1

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. 1There is an amphibology in Elphinstone’s History of India where he quotes Metcalfe’s 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).

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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

Stokes’s 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 cliché, 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 Metcalfe’s 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

Munro’s 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.

2 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 Metcalfe’s description as applying implicitly to the ‘isolation and stability’ of village communities all over India (India’s 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 Spear’s 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 Metcalfe’s 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.

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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 Dutt’s 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 mauzawari’s settlement) and not on the individual peasant (Munro’s 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 style7 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 Munro’s, to

4 Sir Charles Metcalfe’s 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 Elphinstone’s 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 Ellis’s 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).

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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 Munro’s 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 Munro’s 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 Munro’s imprudent sentence ‘From the age of Manu …’ is used to

great effect in favour of village settlement and against Munro’s own settlement with the

individual peasant. On the whole, the cliché had been set, as is clearly seen in an extracts of the

description in the Fifth Report proper (Munro’s 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 Munro’s theme. In contrast, Elphinstone’s description in his Report is detailed and

measured; it does not echo Munro’s 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 Elphinstore’s 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:

8 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.

10Mounstuart Elphinsotne, History of India (1839), 5

th 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.

5

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).

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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 Elphinstone’s 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 Metcalfe’s 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 enumerated—somewhat 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).

6

It is perhaps characteristic that the Fifth Report, which obviously uses Wilk’s 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 Macaulay’s decisive victory over the orientalizing tendency in the field of education (cf. Stokes, op. cit. ).

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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

15From Ballhatchet, Social Policy, p. 32 16 Cf. Munro’s 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 Dutt’s text, Elphinstone’s recognition is thus seriously weakened in Dutt’s summary. Dutt’s 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 Elphinstone’s 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 O’Malley (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’ (India’s 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 India’s 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. Mayer’s 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 author’s conclusion (p. 146): ‘This account has shown how it is that a village containing twenty-seven different caste groups, each with

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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 Ellis’s

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 king’s 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).

9

form of collective right inland, did not take it as independent from the State’s 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.21

Yet 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

Ancient Law, Pollock ed. (below, n. 26), p. 275. 22

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

10

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. 83-

4). 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).

11

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 Marx’s views on the subject by a more competent writer than the present, I shall restrict

myself to a critical treatment of the point in Maine’s 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

Maine’s 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;25

our emphasis on

23The 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 other’s 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 26th chapter of Tacitus’s 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 Thorner’s more precise and complete study. I believe that all the special sources of Marx’s 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. 205-39. 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 Maine’s preoccupation. It is worth noting here that Maine’s criticism of Bentham and Austin’s 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 Maine’s 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 Maine’s central position in the development of social science in general. The passage recalls Talcott Parson’s 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).

12

ideas and norms, and our effort to see them against their total social background is consonant

with Maine’s 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 Maine’s 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

Maine’s 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, Maine’s ‘Indian village Community’ corresponds only to Campbell’s ‘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 Maine’s 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 Maine’s 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.

13

The trouble is that, although Maine stayed in India for several years (1862-1869) as Law

Member in Viceroy’s 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 Campbell’s 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 Maine’s biography, cf. M.E. Duff and W. Stokes, Sir Henry Maine, A Brief Memoir …, London, 1892.

14

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.28

How 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 Maine’s 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 itself—for

the community is ex hypothesi equalitarian in its origin, and India its repository—but 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 Maine’s belief in his ‘community’

as an independent institution. From this angle, the failure is due to the incapacity to relinquish a

substantialist point of view—the community as a thing-in-itself, as an individual—in 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.

15

All this is the more surprising as a number of Maine’s 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).

16

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 added—as was made clearer, after Maine

wrote, by Baden-Powell and others—that 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’.

17

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 Thorner, loc. cit., p. 78; Baden-Powell is quoted by Pollock in Ancient Law, p. 315. 31 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-Powell’s 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).

18

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