorial in only three departments: that of Finance, or the plunder of the interior; that of War, or the plunder of
the exterior; and finally, the department of Public Works [for irrigation]'. Maine held a similar view.
Maine commented upon further characteristic of the State in the British period: the State, . with few doubtful
exceptions, neither legislated nor centralized. The village communities were left to modify themselves separately in
their own way'.
O' Malley fills in some details on the relation between the pre-British king and the villages:
Except for the collection of land revenue there was little state control of the villages. The activities of the
state did not go further than the primary functions of defence against external enemies, the prevention
of internal rebellion, and the maintenance of law and order. The administrative machinery can scarcely
be said to have extended to the villges. . . . The only contact with the villages was by means of local
officials having their headquarters in the towns, who were responsible for patrolling of the main routes,
the suppression of organized crime, and the realization of the land revenue. So long as it was paid, and
so long as there was no disturbance of the peace endangering the general security or outbreaks of crime
preventing the safe passage of travellers and merchandise, the villagers were left to manage their own
affairs, with headmen and councils of elders to try their petty cases and village watchmen to prevent
petty crimes.
While Maine and 0' Malley were stating an important truth, we shall see later that the relationship between the king
and his subjects was more complicated, and that the traditional king performed certain other duties as well.
However, this is not to deny that British rule altered fundamentally the relationship between the rulers and the
ruled.
The kind of relationship between the State and the village described above had its roots in primitive technology and
the related phenomena of absence of roads and poor communications. In the first half of the nineteenth century,
according to Gadgil, 'In most parts of the country roads as such did not exist, and where they did exist their condition
was very unsatisfactory'. There was an almost complete absence of roads in the Madras Presidency at the beginning
of the nineteenth century. According to the Public Works Commissioners appointed by the Madras government,
... nearly the whole of the made roads (so called) are only so far made as to be just practicable for carts.
They admit of carts moving in dry weather with light loads at a very slow pace and by very short stages.
But by far the greater portion of these roads are unbridged and a heavy shower cuts off the
communications wherever the stream crosses a line and they are in many cases so unfit to stand the
effects of the wheels while the surface is wet, that in the monsoon months they are out of use except
for cattle or foot passengers.
Not until British rule was there an attempt to cover the country with a network of roads but their efforts were
confined, more or less, to connecting the main towns. Inter-village communication improved, if at all, only
incidentally. Only since 1947 has attention begun to be paid to rural roads. But the situation continues to be
extremely unsatisfactory. According to J. M. Healey,

5
 India has the lowest mileage of road per cultivated acre in the world. Large areas have no access to
roads at all. Only 11 per cent of the 645,000 villages are connected by all-weather roads. One out of
three villages is more than five miles from a dependable road connection. The isolation of many villages
impedes the spread of new attitudes and techniques as well as movements of physical goods.
Any portrayal of villages as helpless entities in their relationship with rulers in pre-British India would not be correct.
There is here a need to emphasize the distinction between regular or continuing relationships between the village
and the State, and individual instances of contact. In the latter situation, any cruelty or injustice could have been
practised, whereas in the former there were several constraints on the king's power. I have already mentioned how
geography and primitive technology favoured a measure of village autonomy. This was reinforced by the character
of the pre-British political system. Any king who wanted to sit on his throne for a period of time had to win, in some
measure, the support and goodwill of his subjects living in the villages of his kingdom. Otherwise he was inviting
them to be disloyal to him during crises, which were only too frequent.
Troops could certainly be sent to make an example of disloyal villagers but such a measure, one suspects, was
resorted to only in an extremity. And, apart from other constraints, the king could not always take for granted the
loyalty of his troops. Percival Spear writes of villages in the Delhi region during the last days of Mughal rule:
They [the landowners] acted as the representatives of the body of proprietors, and in the name of the
rest of the village. They had first to fix the assessment with the government officials. This in itself
required all the qualities of the diplomatist, the statesman and the soldier. If the Government was short
of troops and they put on a bold front they might escape payment altogether. By judicious
management, such as presents to soldiers mutinous through arrears of pay, they might turn the troops
against their commanders, and even receive money for ransoms instead of paying up. If this was not
possible they could retire behind their mud walls and defy the officers, hoping that the rains would
break, that a party of marauding Sikhs would gallop up or that the troops might be called away before
they had time to bring up the artillery. But they must not resist too long and allow the village to be
stormed, when all would be lost in the general plunder.
Villages paid some attention to their defence, and in the Delhi region villages of any size surrounded themselves with
a mud wall, and had even watch-towers to protect their walls. Neighbouring villages came together to protect
themselves against external attack. Generally, in most parts of India, the dominant peasant castes seem to have
provided the pool from which chieftains were recruited, and some chieftains such as Shivaji even graduated to
kinghood. An important criterion of dominance was the ability to field a certain number of men for a fight. Violence
was an integral element in the tradition of the dominant castes, and the political conditions of pre-British India
provided ample opportunities for violence. Further, the successful exercise of violence often resulted in a caste, or a
section of it, being able to claim Kshatriya status.
It was the establishment of the Pax Britannica that effectively clipped the wings of the leaders of the dominant
peasant castes. But even after a century of British rule many a peasant leader continued to have the attitude and
outlook of a chieftain of yore. N. Ramarao, during his lifetime a distinguished official of Mysore State, has presented
the portrait of such a leader in his enthralling book of memoirs, Kelavu Nenapugalu. Even today in Mysore it is not
uncommon to refer to a powerful and autocratic village leader as a palegar, a term referring to a chieftain of a group
of villages.
Collective flight was another sanction available to villagers against oppression. The sanction was rendered more
potent by the fact that labour was scarce in pre-British India while land was relatively abundant. There was aLso the
likelihood that the flight of people in one village would have repercussions elsewhere, given the bonds of kindred
and caste which frequently cut across villages. According to the Thorners,
so long as the peasants turned over to the local potentate his customary tribute and rendered him the
usual services, their right to till the soil and reap its fruits was taken for granted. Local rulers who
repeatedly abused this right were considered oppressive; if they persisted, the peasantry fled to areas
where the customs of the land were better respected. As land was still available for settlement and
labour was not too cheap, local chiefs had to be careful lest they alienate the villagers.
Villages then, were, not helpless entities but had considerable resources of their own in dealing with higher political
powers. An implicit recognition of this is to be found in the prevalence in pre-British India of a form of government
which bore a close resemblance to what Lord Lugard termed 'indirect rule'. Tax-farming was an expression of
indirect rule and its popularity was due to the fact that it relieved the king and his administration from
preoccupation with the day-to-day problems regarding the villages farmed out. That the system had its dangers,
grave ones at that, is not gainsaid. The tax-farmers could—and did—mulct the cultivators, and only a fraction of their
collections reached the king. Again, the political system of pre-British India offered temptations if not opportunities

6
for tax-farmers to transform themselves into chiefs. But there were also factors inhibiting their rapacity: the milch
cows could run away, putting an end to the milk supply. There was also the likelihood of complaints reaching the
king about the inhuman exactions. Punishment was likely to be swift and deterrent in such a case, as the act often
provided the, king with a chance to regain his popularity with the peasantry. Such punishment also conveyed an
unequivocal message to other tax-farming officials.
I am aware that the 'joint' villages of the north have been called `democratic'—in contrast to the 'severalty' villages
elsewhere which have been dubbed 'autocratic'—on the ground that a relationship of equality characterized the
representatives of the landowning lineages who formed the village council. The severalty villages, on the other hand,
were dominated by the hereditary village headman who wielded enormous power. Leaving aside the fact that the
democracy of the 'joint' villages did not include the members of the non-dominant castes, the distinction ignores a
fundamental similarity underlying both types of villages, viz. the existence of dominant castes in both joint and
severalty villages. This meant that the council of the dominant caste, comprising the elders of the different lineages,
was important and even a state-appointed headman could not easily ignore its views.
The point I am making is that kings were willing to let villagers govern themselves in day-to-day matters, and
wherever a dominant caste existed, its council, on which the leading landowners were represented, exercised power
in local matters. The existence of the dominant caste was of greater importance than the fact that tax was collected
either through a single hereditary headman or through a body of co-owners. The council of the dominant caste
observed certain rules and principles which operated universally, such as respect for the customs of each caste,
respect for the principle of hereditary succession including, in certain contexts, primogeniture, respect for males and
elders, and for the authority of the head of a household.
In other words, something akin to 'indirect rule' seems to have been built into the political and social structure. And
yet, paradoxical as it may seem, the king seems to have performed other functions and duties besides those of
collection of taxes and conscription of young men during war. (This fact has not been sufficiently recognized by the
earlier writers.) A good king paid attention to the condition of his people—he built roads, tanks, ponds, and temples,
gave gifts of land to pious and learned Brahmins.9 Disputes regarding mutual caste rank were ultimately settled by
him. Such a function was not restricted to Hindu kings: under the Mughal emperors, the Delhi court was the head of
all caste panchayats, and questions affecting a caste over a wide area could not be settled except at Delhi.
A good king also paid attention to the development of irrigation, though this is more evident in some parts of the
country than in others. In parts of modern Mysore, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh both canals and tank-systems
have played a significant part in agriculture. According to K. A. Nilakanta Sastry, doyen among South Indian
historians,
the importance of irrigation was well understood from early times; dams were erected across streams
and channels taken off from them wherever possible. Large tanks were made to serve areas where
there were no natural streams, and the proper maintenance of tanks was regularly provided for. The
extension of agriculture was encouraged at all times by granting special facilities and tax concessions for
specified periods to people who reclaimed land and brought it under cultivation for the first time.
A feature of agriculture in many parts of South India is the damming up of rain water in suitable places to form
artificial lakes which were constructed in such a way that the overflow water from each tank fed one below till the
excess eventually reached a stream. Many of these tanks were large indeed, providing irrigation water for hundreds
of acres of land lying on the other side of the embankment. The maintenance of these tanks was an important duty
of the king's. Irrigation tanks were also found in other parts of the country such as Gujarat, Malwa, and
Bundelkhand, though nowhere were they as numerous.
Thorner has, however, argued that ' . . . canal networks have never been the outstanding feature of Indian crop
production. Rather, I radian agriculture as a whole has always turned on rainfall and the local wells or ponds of the
villages'. If Thorner had looked below the all-India level to the regional, he would have found that irrigation, through
canal and tank, was an important feature of pre-British agriculture in certain parts of the country. The bigger
irrigation projects could not have come into existence without the king's active support and involvement.
The gist of my argument is that the relationship between the king and the village in pre-British India was a complex
one. The villages were not without some resources in any continuing relationship between them and the king. The
king's functions were not confined to collecting taxes and conscripting young men during war. He had also other
duties.
Dumont has argued that Maine and other writers failed to under-stand the implications of the regular collection by
the king of a `substantial part of the produce'. This meant, in effect, that 'wherever the king delegated his right to
one person there was a chance of this beneficiary and his heirs assuming the superior right and reducing its former

7
enjoyers to subordinate status'. In other words, the king's power was effective enough to ensure that the rights of
individuals who were recognized by him prevailed over other rights.
The payment of a substantial portion of the produce was then also a symbol of the village's dependence on the king.
Dumont quotes Maine himself to make the point that Indian villagers exhibit their `dependency' on the State by the
importance they attribute to 'the sanction of the state, be it only in the form of the stamped paper on which an
agreement between private parties is written'. My own field experience supports this. In 1948, I was surprised to
find Rampura villagers frequently mentioning the existence of copper-plate grants listing the privileges, duties, and
rank of particular castes. The copper plates were 'somewhere', with someone not available, nearby; but what struck
me was the fact of their being mentioned.

III
The myth of economic self-sufficiency or autarky of the pre-British village is one that is widely subscribed to, and it
has persisted until very recent years. But no one, not even Dumont, has drawn attention to the contradiction
between the fact of the subsumption of the village in the wider polity and the notion of its economic self-sufficiency.
The former substracted from self-sufficiency in that the State continually drained away a sizeable share of what was
produced and left the village to make do with what was left over. There were also others such as tax-farmers and
officials who came in for their share. And this was during times of peace. War not infrequently destroyed, at least
temporarily, the economy of the village.'°
However, it is not surprising that observers of the Indian village have been impressed with its appearance of
economic 'self-sufficiency'. The crops provide food and seeds for the next season, taxes to the State, and the means
to pay essential artisan and servicing castes such as the carpenter, blacksmith, potter, barber, washerman, and
priest. In an economy which is non-monetized or minimally monetized, where poor communications confine the
flow of goods and services to a limited area, the wants are few and are such as can be satisfied locally. The
appearance of self-sufficiency was enhanced by caste-wise division of labour.
A closer look at the village will, however, reveal several loopholes in self-sufficiency. Even a basic commodity like salt
was not produced in most villages, and many spices also came from outside. Iron, indispensable for ploughs and
other agricultural implements, was not available everywhere, and iron-smelting was a localized industry. Sugar-cane
was not grown in all villages," and it was the biggest source of jaggery, widely used by the peasantry. Betel leaves
and areca nuts, coconuts, tobacco, and lime paste were other peasant wants not always locally met. Silver and gold
were essential for wedding jewellery, and they had to be imported from the towns. And not every village had
goldsmiths.
Weekly markets are a feature of rural India everywhere and they are a traditional institution. They dramatize the
economic interdependence of villages and provide conclusive refutation of the idea of economic self-sufficiency.' It is
indeed surprising that their existence has been ignored by most writers. The areas serviced by weekly markets seem
to have varied from market to market, many having more than a purely local reputation. There seems to have been
also a degree of specialization in weekly markets on the basis of the goods sold there.
The periodical fairs held on the occasion of the festival of the local deities or on certain sacred days (e.g. the full
moon in Kartik or Chaitra) were also visited by villagers in large numbers, and the fairs served many purposes,
secular as well as religious. In southern Mysore, for instance, the annual fairs held in Chunchanakatte, Hassan,
Mudukutore, and Madeshwara hills were well known for the buying and selling of cattle.
The concept of economic self-sufficiency also assumes that every village had living within it all the essential artisan
and servicing castes. There can be some argument as to which are the essential castes, but those who have first-
hand knowledge of rural India would probably agree that peasants would have a continuing need for the services of
the carpenter, blacksmith, leatherworker, potter, barber, and washerman. This would mean that every village had to
have at least seven castes. This was—and still continues to be—highly unlikely. The number of castes in a village is
related to its total population, and according to Karan, 'In the north they [villages] are small with an average
population of about 500; in the south they are large with nearly 1000 inhabitants. About one-fourth of all Indian
villages have less than 500 inhabitants, another quarter have populations exceeding 2000 and the rest fall in
between'.
Kingsley Davis quotes from a survey, carried out in the early 1930s, by S. S. Nehru, of fifty-four villages in the middle
Ganges valley, and Nehru found fifty-two castes inhabiting the area.
Not one of these castes, however, was represented in every village. I he Chamars, one of the most
pervasive, were found in only 32, and the Ahirs in only 30 villages. 'And vet, a priori, the Chamars should
be represented in all villages, as they are the commonest type of razi/ population, supply all the labour
in the village and are indispensable to village life'. There were Brahmins in 14 per cent of the villages.

8
 The Nai, or barber caste, was represented in less than half the villages. The average number of villages in
which each caste, taken altogether, was represented was only 9.3.
Davis concludes that
. . . the rural village has by no means a full complement of castes, and that the castes it does have are
generally represented by one or two families. The first fact means that each village must depend to
some extent upon the services of persons in other villages, and the second that relations between caste
members must be maintained by contact between villages.
It is likely that the proportion of smaller villages was greater in pre-British India, for it was during British rule that
large irrigation projects were undertaken in different parts of the country. And irrigation enables larger numbers of
people to be supported on the same quantum of land through the intensive cultivation of more profitable crops.
Irrigation increases the demand for labour and puts more money into the pockets of peasants; the money then
becomes translated into new wants to be satisfied by new goods and services.
Individual villages, it is clear, are far from self-sufficient economically. It may he added that socially and religiously,
also, villages were anything but self-sufficient. Caste ties stretched across villages, and in a great part of northern
India the concept of village exogamy, and the existence of hypergamy on a village basis, constitute an advertisement
for inter-village interdependence. The partiality of peasants for pilgrimages and fairs also highlights the fact that the
Indian village was always a part of a wider network.

IV
Dumont and Pocock have argued that the Indian village is only an `architectural and demographic fact' and that
fieldworkers confer upon the 'village a kind of sociological reality which it does not possess'. Further, 'the substantial
reality of the village deceives us into doing what we normally would not do in a social analysis and into assuming a
priori that when people refer to an object by name they mean by that designation what we ourselves mean when we
speak of it'. Dumont and Pocock argue that the 'village' has a different meaning for rural Indians: 'Whether a man is
speaking ofh is own village or of another village, unless he positively specifies another caste by name, he is referring
to his caste fellows'. 'Village solidarity', which many anthropologists, including myself, have re-ported as a reality is
nothing else but a 'presupposition imposed upon the facts'. The lower castes do not possess a sense of loyalty to the
village. They are clients of powerful patrons from the dominant caste(s), and the obligations of clientship force them
to act in ways which are misinterpreted as arising out of 'village solidarity'. Speaking of Rampura in particular,
Dumont and Pocock have asserted that 'if' the solidarity of the village means anything it is the solidarity of the local
group of Okkaliga [dominant caste]'. Caste, and occasionally, factional divisions, are so fundamental that they make
a local community impossible.
As already mentioned, Dumont is critical of Indian scholars for ignoring the inequality inherent in Indian villages:
Caste is ignored or underplayed throughout, for in the prevalent ideology of the period a 'community' is
an equalitarian group. This characteristic gains in importance as the conception spreads, becoming more
and more popular. Dominance, and even hierarchy, are not absolutely ignored by all writers, but they do
remain on the whole in the background, and the main current of thought sustained by the expression
'village community' goes against their full recognition. Indeed, the question arises whether this is not
finally the main function of the expression.
If Indians have used the term 'community' to ignore inequality, to Dumont Indian villages are not communities
because of the inequality of caste. He does not consider at all the question whether unequal groups living in small
face-to-face communities can have common interests binding them together. It is assumed implicitly that
equalitarianism is indispensable to community formation, and also that such communities are the rule in the
Western world, or at least in Western Europe. There is no reference to the existence of economic and social
inequalities in Western Europe. The assumption seems to be that when inequalities assume the form of caste they
make community impossible.
In order to understand the part played by caste in the local com-munity it is necessary to place caste against the
background of the demographic, political, economic, and ideological framework of pre-British India. I shall now
briefly list a few significant features of caste in pre-British India. In the first place, caste was generally accepted as
well as ubiquitous. The idea of hierarchy, for the division of society into higher and lower hereditary groups was
regarded as natural, and caste-like groups were to be found even in sects which rebelled against Hinduism, and
among Muslims and Christians.
The demographic situation in pre-British India affected inter-caste relations in significant ways. Kingsley Davis has
postulated that India's population remained more or less stationary 'during the two thousand years that intervened
between the ancient and the modern period', and that 'the long-run trend would be one of virtual fixity of numbers.

9
No real change could have occurred in this condition until the coming of European control, and then only slowly'.
One result of this demographic stagnation was the relative ease with which land was available for cultivation.
According to Spear, reclaimable waste land was 'plentiful in the eighteenth century' in the Delhi region. Extensive
areas were available for cultivation in Madras Presidency at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and this was
due to several factors such as the political instability of the preceding decades, high land revenue, and the existence
of virgin lands.
Maine has commented on the effects of a historical situation in which land was plentiful relative to available labour:
Right down to the last few generations there persisted a singular scarcity of indigenous law pertaining to
tenures. Men remained of more value than land, the village communities continued to absorb outsiders
in the hope of getting more land tilled and meeting the burden of revenue payments to political
potentates, monarchs or emperors. The need for additional cultivators helped preserve a power of
elasticity and absorption in the villages and kept them from becoming with any rapidity, closed
corporations."
The net result was a situation where landowners competed for the services of labourers, the exact opposite of that
prevailing today in large and irrigated villages. The highly institutionalized nature of the employer—labourer
relationship in pre-British India may well have represented an effort on the part of landowners to assure themselves
of a steady source of labour. Such institutionalized relationships were characteristic of the country as a whole and
not merely of a part. According to Daniel and Alice Thorner,
like other elements of the Indian agrarian structure, the relation between employers and labourers
takes numerous diverse forms. We find in the literature hundreds of indigenous terms, each denoting a
particular kind of labour or labourers. Even for a single such word, the terms of employment, duration of
the work, amount and form of payment may vary from district to district and village to village.
The existence of institutionalized master—servant relationships not only assured each landowner of a steady source
of labour but also helped to minimize competition between landowners for labour which might otherwise have split
them into rival factions. There were also other factors which kept down factionalism. The threat to property and life
from rapacious chiefs, freebooters, and dacoits and from such natural calamities as flood, famine, and epidemics
emphasized the common interest of all villagers in sheer survival. It follows from this that British rule, bringing in law
and order and welfare measures, favoured the development of factionalism and at the expense of the village.
Strong employer-employee bonds provided a countervailing force to caste since generally the employers came from
a high or dominant caste while the landless labourers generally came from the lowest strata. Dharma Kumar has
observed that
one of the most striking and important peculiarities of the Indian forms of servitude is their close
connection with the caste system. Most types of servile status were hereditary, and in general the serfs
and slaves belonged to the lowest castes. Although this group as a whole was at the bottom of the caste
ladder, there were further gradations within it, each sub-group having its articulated rights and
liabilities. In fact, the caste system not only confirmed the economic and social disadvantages of the
agricultural laborer, but also gave him some rights, some economic, others of a social and ritual nature.
There is no reason, however, to think that landless labourers were always confined to the lowest castes. and it is
likely that one of the results of the great population increase of the last hundred years or more has been the
reduction of many individuals from the landowning hierarchy to the lower levels of peasantry. Here, the customary
patterns of expenditure prescribed for wedding and funerals, and the hazards to which the subsistence agriculture of
poor cultivators are subject. as, for instance, failure of the crops following drought or the death of a plough bullock
during the agricultural season, played their part in pushing marginal landowners down the economic slope. In any
case, in rural India today landless labourers hail from a variety of castes, high and low, though it is even now true
that the lowest castes generally provide the bulk of such labourers. Quite frequently, poor members from the
dominant peasant castes are found serving their richer caste fellows as labourers and servants. It is only the Brahmin
who does not substantially contribute to the ranks of landless labourers, this being particularly true of peninsular
India.
In short, both political and economic forces in pre-British India converged to put a premium on localism, and to
discourage the formation of horizontal bonds stretching across political bounda-ries.14 Movement across political
boundaries was difficult for all, and especially for members of the lower castes. Besides, politically ambitious patrons
had to keep in view the paramount need to acquire and retain their local followers. They had to be generous with
food and drink, especially at weddings and funerals, and provide loans and other help when necessary. Also the fact
that it was difficult to store grain or other foodstuffs for long periods in a tropical climate made necessary the
distribution of surpluses. The far-sighted leader who gave, or loaned on interest, foodgrains to his tenants and

10
labourers earned their goodwill, which could be cashed in on a later occasion. Thus political factors combined with
the ecological to favour an ethic of distribution which in turn was buttressed by ideas from the great tradition.
The tendency to stress intra-caste solidarity and to forget inter-caste complementarity is to ignore the social
framework of agricultural production in pre-British India. Castewise division of labour forced different castes living in
a local area to come together in the work of growing and harvesting a crop. Landowners forged inter-caste ties not
only with artisan and servicing castes but also with castes providing agricultural labour. These last-mentioned ties
involved daily and close contact between masters from the powerful dominant castes and servants from the
Untouchable or other castes just above the pollution line. Again, in the context of a non-monetized or minimally
monetized economy, and very little spatial mobility, relationships between households tended to be enduring.
Enduringness itself was a value, and hereditary rights and duties acquired ethical overtones.
I have subsumed institutionalized relationships between a landowner and his labourers, and between him and
households of artisan and servicing castes, in a single category, viz. patron and client. A characteristic of this
relationship was that it became multi-stranded even if it began as a single-stranded one. It was such a strong bond
that it attracted to itself a code of norms, and occasionally, the exceptionally loyal client was buried close to his
patron's grave.
Thus, given a situation in which labour was scarce in relation to the available land, village society was divided into a
series of production pyramids with the landlord at the apex, the artisan and servicing castes in the middle, and the
landless labourers at the bottom. Rivalry between patrons was minimized by institutionalized relationships, and by
the existence of external threats to the village community as a whole. A politically ambitious patron had to break
through institutionalized arrangements if he wanted to achieve power at the higher levels of the political system,
which was characterized by fluidity.
In pre-British India, both technological and political factors im-posed limitations on the horizontal stretch of castes,
while castewise division of labour favoured the co-operation of households from different castes. The relative
scarcity of labour and the institutionalization of the master—servant relationship resulted in forging enduring bonds,
between households of landowners and landless labourers, hailing from different castes. Spear accurately
characterizes the situation when he refers to . . . the classes which, locked by economic, social and religious ties into
an intimate interdependence, made up the village community'. A most significant effect of British rule on the caste
system was the increase in the horizontal solidarity of individual castes and the facilitation of their release from the
local multi-caste matrix.

V
The members of a dominant caste are in a privileged position vis-a-vis the other local castes, and its leaders wield
considerable power. These leaders have the greatest stake in the village, have command over resources and,
generally, it is they who organize local activity, whether it be a festival, general protest, or fight. They dominate the
traditional village council or panchayat.
However, the power exercised by the leaders of the dominant caste traditionally has been subject to some of the
constraints to which the king's was in pre-British times. The leaders were required to show respect for certain values
common to all castes, and for the customs of each caste even when they differed significantly from those of the
dominant castes.'' In addition, each leader of the dominant caste was bound by strong ties to his clients, and it may
be assumed that he was not entirely impartial when matters affecting them came up before the council. The village
council, then, had to acknowledge the existence of certain rules and principles, and also, of certain checks and
balances which came into play when cases concerning non-dominant castes were being arbitrated upon. There was,
however, considerable room for manoeuvre, and this not unnaturally provided ground for charges of corruption,
favouritism, etc., against the members.
The leaders of the dominant caste were expected to protect the interests of the village as a whole and were
criticized if they did not. I have described elsewhere an incident which occurred in March 1948 in which the
headman of Rampura played a leading part in preventing the government from taking away the villagers' right to fish
in their tank. A petition was despatched to the government stating that villagers had fished without hindrance from
time immemorial, and that the government's sudden decision to set aside this right by an order was arbitrary. When
the government ignored the petition and fixed a date for auctioning fishing rights, word was passed round to
everyone, including leaders from neighbouring villagers, not to offer bids at the auction. The boycott was successful,
and the villagers experienced a sense of triumph.
In the above instance, the lead was certainly taken by the headman and other members of the dominant caste, but
the matter affected the entire village, and in particular, the non-vegetarian castes. The idea is implicit that the

11
leaders of the dominant caste have to work for the village as a whole and not for advancing their personal interests.
It may be that the idea is more often respected in the breach than in the observance but that is a different issue.
Dumont and Pocock have also argued that 'even when disputes occur between "villages" it would appear from the
evidence that these could be more appropriately described as disputes within the Okkaliga caste about land upon
which the Okkaliga base their superiority'. In the first place, not all disputes between villages refer to land, and this is
true of other villages besides Rampura. For instance, a big fight, in which armed police had to be called, occurred
between Kere and Bihalli in October 1947 during the annual festival of the deity Madeshwara, and the subject of the
dispute was the right to carry the portable icon of the deity in procession round the temple. There was a long queue
and the party of Kere youths carrying the icon were asked to hand it over to others after their second trip round the
temple. The youths replied that they would do so only after completing the third trip. There is a belief that odd
numbers are auspicious while even ones are not. A few Bihalli youths tried to wrest the icon from the Kere Youths,
and a fight ensued involving injuries to several and premature closure of the festival. The dispute was settled only six
months later, and Rampura and Hogur leaders played an important role in the tortuous peace negotiations. While it
was true that Okkaligas took the lead in the fight, the fighters were convinced that they were fighting for the honour
of their villages.
Even more interesting is the fact that Kathleen Gough has reported the occurrence, over a period of twenty years, of
four instances of fights between the lower castes in Kumbapettai and neighbouring villages. Members of the
dominant caste of Brahmins were not involved in any of these fights. It is surprising that this observation should
have escaped Dumont and Pocock. Similarly, referring to the highly factionalized village near Delhi studied by Oscar
Lewis, they raise the question, . . . it would be interesting to see to what extent Oscar Lewis' account of the lack of
even this kind of solidarity [of the local dominant caste group] is applicable elsewhere'. But according to Lewis, even
extreme factionalism did not prevent his field-village from acting as a unit on occasion: 'As we have seen earlier,
there are occasions when the village acts as a unit. However, these relatively infrequent and with the weakening of
the old and traditional jajmani system the segmentation within the village is all the more striking, nor has it been
replaced by any new uniting forms of social organization'. The ability of a village comprising a large number of castes,
and also divided into factions, to function on certain occasions as a unit has impressed many observers. A. C. Mayer,
for instance, is able to state, `This account has shown how it is that a village containing twenty-seven different caste
groups, each with its barrier of endogamy and often occupational and commensal restrictions, can nevertheless exist
to some extent as a unit'.
It is possible for villages to function as units in spite of the various cleavages within them because everyone,
irrespective of his caste and other affiliations, has a sense of belonging to a local community which has certain
common interests overriding caste, kin, and factional alignments. It is likely that loyalty to the village was greater in
the past than now, and future developments may weaken it even further. But the important fact is that it does exist
in some measure today. Indian villagers have a complex system of loyalties: in an inter-caste context, identification
tends to follow caste lines and this is often reinforced by castewise division of labour. In an intra-castes situation, on
the other hand, affiliation follows village lines. This is dramatized in Rampura, for instance, at weddings in the ritual
of the distribution of betel leaves and areca nuts (dodda veqya) to the assembled guests. Besides each guest
receiving a set of betel leaves and areca nuts in his role as kinsman or casteman, some receive it also as
representatives of their respective villages. The credentials of a person to represent his village are not always clear,
and a man whose credentials are rejected feels humiliated. A few guests may claim precedence for their villages over
the others, and this has often led to a heated debate. In 1948, elderly villagers spoke feelingly about the difficulties
and dangers with which ritual betel-distribution was beset. The elders of Rampura had previously passed a rule
which enabled anyone who paid Rs 8.25 to the village fund to escape the cost and trouble of the formal distribution
of betel.
In the foregoing pages I have tried to adduce evidence to show that the village is not only an architectural and
demographic entity hut also a social entity in that all villagers have some loyalty to it. Rural Indians live in a system of
complex loyalties, each loyalty surfacing in a particular context. It is presumable, indeed likely, that there are
occasions when there is a conflict of loyalties but that is a different matter. The phenomenon of the dominant caste
is indeed impressive, but it is not the whole story.

VI
The exclusion of Harijan castes from access to wells and temples used by the others is occasionally cited in support
of the argument that the village does not really include all those living in it. It is relevant to point out in this
connection that in traditional India relationships between people took place in an ideological framework that
accepted caste. A person was born into a caste which was a unit in a hierarchy to castes, and relations among these

12
were governed by the ideas of pollution and purity. This meant that in actual social life, the highly elaborated and
systematized principles of inclusion and exclusion of individuals on the basis of caste came into play. Individuals from
a particular caste were included in one context (e.g. living together) and excluded in another (e.g. endogamy), and
this applied all along the line. Inclusion and exclusion were also matters of degree—for instance, the social distance
between castes in Kerala was traditionally expressed in spatial terms.
The position occupied by a caste in the local hierarchy is not always clear, and a caste's own conception of its
position frequently differs from that assigned to it by its structural neighbours." In Rampura, for instance, each caste,
including the Harijan, is able to point to another as its inferior. Thus the Harijan Holeyas are able to point to the
Smiths as their inferiors, and as 'evidence' of their superiority, to the fact that they do not accept food and drinking-
water from Smiths. They would also point to the Smiths being included in the 'Left-hand' castes while they
themselves were included among the `Right-hand' castes. Again, traditionally Smiths were not allowed to perform
weddings within the village and were subjected to certain other disabilities. On their side, the Smiths would dismiss
the Harijan claim as absurd, and point to their Sanskritized style of life, and to their not accepting food cooked by
any except Brahmins and Lingayats as evidence of their high status. This kind of ambiguity regarding the position of
several castes was not only a function of the flexibility of the system but also facilitated its acceptance.
I have stated that exclusion was not only contextual but also a matter of degree. An interesting instance of this has
bearing on the question of membership of the village. One of the most important temples in Rampura—certainly,
architecturally the most striking—is dedicated to the Sanskritic deity, Rama. While its priest is a Brahmin, the temple
is maintained by contributions from the entire village, and the headman's lineage not only has made substantial
contributions in the past but also takes an active interest in the temple's activities. It came, therefore, as a surprise
to me to find the headman (along with other members of the dominant Okkaligas) refusing to enter the sanctum
sanctorum (in Kannada, garbha gudi) of the temple while he urged Brahmin devotees to stand there while the puja
was being performed. Had he wanted to enter the sanctum sanctorum no one, certainly not the Brahmin priest, who
was heavily dependent upon him, would have prevented him. But the headman chose to remain outside. It did not
occur to him that his full participation depended on his being on a par with Brahmin devotees. Given this kind of
ideology, it should be clear that the exclusion of the Harijans from the temple cannot be interpreted as meaning
exclusion from the village. The same can be said for other instances of exclusion of Harijans. Condemnation of the
exclusion of Harijans (or any other caste) from the point of view of a new ethical system is a distinct phenomenon,
and as such ought not to be brought in while trying to understand the meaning of exclusion and inclusion in the
traditional system.
Again, exclusion has different connotations in different situations. For instance, in Rampura, four groups of villagers,
viz. Brahmins Lifigayats, Harijans, and Muslims, are not called upon to make any contribution to the expenses of the
Rama Navami, the great annual nine-day festival at the temple of Rama. Not only are the Brahmin, Lingayat, and
Smith' households exempted from making contributions: they also receive the raw ingredients of a meal as their
caste rules prevent them from eating food cooked by Peasants. The Lingayat may be regarded as a kind of Brahmin
in view of his staunch vegetarianism and teetotalism, and in view of the fact that he acts as priest in two important
village temples. In Sanskritic Hinduism, a gift made to a Brahmin confers religious merit on the giver. Not accepting
contributions from the Brahmin, and giving him the ingredients of meal, may be interpreted as conferring merit on
those who make the contributions. No such consideration is applicable in the case of the Harijan or Muslim.
Harijans, however, perform many essential services at the festival. The hereditary servants run errands for the
organizers, and Harijan women clean the rice and lentils for the ninth-day dinner. Harijan men, beating tom-toms,
march at the head of the deity's procession. They also remove the dining-leaves on which the villagers eat the
dinner. They are the last to eat.
Muslims also participate in the procession. In Rampura a fire-works man, invariably a Muslim, follows Harijans,
setting off fire-works. In 1948 one Muslim youth distinguished himself at the procession by a brilliant display of
swordsmanship. The fact is that everyone looks forward to the procession with its music, fireworks, display of sword
and stick (lathi), fancy dress, and the monkey-god who walks on rooftops peeling green coconuts with his teeth and
hands.
The traditional tasks performed by Harijans at village festivals had begun to be regarded by the middle of the
twentieth century as degrading symbols of untouchability, and some Harijans attempted to refuse performing them.
But the dominant castes used the twin sanctions of economic boycott and physical force to coerce them into
conformity.
It is obvious that exclusion and inclusion need to be viewed over the whole range of contexts, religious as well as
secular, in understanding the position of a caste. Thus, groups excluded in religious contexts may have important
roles in secular contexts. For instance, individual households from the dominant or other high castes often have

13
strong economic ties with households of Harijans. Thus, traditionally, each Harijan household served as 'traditional
servant' (hale maga) in a peasant or other high-caste household.
This traditional servant had certain well-defined duties and rights in relation to the master and his
family. For instance, when a wedding occurred in the master's family, then men of the servant family
were required to repair and whitewash the wedding house, put up the marriage pandal before it, chop
wood to be used as fuel for cooking the wedding feasts, and do odd jobs. The servant was also required
to present a pair of leather sandals (chammalige) to the bridegroom. Women of the servant's family
were required to clean the grain, grind it to flour on the rotary quern, grind chillies and turmeric, and do
several other jobs. In return, the master made presents of money and of cooked food to the servant
family. When an ox or buffalo died in the master's family, the servant took it home, skinned it, and ate
the meat. He was required, however, to make out of the hide a pair of' sandals and a length of plaited
rope for presentation to the master.
The institution of jita or contractual servantship was an important institution in which the servant worked long hours
on the master's farm for a stipulated annual fee. While many Harijans worked as jita servants for high-caste,
landowning masters, all jita servants were not Harijans nor were all Harijans jita servants. Traditionally, jita servants
did a great deal of the hard work on the land and they were indispensable to the economy. The situation described
by Spear for the Delhi region in the early nineteenth century highlights the importance of the castes which normally
provided the labour on the farm in contrast with the Brahmin priest whose services were symbolic:
Thus the lowly Chamar, the cobbler and dresser of unclean leather, received the highest allowance of
all, while the priest or Brahmin was given by these hard-headed people the least. He had to make up as
best he could by exacting presents on occasions like marriages and deaths when his presence was
essential, and by soliciting gifts at festival times, when people were good-tempered and liked to stand
well with the gods. ... The barbers and the water-carriers, two other despised occupations, were also
rated highly.
To sum up: In a society where the ideology of caste is fully accepted, and where the principles of exclusion and
inclusion apply to everyone including the highest, the exclusion of a caste from particular contexts cannot be
adduced as evidence of non-membership of the local community. To do so would be to misinterpret indigenous
behaviour.

VII
I have so far looked at village unity or solidarity, from the outside, and shall now turn to the villagers' perception of
the problem. As it happened, I stumbled on to this while I was carrying out a census of village households in
Rampura. From the villagers' point of view two factors seem to be crucial in determining who belonged and who did
not: length of stay in the village, and ownership of real property, especially land. If a family had spent two
generations in the village, -and owned a little land and a house, then their membership had been established beyond
question. Surprisingly enough, membership did not seem to have any connection with caste or religion. Exclusion
from various activities was not viewed as being relevant to membership: it was something incidental to living in a
caste society.
The question of membership in the village came up in the case of three groups, Basket-makers, Swineherds, and
Muslims. There were seven basket-makers in Rampura in 1948, and all of them, men as well as women, lived by
making artefacts with bamboo bought in the market in Mysore. They made essential articles such as baskets, fish
traps, partition screens, and winnows, and sold many of their pro-ducts in the weekly markets around Rampura.
Unlike the other village artisans they worked strictly for cash. They had the habit of never delivering goods on time,
and this and their fondness for liquor had given them a reputation for undependability.
More importantly, all the Basket-makers were immigrants from the nearby town of Malavalli, and every few years a
family would pack up and return home and its place would be taken by another. Only one household had spent
about twenty years in Rampura. None of the Basket-makers owned any real property—indeed, all of them lived on
the verandas of houses owned by others. Veranda-dwelling (jagali mile wasa) symbolized extreme poverty, and it
was generally accompanied by the dwellers' doing casual labour (kooli kambla) for a living (In 1948, out of a total
population of 1,523, 31 lived on verandas, 14 being widows, 1 a divorcee, and the rest remnants of once fuller
households.).
While the Basket-makers made articles essential for the villagers, they were not regarded as properly belonging to
the village. The Swineherds were another marginal group and had settled down in Rampura during the headman's
father's days. They spoke among themselves a dialect of Telugu which was unintelligible to the others. During the
rainy season they lived in a cluster of huts on the headman's mango orchard, and during the dry season moved to

14
temporary huts erected on the headman's rice land below the C.D.S. canal. Their transhumance was a tribute to the
power wielded by the headman's father: it was his way of ensuring that two of his fields were fertilized by pig
manure.
The Swineherds had a herd of about sixty pigs, and a boy took them out 'grazing' every day. The pigs were
scavengers and the low ritual rank of the Swineherds was due to their association with pigs. They also ate pork and
drank toddy. Their women went round the villages begging and telling fortunes.
The Swineherds had regular relations with only the headman's household. They were tenants of the headman,
cultivating 2.5 acres of his land. They occasionally borrowed money from him, and sometimes took their disputes to
him. The rest of the village did not interact with them except when one of their pigs damaged plants in someone's
backyard or field. They seemed to be in the village but not of it.
As a group, neither Swineherds nor Basket-makers were integrated with the village in the way the Harijans were. But
Basket-makers, Swineherds, and Smiths all made contributions to the Rama Navami festival, while Harijans, along
with Brahmins, Lingayats, and Muslims, did not.
The Muslims were the third biggest group (179) in Rampura in 1948, and though they were scattered all over the
village there was some tendency for them to cluster along the fringes of the high-caste areas. They were engaged in
a variety of occupations, agriculture, trade—especially trading in ripe mangoes—and in crafts such as tailoring,
tinkering, shoeing bullocks, and plastering. Many of them had migrated into Rampura in the 1940s but there was
also a nucleus of earlier immigrants who owned land and houses, and did a little buying and selling of rice on the
side. It was when I was carrying out a census among Muslims that I heard villagers use two expressions which I came
to realize were significant: the recent immigrants were almost contemptuously described as nenni monne bandavaru
(`came yesterday or the day before') while the old immigrants were described as arsheyinda bandavaru (`came long
ago') or khadeem kulagalu (‘old lineages'). Only three households fell into the latter category and all of them owned
land.
It was at this point that I realized the crucial importance of ownership of arable land in determining membership in
the village. Villagers are acutely aware of the many ways in which land provides bonds with the village, and land
once acquired cannot be disposed of easily, for public opinion is against the disposing of such an important and
respected asset. Ownership of land enables owners to have enduring relationships with others in the village: they
are able to pay the artisan and servicing castes and labourers annually in grain. Such payments are made on a
continuing basis. The owners achieve the coveted status of patrons.
In their talks with me, my friends occasionally referred to such-and-such a Brahmin family as belonging to Rampura
even though it had left the village two or three decades ago to settle down in Mysore or Bangalore. But the
important fact was that they continued to own land in the village, and collected their share of the crop regularly. This
kept alive their links with the village. I may add here that during the 1950s I talked to several Brahmin landowners in
Mysore and Bangalore and all of them seemed to feel that land was not only economically profitable but also a link
with the ancestral village. Selling land was not only improvident but almost implied a lack of piety toward the
ancestors who had acquired the land with great hardship.
During the summer of 1952, when I visited the village a second time, a Shepherd sold all his land to settle down in
his wife's village. While conflicts among grown brothers are a common feature of the kinship system of many castes,
friendly relationships generally obtain between a man and his affines. The buyer of the land, an up-and-coming local
Peasant, was represented at the transaction by an over-articulate affine, his wife's sister's husband. As the
transaction was about to be concluded the buyer's representative made a pompous speech in which he said that his
relative did not want to be accused later of having been responsible for depriving a fellow villager of all his land. The
seller should consider whether he should not retain some property in the village, he it even a manure-heap, as a
symbol of his belonging to the village.
While land indeed provides the passport to membership, not everyone has the resources to buy it. And in the case of
a few artisan and trading castes in Rampura, preoccupation with the hereditary calling seemed to get in the way of
acquiring land. Everyone, however, needs a house, and ownership of a house was also evidence of membership.
There was a hierarchy in housing, the veranda-dwellers being at the bottom and the owners of large houses with
open, paved central courtyards being at the apex. The hut-dwellers were just above the veranda-dwellers in the local
prestige scale. The next rung was a house with mud walls and a roof of country-made tiles. Those who owned
bullocks and buffaloes tended to live in courtyard houses (totti mane), one part of the inner roofed portion being
reserved for cattle. It was the ideal of .the villager to live in a house with a big central courtyard, with many bullocks,
and milch-buffaloes and cows, and many children, especially sons and grandsons. Such a household indicated that its
head owned much land, and his wealth and prosperity were regarded as evidence of divine favour just as veranda-
dwelling and poverty embodied the worst fears of villagers.

15
It is significant that the question of membership of the Harijans in the local community never came up for discussion
during my stay. In this part of India, as in several others, the hereditary village servant (chakra) came from the
Harijan caste, and the holder of the office was traditionally paid in land by the government. In Rampura in 1948 the
land allotted to the original chakra had been partitioned among his agnatic descendants. These households formed
the core of the Harijan group and additions had accrued to this group through the immigration of of nes and others
from neighbouring villages. The Harijans were no doubt Untouchables by caste, and as such were subjected to
several disabilities stemming from the idea of pollution, but there was no doubt that they were an integral part of
the village, far more so than, for instance, the Basket-makers.
One way of conceptualizing the situation obtaining in Rampura and other villages would be to regard individuals
from the dominant caste as first-class members, the Harijans as third-class members and those in between as
second-class members. Though such a conceptualization would be too neat and schematic, and fail to take note of
the phenomenon of the 'exclusion' of each caste, including the highest, in certain contexts, it would, on the other
hand, make clear the inegalitarian character of the village, the differential rights and duties attached to each
category of membership, and the inclusion of everyone from the dominant caste to the Harijan in the local
community.

VIII
The historic descriptions of the Indian village, first given by the British administrators early in the nineteenth century,
are now seen as having been somewhat idyllic and oversimplified. Yet they have influenced the perceptions and
views of generations of scholars. It is only since independence that a few social scientists, especially social
anthropologists who carrried out intensive field-studies of villages, have begun critically to examine the conventional
representations of the Indian village. It needs hardly be said that this is essential not only to the correct
understanding of village structure and life but of the dynamics of traditional society and culture.
What I have shown in the foregoing pages is that the traditional village was far from being economically self-
sufficient. Besides, the fact of its being part of a wider political system made it even less self-sufficient: the
government claimed a share of the grown crop as tax, and in addition the various officials imposed their own levies
on the peasant. During periods of war, able-bodied villagers were likely to be conscripted with the result that yields
declined on the farm.
Nevertheless, the village did give an impression of self-sufficiency: the villagers ate what they grew, they paid the
artisan and servicing castes in grain, and a system of barter enabled grain to be used for obtaining various goods and
services. There was an emphasis in the culture on getting the utmost out of the environment, every twig and leaf
and the droppings of domestic animals being put to use. Caste-wise division of labour also added to the appearance
of self-sufficiency. Moreover, the arrangements for internal or municipal government which existed in each village,
and its capacity for survival in contrast to higher political entities, created the illusion of political autonomy. An
incorrect understanding of the relationship between the king and the village helped to strengthen that illusion.
I have already suggested the reasons for the continuing influence of the views of the early British administrators.
Social theorists such as Marx and Maine brought the Indian village into the forefront of the contemporary
discussions on the evolution of property and other economic and social institutions. Marx's predominant concern
with economic development the world over led him to discuss the phenomenon of the stagnation of Indian society.
He perceived the source of the stagnation to be in the isolated and economically self-sufficient character of the
village community, with its impressive capacity for survival while the kingdoms which included it rose and fell.
Isolation and self-sufficiency went hand in hand with the absorption of the villagers in their own tiny world and their
indifference to important events occurring outside. Such villages, he held, made tyranny possible, and the
importance of British rule lay in the fact that for the first time in Indian history villages were undergoing fundamental
changes as a result of the destruction of their self-sufficiency. Goods made in British factories, especially textiles,
were displacing handlooms, and this was leading to the impoverishment of the countryside. The railways were aiding
and abetting the factories in transforming village-based Indian society.
Indian nationalists used the argument of the impoverishment of the peasant and destruction of the village
community to advance the cause of Indian independence. Beginning in the 1920s, Gandhi's attempt to revive the
economic and social life of the village, and certain elements in his thinking such as his distrust of the power of the
State, hatred of the enslaving machine, and his emphasis on self-reliance and the need for political and economic
decentralization, led to a new idealization of the peasant and the village.
Perhaps it is in reaction to all this that there is now an attempt to deny that the village is a community. It is argued
that the existence of caste and other inequalities make it impossible for the Indian village to be a community, for the
community, it is assumed, has to be egalitarian.

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But the argument that the village in India is only an architectural and demographic entity, and that it is caste that is
sociologically real, does not take into account the true function of caste, which has to be viewed in the pre-British
context. Given the scarcity of labour in relation to land and the resultant strong patron—client relationships, the
social framework of production created bonds running counter to caste. Thus the paradox was that castewise
division of labour was at the source of contracaste bonds. This was reinforced by the political system, which
discouraged the formation of links across chiefdoms and kingdoms. The village was no doubt stratified along the
lines of caste and land, but the productive process made it an interlocking community.
The power wielded by the dominant caste was real but it also respected certain common values, and observed the
principle of `indirect rule' vis-a-vis dependent castes. The leaders of the dominant caste had the maximum stake in
the local community and they took the lead in all its activities. But the dependent castes also had a loyalty to the
village, and were considered by the villagers themselves to have membership in it. Inclusion and exclusion operated
(and continue to operate) at all levels of a caste society, and the exclusion of Harijans from certain important
activities, areas, and facilities cannot therefore be interpreted as evidence of their not being part of the village
community.
Finally, it must be remembered that in pre-British India there was a general acceptance of caste, and of the idiom of
caste in governing relationships between individuals and between groups. Given such a framework of acceptance of
hierarchy, it ought not to be difficult to conceive of communities which are non-egalitarian, their people playing
interdependent roles and all of them having a common interest in survival. The argument that only 'equalitarian'
societies can have local communities has to be proved, and cannot be the starting-point for evaluating hierarchical
societies. Nor can an implicit assumption that 'equalitarian' communities do not have significant differences in
property, income, and status be accepted as a 'sociological reality'.

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