The Village Community from Munro to Maine*

LOUIS DUMONT

From the beginning of the 19th century to our day, the village community has been a familiar expression. It is seldom looked into critically, although in its shifting meanings and emphases, it embodies a remarkable interaction between Western and Indian minds and data. We can distinguish three meanings of the expression which seem to pre-dominate in three successive historical phases. In the first phase, the village community is primarily a political society, in the second a body of co-owners of the soil, 1 while in the third phase it becomes the emblem of traditional economy and polity, a watchword of Indian patriotism. 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 on the whole remain in the background, as 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. At any rate such a configuration of ideas does encourage a critical study. There is ample scope here for a book, and perhaps an Indian student of history will one day give us a thesis on the subject. In the meanwhile what is offered here can be only an incomplete and preliminary sketch. The third aspect will be left out except for some incidental remarks. The evidence at my disposal is limited, and on many points of history the conclusion reached is little more than conjecture. Nor can I do justice to the close connection of the question with two others, that of the village panchayat and that of Indian land tenures. I nevertheless feel that something can be said about the first two aspects of the village community. In the administrative literature of the first decades of the nineteenth century, we find a number of descriptions of the village as a little republic with a headman and twelve officers and as being practically impervious to outside political events. The two best know pictures of the kind are those of the Fifth Report (1812) and of Metcalfe (1830. Apart from the uncritical approach of the many subsequent writers who quoted these descriptions in and out of season, especially in our

*Contributions to Indian Sociology, 9, 1966, pp. 67-89. 1 There is an amphibology in Elphinstones History of India where he quotes Metcalfes description: The village communities are little republic *our first meaning+ and further on adds that this description holds when there is nobody between the tenant and the prince, but in one half of India there is in each village a community which represents, or rather which constitutes, the township; the other inhabitants being their tenants *the community is that of the village landholders : our second meaning+ (5th ed., 1866, pp. 69-71).

century,2 one is struck by the fact that all those texts have a family air, as if they all were variants of the same text, or had been engendered by the same mind. No doubt there s an objective element in the descriptions, but their factual basis will clearly not account for their stereotyped character, the very particular uniform language in which they are couched. For the observer of things Indian, there is something idyllic and utopian about them, and a reader of Stokess admirable book is tempted to father this idealization on to the romantic and paternalist minds of the great administrators of the period: Munro, Elphinstone, Malcolm, and Metcalfe. 3 This might explain the aspect of clich, or set piece, of those descriptions--as it were, the expression of the creed of an age, or of a profession. There is already a slight confirmation of this surmise in Metcalfes preamble of his often quoted eulogy of the Jat villages around Delhi where, as will be seen below, he writes: I admire the structure of the village communities. It is strange that none of the recent writers referring to the description of the Indian village in the administrative literature from 1800 to 1830 and beyond have felt any need to consider it critically, to ask what was its basis in fact, and what end it was meant to serve in the minds of those who used it so lavishly. As the settlement of the revenue in several Provinces had been the great preoccupation of British government at the time, it is hardly credible that the celebrated picture of the village was without relation to it. We find that in the Fifth Report as well as in Metcalfe, the village republic is in fact used as an argument against the generalization of Munros Ryotwari Settlement both in Madras and in the region of Delhi. Metcalfe is clear on this point:
Thinking so highly as I do think of this system [the ryotwari system] as a Revenue System, it may naturally be asked why I do not propose its universal adoption in our unsettled Provinces.

The mythical function fulfilled by the theme is evident from its tireless and uncritical reiteration even by anthropologist. Dealing with a Mysore village, M. N. Srinivas quotes Metcalfes description as applying implicitly to the isolation and stability of village communities all over India (Indias Village ed. 1960, p.23). The same author writes a few pages ahead that the completely self-sufficient village republic is a myth; it was always part of a wider entity (p. 11; it is true that according to Metcalf the villages were only nearly self-sufficient and almost independent. F. G. Bailey uses the quotation from Srinivas in the first page of a book dealing with Orissa (Caste and the Economic Frontier, p.3), it is disconcerting to find the same author later on vehemently denying the sociological unity of India, at least in terms of ideology (Contributions III, p. 91). A. K. Nazmul Karim also quotes Metcalfe. He recognizes that the description is particularly applicable to the region of Delhi and northern India, but the claims that any comparison elsewhere in the country will show basic similarities (Changing Society in India and Pakistan, Dacca, OUP, 1956, p. 9). He refers to Percival Spears study of Metcalf, in Twilight of the Mughals (Cambridge, 1951) in which we read: One of the easiest of mistakes is to imagine that villages are same all over India. But village life varied not only from province to province but from age to age in the region around Delhi the village community had retained many of its traditional communal features (p. 117). The element of idealization in Metcalfes description is clear from his initial impression of the Delhi region: The bulk of the population were robbers (Spear, op. cit., p. 85-6, etc.). 3 Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, Oxford, 1959, pp. 1-24, and especially p. 9 sq. for the characterization of the Great Four, their romanticism, paternalism, conservatism and (less uniform) aristocratism.

The reason is that I admire the structure of the village communities, and am apprehensive that direct engagement for Revenue with each separate landholder or cultivator in a village might tend to destroy its constitution. The village communities are little republics 4

It should be noted in passing that the earlier literature ot which we shall refer in due course does not use the term community. For Madras, the reader should turn to Romesh Dutts Economic History, chapter VIII, entitled: Village Communities or Individual Tenants? A Debate in Madras, 1807-1820, with two additions: 1) the celebrated description of the Fifth Report, which this author gives earlier in the book, should be referred back to the same circumstances, as is confirmed from the Report itself; 5 2) it was at request of the Board of Revenue, intent on settling the Revenue on villages (Village or mauzawaris settlement) and not on the individual peasant (Munros Ryotwari settlement) that in 1814 the Collector of Madras, F.W. Ellis, composed his Report on Mirasi Right,6 which introduced a different aspect of the village, namely that of a corporate body of persons sharing rights in a common territory. To this we shall return. For the moment we are concerned with the village as a political society. As we shall see further on, these descriptions appear to repeat each other so precisely that we are obviously not faced with results of independent observations, but rather with the reiteration of a single theme, each author copying another, as if frequent in literary history. Less than with a picture of facts, we are dealing with something like a myth, a piece of belief widely shared among the administrators of the period. Now there is one paradox: those descriptions bear an element of distinct style 7 of, let us say, romantic style; and insofar as the matter centres, or begins, in Madras, they appear to have been used against the policy of the very person who might be conceived as having stamped his character on such formulas. Thomas Munro himself. Luckily, we may show, without an extensive search through the documents of the time, that Munro was in effect partly the originator not only of the theme, but of the stereotyped formulas which recur regularly in its expression. A contemporary and colleague of Munros, to
4

Sir Charles Metcalfes Minute dated 7.1.1830, in Report from the Select Committee in the House of Commons, Evidence, III , Revenue, Appendices (App. No. 84, p. 328 sq.). There follows the well-known description as found, e.g., in Romesh Dutt, The Economic History of India under Early British Rule, 1901 (ed. 1956, pp. 386-7). This book is very convenient as it gives at same the description from the Fifth Report, 1812 (pp. 118-9), that from a letter of the Madras Board of Revenue (1803) (p. 141), and extracts from Elphinstones Report (1819)(pp. 346-8). 5 W. K. Firminger, The Fifth Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons, on the Affairs of the East India Company, dated 28 July 1812, 3 vol. (vol. I, p. 431 sq., etc.). 6 Francis W. Ellis, Lt. Col. Blackburne, Sir Thomas Munro, Three Treatises on Mirasi Right, C. P. Brown, ed., Madras, 1852. Cf. on p. 155 the extract from a letter from the Directors of 2.1.1822 (etc.) The Minute by Munro included in this volume, which includes some discussion of Elliss Report, is actually his final message of 31.12.1824 (cf. n. 16 below). 7 The decline in style is clear in writers who later took up the same theme. As examples, see quotations in Karim, op. cit., pp. 10-1, and in the recent Report of the Study Team on Nyaya Panchayats, Delhi, 1962 (Ministry of Law), pp. 8-9, etc. (Note this florilegium extolling the traditional village organizations in an official publication).

whom another part of the theme can probably be traced, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Wilks, who was Political Resident at the Court of Mysore, described the Indian village in his Historical Sketches, and invoked the authority of Munro in a note quoting Munros Report from Anantpur, of May 15, 1806.
Every village, with its twelve Ayangadees as they are called, is a kind of little republic, with the Potail at the head of it; and India is a mass of such republics. The inhabitants, during war, look chiefly to their own Potail. They give themselves no trouble about the breaking up and division of kingdom; while the village remains entire, they care not to what power it is transferred: wherever it goes the internal management remains unaltered; the Potail is still the collector and magistrate, and head farmer. From t he age of Menu until this day the settlements have been made either with or through the Potails. 8

This is original which was to be endlessely copied and varied. In the first place, the letter of the Board of Revenue of 25th Apirl 1808 reproduces Munros text almost verbatim,with only slight changes of words here and there. The republic becomes a commonwealth, the Potail is called the chief inhabitant of head-inhabitant, and receive in addition his other regional denominations: Mokkudum , etc. Of course Munros imprudent sentence From the age of Manu is used to great effect in favour of village settlement and against Munros own settlement with the individual peasant. On the whole, the clich had been set, as is clearly seen in an extracts of the description in the Fifth Report proper (Munros expressions are in italics):
Under this simple form of municipal government the inhabitants have lived from time immemorial. The boundaries of villages have been seldom altered The inhabitants give 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 [Munro: management) remains unchanged [Munro: unaltered]; the Potail is still the head inhabitant, and still acts as the petty judge and magistrate and collector or renter of the village. 9

In the above truncated quotation, it will have been apparent that the Fifth Report amplifies Munros theme. In contrast, Elphinstones description in his Report is detailed and measured; it does not echo Munros sweeping imagination. This is all the more remarkable as we will know how intent Elphinstone was on preserving as far as possible the village make-up. There is an interesting variation regarding the headman. To quote first Elphinstores later History (for the later Hindu period):
The headman settles with the government the some to be paid for the year and apportions the payment among the villagers according to the extent and revenues of their lands. 10

Compare the statements in the Report and in the History:

Lieut. Colonel Mark Wilks, Historical Skethces of South of India in an Attempt to trace the history of Mysore (1810), edited by Murray Hammick, Mysore, 1930, vol. I, p.139. 9 R. Dutt, loc. Cit., p. 119. 10 Mounstuart Elphinsotne, History of India (1839), 5th ed., 1866. See the letter of Elphinstone to J. Stuart of 1819 as printed in Ballhatchet, Social Policy and Social Change, London, 1957, p. 69, and ibid., passim.

Though originally the agent of the government, he is now regarded as equally the representative of the ryots, and is not less useful in executing the orders of the government, than in asserting the rights, or at least making known the wrongs, of the people (Report, p. 17).11 Though he is still [as in Manu] regarded as an officer of the king, he is really more the representative of the people he must possess the confidence of both (History, p. 69).

We thus see that Elphinstones sober mind has been preoccupied with the exactplace of the headman as link between the (seemingly independent) village and the government. I said above that in this trend of thought the village is seen essentially as a political society. This is obvious from the term used: republic, commonwealth (in the above) and even State in Elphinstone and Metcalfe. The Fifth Report is precise:
A village, geographically considered, is a tract of country comprising arable and wasteland; politically viewed, it resembles a corporation or township. Its proper establishment of officers and servants

There is a shade of difference between Elphinstone and Metcalfe:

These communities contain in miniature all the materials of a State within themselves, and are almost sufficient to protect their members, if all governments are withdrawn (Elphinstone, Report). The Village Communities are little Republics, having nearly everything that they want within themselves and almost independent of any foreign relations (Metcalfe, loc. cit.).

We see that Metcalfes consideration is less pointedly political and might include an economic aspect. It is true that in the following he forcible stresses the permanence of the village in the midst of conquests and revolutions, and further on refers to each one forming a separate little State in itself. Yet he refers chiefly to the occupation of land and does not mention the form of authority and the internal arrangements in the village. But the economic aspect is not quite absent from the standard description. The twelve officers or servants referred to in the archtext by Munro are not simple mentioned in Wilks and Elphinstone: they are even enumeratedsomewhat differently --- by them. The Fifth Report gives a long detailed enumeration without numbering them. The initiator here seems to be Wilks. To his enumeration he added that:
these twelve officers, or requisite members of the community, receive the compensation of their labour, either in allotments of land from the corporate stock, or in fees, consisting in fixed proportion to the crop of every farmer in the village (p. 137).

In short, this is what we nowadays call jajmani. Wilks goes on:

In some instances the lands of a village are cultivated in common, and the crop divided in the proportions of the labour contributed, but generally each occupant tills his own field

11

Mounstuart Elphinsotne, Report on the Territories conquered from the Paishwa (Calcutta, 1821), 2nd ed., Bombay, 1838, p. 17 (cf. Dutt, op. cit., p. 348).

It is perhaps characteristic that the Fifth Report, which obviously uses Wilks list though it also completes it,12 drops the economic aspect with regard to the remuneration of the specialists and the disposition of land in general. But the latter was not be lost on Karl Marx. 13 I hope that in the foregoing I have shown the stereotyped character of the first kind of description of the village community in India. There is an element of fact in those descriptions, consisting mainly in the division of labour in the Indian village and it its economically almost perfect self- sufficiency. Yet there is also an element of idealization, and this is apparent from the impression received by a contemporary witness. Sir Henry Strachey wrote in 1813:
[there was] of late, a fashion of commending the Hindoos, their laws, their government Opinions of the kind I find in the Evidence taken by the late Committee in the House of Commons, and in the Fifth Report Till these late discoveries, it was generally admitted that native system of administration was oppressive and vicious and that the further we departed from them the better.14

Where, the reader might ask, does this element of idealization lie? It is seen in the transition from what we would call economic self-sufficiency and internal organization as an economic-political group over to supposed political independence. It is likely, as Munro pointed out that villagers did not mind by whom they were governed, and it is probably true, as Metcalfe said about the fortified Jat villages around Delhi, that they could resist a certain amount of lawlessness, and easily survive political changes. Yet, whether anarchy or settled polity prevailed would certainly make a difference to them; and the touchstone of their dependence on wider political agencies is found in the fact they traditionally relinquished at least a sixth part and perhaps up to half --- of the produce of the land in their favour. To state, as many moderns have done, that apart from this remittance the villages were independent and the villagers the owners of the land, will not do. I have already quoted Elphinstone on the decisive subject of the role of the village headman. The same author went to the crux of the matter when he wrote: though under a settled government, it [the village] is entirely subject of the head of the State, yet in many respects it is an organized Commonwealth; (History, p. 68). The idealization begins when the dependence on the State is forgotten, and the village considered as a republic in all respects. Can we detect similar idealization regarding the internal organization of the village? There is already a touch of it in the authority of the headman, which is supposed to be independent from his connection with the government. One might suspect the absence of any reference to the existence of inequality within the village to be a characteristic that belongs here
12

The Fifth Report mentions all the functions enumerated by Wilks in the same order (except the last, silversmith), it intercalates a few more and mentions some variability. This, of course, does not mean that the Fifth Report uses no other source. 13 In some of these communities the lands of the village are cultivated in common, in most cases each occupant tills his own field (Letter to Engels, 14.6.1853). 14 Selection of Papers from the Records at the East-India Office, relating to the Revenue, Police and Civil and Criminal Justice ..., vol. II, 1820, p. 61. This conflict of ideas is general in the first third of the century, until Macaulays decisive victory over the orientalizing tendency in the field of education (cf. Stokes, op. cit. ).

too. And this is certainly the case when in our own time Indian writers adopt the picture conjured up by our authors, without more ado. But regarding these authors themselves we shall perhaps come nearer the truth by taking a somewhat different view. They took inequality for granted, or at least thought it natural or that it was to be found in all societies; and even if the use of the word community underplayed it to some extent, there was no intention of every denying it absolutely. Elphinstone wrote in a letter to Strachey in 1822: I am not democratic enough to insist on a Ryotwari system: I think that aristocracy of the country, whether it consists of heads of villagers or of heads of zamidaris, should be kept pup, but I also think that its rights and opposite rights of the ryots should be clearly defined and the latter especially effectually defended.15 Munro, although the father of Ryotwari system, did not think any differently. 16 In his Report, Elphinstone opens the considerations of tenures by clearly distinguishing two kinds of villages among the agriculturists:
These [the cultivators], as there are few labourers, are distinguished by their tenures into two classes, that of Meerassees or landed proprietors, and that of Ouprees, or farmers. 17

It is thus clear that when this author speaks of the village as a community, as he occasionally does (above p. 117), he does not mean a group of equals, and the same can be assumed when Munro speaks of a Republic, or others of a Commonwealth or a State.18
15 16

From Ballhatchet, Social Policy, p. 32 Cf. Munros last Despatch in Parliamentary Papers, 1830, XXVIII, On the State of the Country, or in the above Three Treatises, esp. pp. 22-4 and 39, p. 139 sq., pp. 152-3. Cf. Stokes, op.cit. 17 This passage is omitted from the extracts presented by Dutt (op.cit., p. 348). Although the upari-s appear further on in Dutts text, Elphinstones recognition is thus seriously weakened in Dutts summary. Dutts attitude is typical of the later interpretation of those sources. Indicting British policy for having destroyed the village communities, he supposes throughout that inequality, and what must appear to modern mind as exaction and oppression, had no place in them. He did not ponder on Elphinstones seasoned judgment, though he quoted it: Though probably not compatible with a very good form of government, they [the village communities] are an excellent remedy for the imperfections of a bad one Inequality, which the first 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 forthright statement of Percival Spear (Twilight, pp. 1018-20), of OMalley (India Social Hertiage, p. 107) and of Srinivas: In a joint village, there are two classes of men, one with proprietary rights, the other without them, power resting exclusively with the former (Indias Villages, ed. 1960, p 22). Cf. for Patiala the samidar and the lagi in M.W. Smith, The Misal, Amer. Anthrhop., 54, 1952, pp. 41-66. 18 The self-sufficiency, or, in more sophisticated terms, the isolability of the village for purposes of study, have been discussed in our day (Contributions I, p. 23 sq.; cf. Marian Smith and M.N. Srinivas in Indias Villages, p. 11, etc., M.E. Opler, The Extensionsof an Indian Village, Journ. Of Asian St., 16, 1957, pp. 5-10). In absolute terms, the self-sufficiency should appear mythical to any outside observer who knows something about caste, and about the fact that the village is practically exogamous in a large part of the country including the Jat villages of Metcalfe. Fortunately, we can now refer to Adrian C. Mayers study of a region in Malwa, where it is unexceptionably shown how intra-village relations are mainly intercaste relations while intercaste (or rather sub caste) relations are (mainly) extra-village ones (Caste and Kinship in Central India, London, 1960). To quote this authors conclusion (p. 146): This account has shown how it is that a village containing twenty-seven different caste groups, each with

To pass now to the village community as a body exercising joint rights in the territory of the village, in Wilks we already came across a reference to cases of cultivation in common. In the Report mentioned above (see n. 6), F.W. Ellis described for south India, and especially for the province of Tondamandalam, mirasi right, or property in the soil, vested in a certain number of joint holders, sharers or proprietors (p. 2,62), and regarding the constitution of the village he wrote:
The Indian villages or town-ships have been represented as constituting small republics (see Wilks South of India, I, p. 117 and 121) but this description in strictness is true only of the Tamil Village, to which the term commonwealth may be applied in its literal meaning, and not to the townships of the Mahratta, Cannadiya nor Telugu people, which, in their constitution, though, I believe, not in their administration, resemble a monarchy rather than a republic. The former have no chief; his duties are discharged by the village senate, Gramapravartacam, by which all the affairs of the community, internal and external, are conducted: in this assembly every proprietor has a seat and a voice, each possessing a right to management of the general business of the community, as to every other privilege, in poroportion to his share in it (p. 62-3).

What are the other privileges of the mirasidars? They hold a certain extent of land free of all assessment, they receive certain fees from the gross produce of all taxable lands, and a portion of thte produce from all lands cultivated by persons not mirasidars ; and they also have rights in the waste (p. 2, 5).19 In order to throw into relief the nature and condition of mirasi right and Elliss description of it, two points must be stressed. One s that the mirasidars, as sharers in privileged rights over the village territory, are opposed to their tenants called payacari (a foreign and corrupt term), themselves distinguishable into two kinds. 20 The cultivators in the village are thus divided into two classes: the masters and their subordinates. The body of co-sharers in proprietary right is not co-terminous with the village community in the first sense; it does not even include all the cultivators. The second point concerns the relation to the State. The above formula, defining mirasi as property in the soil, would be misleading if taken to have excluded the kings own right. Actually, in his more comprehensive view, Ellis considers the king and the (body of) co-sharers as joint owners, i.e. as having different rights in the same land (p. 15-6). Two passages were quoted in this connection in Contributions VIII, p. 96-7. As the permanent tenants had a right of occupancy, we may say that ownership was divided w\between these three agencies at least. But, apart from the interesting hint at divided ownership which this description contains, its main point for us at the moment is that Ellis in describing a very strong
its barrier of endogamy and often occupational and commensal restrictions, can nevertheless exist to some extent as a unit. 19 The species of Mirasi is divided into two kinds; Pasung-carei, where the whole lands of the village are held jointly, and either cultivated in common, or divided yearly or at some other fixed period, among the Proprietors; Arudi-carei, where the elands are held in severalty (ibid., p. 2). 20 Ulcudis, [tam. Ulkudi] or fixed cultivators, and Paracudis [parakkudi+ or strange cultivators, the former assimilable to copyholders, the latter to tenants-at-will (p. 21). Cf. for the latter the pahi of Delhi (Spear, Twilight, p.119), the paikasht of Bengal, as opposed to the thani (W.W. Hunter, The India of the Queen, 1903, pp. 145-6).

form of collective right inland, did not take it as independent from the States recognition, that he did not deny the existence of a link between the village community in this form and the wider political framework. In short, the earliest description that we possess of a village community in the second sense of the term is clear on two counts: 1) the collective right of a body of co-sharers in the land is not independent from political power at large; 2) it is a superior right opposed to the inferior right of the inhabitants as well as to the absence of rights of yet others (on slaves and their sale, see p. 102 sq.). Although the village communities discovered later in northwest India are not fundamentally different in this respect, the two points were unfortunately not always to remain clear in the subsequent literature. But from what we know and pending more detailed research---- it seems that the competent observers, as well as the British administrators who generalized from their own and their colleagues observations, never lost sight of those two points and that those who did were second-hand writers who had an axe or grind, such as Maine, and, to a lesser extent, Marx. On this point Elphinstone is, as usual, a model of lucidity, method and caution. We have seen that in his Report he is concerned with distinguishing in the villages of the territories conquered from the Peshwa two kinds of tenures, that of proprietors and that of their tenants. In his History (1839), which deals with India in general, he insists on the existence in some parts of the country (enumerated in an appendix) of proprietors in the soil:
but, as the completeness of their proprietary right is doubtful, it will be convenient to preserve the ambiguity of their nature and call them village landholders (p. 71).

Elphinstone then notes in the following order: that a village of this type is normally governed not by a headman, but by a Council made up of the heads of the divisions or families (probably lineages) of householders; that there are four classes of inferior inhabitants: permanent tenants, temporary tenants, labourers and shopkeepers; that the landholders themselves generally trace their origin and unity to a common ancestor, and that
The rights of the landholders are theirs collectively; and, though they almost always have a more or less perfect partition of them, they never have an entire separation.

Furthermore, the rights are various in different parts of the country, and this points to the relation of the village to the State, a relation to which Elphinstone was attentive, as we have seen. Elphinstone is the only author whom Maine once refers to.21Yet Maine was in close touch with another administrator, George Campbell, whose book, Modern India, published in 1852,22 was mentioned several times by Marx. This is the book in which Marx, and most

21 22

Ancient Law, Pollock ed. (below, n. 26), p. 275. George Cambell, Modern India, A Sketch of the System of Civil Government of which is prefaced some account of the Native and Native Institutions, London, J, Murray, 1852. Maine refers to a later and shorter publication by Campbell, practically contemporaneous with the Village Communities (Village Communities, p. 106 and 78): Sir

probably Maine, although we cannot be sure, found the latest treatment of the question by an experienced Civil Servant. Campbell distinguishes two kinds of villages. The first, or corporate villages, were by no means democratic in their constitution. They were municipalities governed by a headman appointed by the king [and] doubtless to a great degree dependent on popular support when governments were overturned and enjoying a regulated division of labour (p. 5). There the property in the soil was of the lowest description, amounting to little more than a very strong tenant-right (p. 83). Regarding these simple communities or aristocratic communities (p. 84), Campbell quotes the description from the Fifth Report. In opposition to them he then describes the democratic communities with their stronger form of property:
With them [the democratic tribes] the whole land of the country was divided among the different communities. They claimed the proprietorship not only of the cultivated, but also of the uncultivated land, within their limits, and they had authority over, and certain superior rights in the land of any inferior holders cultivating on the original tenant-right just described [p. 83, mentioned above]. In the first instance they probably themselves retained the whole or part of the rent, but the greater part of this they have eventually been obliged to pay to some government. They generally, however, retain some marginal portion of it as their profit and for local expenses, and especially where there were inferior holders a portion of the rent levied from them went to the superiors. This then was much stronger and more decided proprietorship. The share of the actual rent enjoyed by the proprietors varied, according to circumstances, from something infinitesimally small to a considerable proportion; but at any rate all the acts of proprietorship are in every case much more evident than in the original tenure first described; and all the strongest proprietary rights found by us are not so much those of occupation as of conquest (p. 834). Where the democratic element prevailed, viz. in the North, and in many arts in the South, the constitution of the communities so far differed from those in other parts, that the proprietary members were all equal, and considered themselves masters of the village, of all the lands attached to it, and of the other inhabitants-the watchmen, priests, artificers, etc., being their servants rather than village officers; while common affairs were managed, not by one head-man holding of the government, but by the Committee or Punch already alluded to, elected by the proprietary community, and consisting on an average of perhaps half a dozen members (p. 85-6).

Campbell then goes on to describe the democratic commune as he observed it in the Punjab in its most perfect form. He stresses that all the families that are its members belong most often to the same brotherhood or clan, that government officers do not interfere directly in village matters so long as the proprietors agree among themselves, that in no instance was the cultivation carried on in common, that the members may claim periodical remeasurements and readjustment of holdings and payments (p. 88), etc. Of course, here as elsewhere, the original right of the government consists in a share of the produce (p. 90). Although Marx and Maine are poles apart in other respects, they come together retrospectively as the two foremost writers who have drawn the Indian Community into the circle of world history. In keeping with contemporary-Victorian-evolutionary ideas and

George Campbell, The Tenure of Land in India, in J.W. Probyn, ed., Systems of Land Tenure in Various Countries, 1870, ed. 1876 (?), pp. 125-96. Therein, Campbell refers the reader to his previous book (p. 136).

10

preoccupations, both saw in it a remnant or survival from what Maine called the infancy of society. 23 Yet, within this wide orientation that they have in common, the two scholars diverge widely, even in their treatment of their more or less common sources, Marx if after all less narrow-minded than his conservative counterpart and more sensitive to the general social context in which collective rights in land were actually found. As we have here the benefit of a special study of Marxs views on the subject by a more competent writer than the present, I shall restrict myself to a critical treatment of the point in Maines writings. 24 Before taking Sir Henry Sumner Maine to task for one particular if important tenet in his theory, let there be no doubt as to the intent of the criticism. All social students of our time are in Maines debt, but this is especially true of us and of our endeavour. To mention only three aspects, the general approach presented in Contributions may claim to be in line with the comparative social science advocated by Maine in his famous Rede Lecture;25our emphasis on
23

The idea was by no means new. Wilks saw in the village republic a living picture of that state of things which theorists have imagined in the earlier stages of civilization, when men have assembled in communities for the purpose of reciprocally administering to each others wants (p. 136, passage omitted by Marx in his letter to Engels, see next note). And Ellis, in his conclusion regarding the periodical interchange of lands, quoted the 26 th chapter of Tacituss Germania (p. 107). 24 Cf. Daniel Thorner, Marx on India and the Asiatic Mode of Production,Contributions IX, pp. 33-66. I touched briefly elsewhere on the Victorian orientation, indicating how we might salvage its valuable aspect by distinguishing between the empirical agent and the individual as normative agent of institutions (La Civilisation Indienne et Nous, pp. 36-40). I expect my notes on Marx (ibid., and in English, in Essays in honour of D.P. Mukerji) to be largely superseded by Daniel Thorners more precise and complete study. I believe that all the special sources of Marxs 1853 writing have been reviewed above. His letter to Engels of June 14 contains a description which combines passages from the Fifth Report, as quoted in the article date June 10, and from Wilks: 3 lines from Report, 3 from Wilks, 4 from Report, then Wilks again with a change regarding No. 11 and one sentence added by Marx, as Wilks had left out the priest: Then comes the Brahmin for worship, then Report to the end of paragraph. Wilks reappears briefly. Marx adds: Within them is slavery and the caste system. The summary and comments that follow are his own. 25 Cf. The Effects of observation of India on Modern European Thought, Village Communities, ed. 1890, pp. 20539. On a comparative social science, cf. pp. 210-1; only the Indo-European framework has been rejected; indeed our present consideration itself is but a widened application of Maines preoccupation. It is worth noting here that Maines criticism of Bentham and Austins narrow positivistic definition of law on the basis of Indian customary law (Village Communities p. 67 sq., etc.) has been pursued by jurists (Pollock, Clark, etc.; cf. Peter Laslett, Philosophy, Politics and Society, Oxford, 1956, pp. 138-9). On effects of Indian experience on British political speculation, cf. Ernest Barker, Political Thought in England, 1848-1914 (Home Univ. Libr.), p. 16. Barker also notes Maines foremost influence in the field of comparative politics and of anthropology (ibid., p. 173). At least one passage of the Rede Lecture should be quoted here in order to underline Maines central position in the development of social science in general. The passage recalls Talcott Parsons account of how the exclusive consideration of rational action has been overcome (cf. The structure of Social Action). Maine Criticized the narrowness of political economy, especially when applied to the East (p223). He added that: only its bigots asset that the motives of which it takes account are the onlyimportant human motives, or that they are not seriously impeded in their operation by counteracting forces. they generalize to the whole world from a part of it they greatly underrate the value, power, and interest of that great body of custom and inherited idea which, according to the metaphor which they have borrowed from the mechanicians, they throw aside a friction. The best corrective which could be given to this siposition would be a demonstration that this friction is capable of scientific analysis and scientific measurement; and that it will be shown to capable of it? I myself firmly believe (pp. 232-3).

11

ideas and norms, and our effort to see them against their total social background is consonant with Maines view of the interplay between law and fact; and our attempt to stress the modern aspect of the individual can be taken as a distant offshoot of what is probably Maines foremost contribution, namely the opposition between status and contract (cf. Contributions VIII, 95, n.15). Yet, the well deserved fame of a scholar should not overshadow the facts of the matter, and, what is perhaps more important, the greater a mind has proved to be, the greater are the lessons its shortcomings afford to lesser m9nds. It is in this spirit that I shall proceed to consider Maines treatment of the evidence available to him on subject of the village community. In his Ancient Law, 26 Maine devoted only a few pages (p. 272-7) to the subject in his chapter on The Early History of Property. We may note, to begin with, that what he calls the Indian Village Community is essentially the body of co-sharers (our sense No. 2), although, as we shall see, it extends occasionally to thte organization of the whole village under them. In other words, Maines Indian village Community corresponds only to Campbells democratic form and not to the more widespread simple or aristocratic from. The main point of view in this chapter is 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 and private duties (p. 277). Thus the Village Community is at once an organized patriarchal society and an assemblage of co-proprietors (p. 272). This type of organization reminds him of the Roman gens and of the other European facts taken as survivals from the Endo-European past (p. 265-6). Regarding the more perfect from of Village Community, the following passage is perhaps the most important:
[a joint family] Such a body of kindred holding a domain in common, is the simplest form of an Indian Village Community, but the community 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 set of functionaries, for internal government, for police, for the administration of justice, and for the apportionment of taxes and public duties (p. 274).

There is obviously confusion here between the two meanings of our term, a confusion by which the first meaning ---a political society--- is taken to be an attribute of second---a body of (related) co sharers. The relation to the government may be forgotten in this context, but surely not the other point that is stressed equally by Ellis and Campbell, namely the existence in the village of inhabitants who do not belong to the privileged sharers. Finally it looks as if the division of labour in the village was to be credited to Maines community, while it is of course actually found everywhere, whether or not there are joint rights in land of a privileged group. But this very partial reading of Campbell my perhaps be understood if Maines wider preoccupations in Ancient Law are taken into account.
For a careful assessment of Maine as an historian and in relation to our present topic, see also Daniel Thorner, Sir Henry Maine in Ausubel, Brebner and Hunt, ed., Some Modern Historicans of Britian, Essays in Honour of R.L. Schuyler, Ney York, 1951, pp. 66-84. 26 Sir Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law, its connection with the early history of society and its relation to modern ideas (1861), with Introduction and Notes by Frederick Pollock, London, J. Murray, 1906.

12

The trouble is that, although Maine stayed in India for several years (1862-1869) as Law Member in Viceroys Council, and published his Village Communities after his return, it cannot be said that he took advantage of this stay to give sufficient attention to the other aspects of the question, so as to transcend the one sidedness of his initial treatment. Yet his main informant was no less than Lord John Lawrence, Viceroy from 1864 onwards, and he also consulted Campbell, shortly afterwards Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. 27 The treatment is more ample in Village Communities than in the previous book: the Indian village is the object of a full chapter (Lecture IV, p. 103-30) and its consideration recurs often in the remaining five chapters. Yet none of the limitations found in Ancient Law disappears. In one case the main reason for this shortcoming can be shown. According to Pollock in his edition of Ancient Law (p. 315), main admits that his communities are not so simple as he had assumed, and he announces an explanation which unfortunately he fails to offer. The judgment is severe, and probably inexact, and it must be modified to be given its full force. Near the end of the special chapter devoted to the Indian Village Community, Maine writes:
I shall have hereafter to explain that the Indian village communities prove on close inspection to be not simple but composite bodies, including a number of classes with very various rights and claims (p. 123).

The subsequent chapter is rich with similar statements:

(p. 156) many of the families whom the English have recognized as owners of villages were privileged families enjoying the primacy of the township (p. 157) Claims to some sort of superior right over land in fact existed Even when the village-communities were allowed to e in some sense the proprietors of the land which they tilled, they proved on careful inspection not be simple groups, but highly composite bodies, composed of several sections,, with conflicting and occasionally with irreconcilable claims. (p. 166) Although it is hardly possible to avoid speaking of the Western village groups as in one stage democratically governed, they were really oligarchies, as the Eastern communities always tend to become. (ch. VI, p. 176-7) ... some dominant family occasionally claims a superiority over the whole brotherhood But, besides this, the community itself is found, on close observation, to exhibit divisions which run through its internal framework , the most interesting division of the community may be described as division into several parallel social strata the brotherhood, in fact, m forms a sort of hierarchy, the degrees of which are determined by the order in which the various sets of families were amalgamated with the community.

The wheel has run full circle: while, in the main chapter devoted to them, the village communities are implicitly seen as democratic, or equalitarian, or even, elsewhere, by analogy with others, communist (p. 62), we now read that the brotherhood forms a sort of hierarchy. We might feel only at this point that we are reaching back to Campbells perception of 1851, but this would not be doing him justice, for Campbell distinguished between equality within the
27

Sir Henry Sumner Maine, Village Communities in the East and West, London, J. Murray (1871), ed. 1890. For Maines biography, cf. M.E. Duff and W. Stokes, Sir Henry Maine, A Brief Memoir , London, 1892.

13

group of co-sharing families and the fact that these families were masters of the rest of the village population, while Maine persists in confusing the brotherhood with the village population at large, including the craftsmen or servants of the village. 28How can we explain the failure of such a scholar as Maine in this regard? He explains his way of working when he says that the only reliable sources are the Revenue Settlements, but that they are so highly technical that they cannot be understood without preliminary knowledge such as only the oral statements of experienced Indian functionaries can impart (p. 107). It is obvious that his informants themselves disagreed on some basic issues (p. 153, 180 and viii), and this might explain the fact that he could not follow Campbell entirely, even though he declares having submitted his finished work to him (p. viii). This explanation is nevertheless begging the question. What is it that prevented Maine from seeing what he calls hierarchy, and which might be simple dominance, as an integral part of the institution? In other words, what kept him from realizing that the approach he had chosen of abstracting what he called the village community from Indian social reality, was insufficient, and that, to be understood, 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? Once the question is so framed, I believe the right answer comes readily. The reason lies in the presuppositions embedded in Maines preoccupation with the Indo-European village community: he never became fully conscious of his presuppositions because he hardly ever looked at the Indian village in itself, but only as a counterpart to Teutonic, Slavonic or other institutions. India was to him little other than the great repository of verifiable phenomena of ancient usage and ancient juridical thought (p. 22). This explains the abiding confusion between the co-sharers and the village population as a whole, as well as the treatment given to the aspects of inequality that I have epitomized above. They are for the most part concentrated in chapter entitled The Process of Feudalisation. Always by analogy with the West, and in this instance by analogy with a Western development to which India offers no real parallel, the diverse forms of inequality in the Indian community, as found in diverse places in modern times, are supposed to be the remnants or traces of an abortive feudal development (p. 185). The unilineal scheme of evolution so dear to the Victorians allows Maine to treat those features which, as he insists, are revealed by a close inspection, not as belonging to the community in itselffor the community is ex hypothesi equalitarian in its origin, and India its repositorybut rather as the traces of a secondary, historical development which has not actually taken place if we judge by its final result (p. 158). It is odd that the relation between the communities and State, which is vital in this context, is not recognized but his due to Maines belief in his community as an independent institution. From this angle, the failure is due to the incapacity to relinquish a substantialist point of viewthe community as a thing-in-itself, as an individualin favour of a relational view: the village in its context of caste and power (or naked force).

28

The inclusion of the latter (explicitly p. 175) is criticized by D. Thorner (loc. cit., p. 74 note). More precisely (with a hint of Campbell?): the person practicing one of these hereditary employments is really a servant of the community as well as one of its component members (p. 126); the confusion between the two senses of community is clear.

14

All this is the more surprising as a number of Maines own statements should have led him to revise his views. On the reserve with which all speculations on the antiquity of human usage should be received, we read (p.17):
Practices represented as of immemorial antiquity have described to me as having been for the first time resorted to in our own days

But this relates to Indian tribes. On the link between the aristocracy and the king:
Such nobility as existed was supported not be rents by assignments of the royal revenue; and the natural aristocracy of the country would have differed in little from the humbler classes but for these assignments (p. 179).

Maine sees the process of feudalisation as one of transition from the village community to what he calls the Manorial Group, the latter being characterized by the combination of a Lord, a body of formerly independent peasants, and servile manpower. There is an unexpected ingenuousness in a question like the following, which bears on Teutonic history as seen by Von Maurer, but which was intended comparatively:
How did the Manor arise out of the Mark [commune]? What were the causes of indigenous growth which, independently of grants of land by royal or national authority, were leading to suzerainty or superiority of one cultivating community over another, or of one family over the rest of the families composing the village community? (p. 143) [my italics].

When applied to India the answer is simple: suzerainty is out of the question, as is the individual contract of homage. As to superiority, it is on the face of it a matter of caste and power, or force. There is evidence that Maine dealt with caste as little as possible and when doing so, was not quite able to suspend his moral judgment:
(In the infancy of society) men are regarded and treated, not as individuals, but always as members of a particular group Everybody is a member of an order of patricians or plebeians; or, in those societies which an unhappy fate has afflicted with a special perversion in their course of development, of a caste (Ancient Law, p. 196).

In the second chapter of his Village Communities, in order to explain the conservation of immemorial custom he refers to the intellectual quickness of Indians and to other factors, and insists on the division of the society into small organic groups closely dependent upon tradition. In passing he fires a broadside at what he considers to be a popular misconception of caste:
I am aware that the popular impression here is that Indian society is divided, so to speak, into a number of horizontal strata, each representing a caste. This is an entire mistake Otherwise, caste is merely a name for trade and occupation, and the sole tangible effect of brahmanical theory is that it creates a religious sanction for what is really a primitive and natural distribution of classes. The true view (p. 57; cf. Contributions VIII, 87, n.1).

15

The crux of this passage is that hierarchy or stratification is not a fundamental principle of the caste system. 29

As to the Untouchables, who are referred to (p. 127-8) under another names as being found in certain villages in Central and Southern India, although they have definite village duties they form no part of the natural and organic aggregate to which the bulk of the villagers belong, and they evidently represent a population of alien blood, too obstinately and obtrusively foreign to be completely absorbed. A perceptive reader will find in the sequence of expressions just quoted a trace of how the refusal to look into the face of caste leads Maine to conjure up a picture of the village which is wholly unreal. As to the relation of the village to outside power, Maine states several times that the kings took so large a share of the produce as to leave nothing practically to the cultivating groups except the bare means of tillage and subsistence (p. 119, similarly, p. 179). Can the cultivating groups, then, be said to have been independent of the wider political power, as Maine and others at least implicitly assume? This contradiction comes up forcibly in another passage:
(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 (p. 159-60).

Maine and other writers with him are probably right in assuming that the kings did not interfere with the principles on which the villages were constituted, and one must distinguish between material or factual interdependence and juridical or moral intervention. Yet, it is clear that all over the country the villagers agreed to deliver to the king a substantial part of the produce, and this embodies recognition of dependence. 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 the first place, we have seen Campbell referring to conquest as a likely source of the superior rights in the villages, and it should be addedas was made clearer, after Maine wrote, by Baden-Powell and othersthat wherever the king delegated his right to one person there was a chance of his beneficiary and his heirs assuming the superior right and reducing those who formerly enjoyed it to subordinate status. In short, if not the principle of the village constitution, then its actual constitution, and especially the identity of its superior members, were not wholly unrelated to the wider political power. This dependency is also marked in psychological details recorded by Maine (p. 111): the sanction of the State, but it only in the form of the stamped paper on which an agreement between private parties is written, is felt as important by the villager. Again (p. 150) it is stated that all agrarian rights, whether superior or subordinate to those of the person held responsible to Government, have tendency to decay (my

29

Yet we have quoted above, from p. 177, a passage in which the brotherhood is seen as a hierarchy with several social strata. Whether it is precisely a matter of dominance or hierarchy, it is clear that Maine was driven to account for this feature by a supposed historical process since he refused to recognize it as constitutive of the Indian caste system. There is a reference on p. 175 to the shadowy bond of caste.

16

italics). True, this is said of the British period, and it is related to the definition of rights. But it is clear that government favour in general is powerful in itself. On the whole, I conclude the Maine failed to take advantage of his stay in India and of the evidence available to him there in order to fufil the task which the existing literature proposed: to integrate the corporate body of sharers in land rights in its context within the village (dominance over other groups or castes) and without (relation to settled power and to conquest). It is not enough to regret that he did not make inquiries on the sport, or that he could not have access to the literature produced later on,30 for, as I have shown, the existing literature should not have left him any doubt on those issues. The truth is the Maine carried on the approach inaugurated in Ancient Law, arbitrarily abstracting his Community from the data and reducing it to those features which, he assumed, were characteristic of the pristine Indo-European community. He did away with caste and kingship with a leger de main, just as he did not feel the need for any detailed and localized description. He was content with reducing the highly technical literature of the Revenue Settlements, and of the administrators in general to an elegant and short statement of what he thought to be the general principles and basic nature of the institution that interested him. This could not be of course have happened had there not been, in Maine himself and in the intellectual atmosphere of his day, a strong attraction to Indo-European origins, and , more lastingly, to communistic origins and evolutionist views in general. Thus Durkheim, reviewing Baden-Powell in 1897, could not see that in the Indian case joint rights are structural facts rather than prehistoric survivals. 31

30 31

Thorner, loc. cit., p. 78; Baden-Powell is quoted by Pollock in Ancient Law, p. 315. Review of The Indian Village Commuity, in Annee Sociologique, I, 1897, pp. 359-63. It is true that this is not the best of Baden-Powells books, and that it obscures the basic question by resorting to pseudo-historical speculations (Aryan-Dravidian, etc.). Durkheim restated the common evolutionary view: This goes gains all the comparative history of law Never has the joint family been seen to arise from a more restricted family. Everything proves that it is by far the more ancient from (qu elle lui est bien anterieure) (ibid., p. 363).

17

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Srinivas, M. N. 1960. Indias Village (second edition). Bombay: Asia Publishing House. Stoke, E. 1959. The English Utilitarians and India, London: Oxford University Press. Thorner, D. 1951. Sir Hery Maine (1882-1888). In H. Ausubel, J.B. Brebner, and E.M. Hunt, ed. Some Modern Historians of Britian. New York: Dryden Press. Pp.66-84. Wilks, M. 1810. Historical Sketches of the South of India in an attempt to trace the History of Mysore. Mysore. (edited by M. Hammick in 1930). Vol. 1.

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