Page:India—what can it teach us?.djvu/69

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TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HINDUS.

47

The political unit, or the social cell in India has always been, and, in spite of repeated foreign conquests, is still the village-community. Some of these political units will occasionally combine or be combined for common purposes (such a confederacy being called a grâmagâla), but each is perfect in itself. When we read in the laws of Manu^[1] of officers appointed to rule over ten, twenty, a hundred, or a thousand of these villages, that means no more than that they were responsible for the collection of taxes, and generally for the good behaviour of these villages. And when, in later times, we hear of circles of 84 villages, the so-called Chourasees (Katurasîti^[2]), and of 360 villages, this too seems to refer to fiscal arrangements only. To the ordinary Hindu, I mean to ninety-nine in every hundred, the village was his world, and the sphere of public opinion, with its beneficial influences on individuals, seldom extended beyond the horizon of his village^[3].

Colonel Sleeman was one of the first who called attention to the existence of these village-communities in India, and their importance in the social fabric of the whole country both in ancient and in modern

↑ Manu VII. 115.
↑ H. M. Elliot, Supplement to the Glossary of Indian Terms, p. 151.
↑ I see from Dr. Hunter's latest statistical tables that the whole number of towns and villages in British India amounts to 493,498. Out of this number 448,320 have less than 1000 inhabitants, and may be called villages. In Bengal, where the growth of towns has been most encouraged through Government establishments, the total number of homesteads is 117,042, and more than half of these contain less than 200 inhabitants. Only 10,077 towns in Bengal have more than 1000 inhabitants, that is, no more than about a seventeenth part of all the settlements are anything but what we should call substantial villages. In the North-Western Provinces the last census gives us 105,124 villages, against 297 towns. See Times, 14th Aug. 1882.

[1] Manu VII. 115.

[2] H. M. Elliot, Supplement to the Glossary of Indian Terms, p. 151.

[3] I see from Dr. Hunter's latest statistical tables that the whole number of towns and villages in British India amounts to 493,498. Out of this number 448,320 have less than 1000 inhabitants, and may be called villages. In Bengal, where the growth of towns has been most encouraged through Government establishments, the total number of homesteads is 117,042, and more than half of these contain less than 200 inhabitants. Only 10,077 towns in Bengal have more than 1000 inhabitants, that is, no more than about a seventeenth part of all the settlements are anything but what we should call substantial villages. In the North-Western Provinces the last census gives us 105,124 villages, against 297 towns. See Times, 14th Aug. 1882.

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