Our Political Heritage

By Prof. N. SRINIVASAN, M.A. (Oxon.)
(Andhra University, Waltair)

Modern research has disclosed the widespread existence of democratic and popular institutions during the earlier periods of Indian history. There is abundant evidence of such institutions in the literature of the Vedic, Buddhist, Epic and Puranic periods from about 1000 B.C. till about 600 A.D. While monarchy seems to have been too prevalent form of State there seems to have been also a number of republics (Vairajya). The character of the governments seems to have ranged from aristocracy and oligarchy to democracy of a kind. Kingship was, in some instances, elective. General assemblies of the people were convened to choose, or to approve of the succession of, a new ruler. Popular assemblies and Councils of Elders (Sabhas and Samitis) whom the ruler was bound to consult, were to be found in many States. Regional Councils (Janapadas) City Councils (Pauras), Village Assemblies (Sabhas) which administered local affairs with almost complete freedom, and Trade and Caste Guilds (Sreni) which regulated the trades and professions and the affairs of the caste were a common feature of ancient Indian polity.

These institutions of self-government were, in India as elsewhere, the “first expression of man’s political instincts”, the “natural creation of his political intelligence”. They attained a high stage of development in her early history. But their growth was inhibited by the rise of monarchical and imperial States and by the ideal of a united Empire embracing the whole of India. The theme of all political literature of the later Hindu period is Empire (Samrajya). The greatest of Hindu political treatises, Kautilya’s ‘Arthasastra’, is concerned not with freedom and popular government but with monarchy and the means of strengthening and assuring its stability. In its scheme of government popular institutions have no place. Its ideal is a benevolent and paternal autocracy. At the same time the ‘Arthasastra’ recognises the existence of corporate institutions and enjoins on the King respect for them and the duty of enforcing their decisions.

The history of popular institutions after the age of the Guptas is obscure. We have no positive evidence of their existence in the centuries that followed. We may presume none the less that the village community, at least, continued its existence in some form or other long afterwards. The successive empires that rose to power and declined affected only the surface of Indian society. An efficient and centralised government that stifles all local initiative and freedom was unknown in India until the establishment of British rule in the nineteenth century. Only the self-governing village survived while all other popular institutions vanished completely leaving no trace behind them. The latter have survived only in the beautiful words which once served to describe them, like the Sabha, the Mahasabha, the Samiti, the Gana, Samgha, janapada, Paura, Sreni and others.

The self-governing village community in its later days was much less vigorous than it had been in Ancient India. It was not found everywhere. Administrative functions had passed largely into the hands of the Patel, or Munsiff. But even in the days of its decline the village community was still impressive enough to evoke the admiration of the great British administrators like Munro, Elphinstone and Sir Henry Maine. To Elphinstone we owe the classic description of the autonomous village reproduced below:

“Each township conducts its own internal affairs. It levies on its members the revenue due to the State, and is collectively responsible for the full amount. It manages its own police and is answerable for any property plundered within its limits. It administers justice to its own members as far as punishing small offences and deciding disputes in the first instance. It taxes itself to provide funds for its internal expenses such as the repairs of the wells and the temple, and the cost of public sacrifices and charities, as well as some ceremonies and amusements or festivals. It is provided with the requisite officers for conducting these duties and with various others adapted to the wants of the inhabitants, and, though entirely subject to the general government, is in many respects an organised commonwealth complete within itself. This independence and its concomitant privileges, though often violated by the Government, are never denied; they afford some little protection against a tyrannical ruler, and maintain order within their own limits, even when the general government has been dissolved.”

The Village Panchayat which seems to have survived in fully vigour till the British conquest, and was practically universal in India at the beginning of the last century, is however not to be confused with the Sabha of the old self-governing village. It was a purely judicial institution and had no administrative functions. Where a national system of justice was lacking, its services were of the utmost importance to the peaceful and orderly existence of the village commmity. Sir Thomas Munro wrote of it in 1807: “There can be no doubt that the trial of Panchayat is as much the common law of India in civil matters as that by the juryin England.” (It is interesting to note that the two institutions were similar in their functions). Elphinstone notes that the Panchayat was a part of the judicial organisation of the Mahratta country under Nana Fadnavis, and Sir John Malcolm observes that it was used in Central India and the Punjab for the settlement of disputes. Whatever the origins of the Panchayat, in its later forms it was neither an organ of village self-government nor a representative body like the Sabha of the old village community.

The history of self-governing institutions in the South is more continuous than in the North. But there appear to have been no popular assemblies representative of the country as a whole except perhaps in the earliest period. The origins of democratic institutions go to the first or second century A.D. There are frequent references in the early literature of the Tamils to the gatherings of the Eight or Five Greater Assemblies as well as to the Ur, the Nattar, and Naga-rathar which may be taken as village, country, and town councils. The institution that has the most continuous history and reached a high stage of development was, however, the Village Sabha. The great age of the village community was under the Cholas from the ninth to the thirteenth century. Inscriptional evidence indicates the existence of a remarkably complete system of local autonomy from the sixth to the thirteenth century, and from places so far apart as Tanjore and Tinnevelly in the Tamil country and Masulipatam in the heart of the Telugu area. These village communities seem to have preserved their corporate organisation in some form down to the British conquest early in the last century.

The characteristic institutions in. their heyday were the general assembly of the Village known as the Sabha or Mahasabha, and numerous elected committees for the performance of different functions. We have a full account of the organisation of Uttiramerur in the tenth century. Besides the Sabha the village had a score or more of committees attend to different functions. There were, for instance, an annual committee for general supervision (Samvatsara variyam), a tank committee (Eri variyam), a sluices committee (Kalingu variyam), a committee (Kazhani variyam), a garden committee (Thotta variyam) and so on. Their names indicate their functions. The committees were chosen by a system of lot from the different wards of the village. The procedure of election was prescribed in great detail, as also the procedure of the committees and assembly, the rules of debate and the manner of arriving at decisions in these bodies. An efficient financial control was maintained and the committees were held to a strict accountability to the Sabha for the proper discharge of their functions.

The Sabha attended to the temple which has always been the central institution in the Indian village, to endowments, land records and irrigation, justice and police, communications and education. Any matter concerning the village was within its purview.

In the description of the village of Uttiramerur given by Professor S. Krishnaswami Ayyangar in his “Evolution of Hindu Administrative Institutions in South India” and by Professor K.A. Nilakanta Sastri in his “History of the Cholas” and “Studies in Chola Administration” we have indeed the picture of a little republic administering its affairs democratically with little or no interference from the central government. As suggested by these two historians, it may reasonably be assumed that the organisation of the village outlined here was typical of the villages of the Tamil-Nad at the time.

This account of the popular and democratic institutions of ancient and medieval India is necessarily sketchy. There are many gaps in our knowledge of them. We do not know how they actually worked or the spirit that animated them. It is difficult, therefore, to estimate their true role in our history. From the facts as we know them a few inferences may be made. A nostalgic and uncritical admiration for them as a perfect example of democratic institutions, and the attempt to find in them the latest democratic devices like the secret ballot, seem to be wholly unjustified. Nor can they be dismissed as primitive and useless. If they were in no sense the progenitors or precursors of our modern democracy, they may still serve to give our people a confidence in themselves and in their ability to make popular government a success.

We have noticed two types of democratic institutions in Ancient India and the two have a different history. Of these the political assemblies never attained any great importance. Nor did they develop beyond an inchoate stage. They were short-lived and seem to have succumbed easily before the rising power of the monarch. We have no trace of them in our history after the sixth century. We know nothing about the causes of their fall.

The self-governing village communities, on the other hand, were more permanent and attained a high stage of development. Their most striking feature was their self-sufficiency. They lived a self-centred and almost secluded life, as they were not articulated to the political life of the larger community and nation. Their independence and self-sufficiency were the source of both their strength and weakness. Their self-sufficiency enabled them to survive great political upheavals and frequent changes of regime. But their narrow and parochial outlook inevitably prevented the development of a larger patriotism and truer citizenship which recognise the duty of defending the country against foreign enemies as the supreme virtue of the citizen. Indian society was atomized; it failed to develop a sense of cohesion and nationality necessary to its preservation. The result was the easy conquest of India by successive waves of foreign invaders. The truth is that, in the long run, too great a measure of local autonomy is destructive both of the national community and of the local autonomy itself.

The fairest verdict on our ancient and medieval democracy comes from the pen of Mountstuart Elphinstone who, in paying a high tribute to it, does not forget its fatal weakness:

“These communities contain in miniature all the materials of a State within themselves and are almost sufficient to protect their members if all other governments were withdrawn. Though probably not compatible with a very good form of government, they are an excellent remedy for the imperfections of a bad one; they prevent the bad effects of its negligence and weakness; and even present some barrier against its tyranny and rapacity.”
(Official writings, Ed. by G.W. Forrest, p. 274-5.)

“In the stability and continuity of village life and organisation is to be sought the secret of the good things achieved by India in the past, in spite of an apparent incapacity to develop political institutions of an advanced character.”
(Quoted by Prof. K. A. N. Sastri)

In a political sense Hindu India did not grow beyond a rudimentary stage. Its political legacy is not a democratic tradition but rather its contrary. And autocracy is the mark of political immaturity, though it may be combined with a high state of civilisation in other respects.

The greatest political legacy from our Hindu past, is the conceptionof an India united culturally and politically. It is immensely important for our political future. The ideal was almost completely realised under Asoka and was the vision that inspired the greatest of our rulers, from Samudragupta and Harsha to Akbar and Aurangazebe. The British were no less under its spell and it was under them that a united India was finally achieved. It should be emphasised that it was the fundamental cultural unity of India achieved by Hindu India that constitutes the essential basis for the superstructure of our political unity. This unity of culture and government is the only sure foundation on which a more perfect and stable democratic polity can be built. It is necessary therefore to cherish and foster this unity.

In our heritage from the Hindu past our social constitution is the most persistent. A rigid, hierarchic and stratified caste system is the basis of Hindu society. It was caste that made possible the absorption into asingle cultural society of the different tribes of India and gave to Hindu society its extraordinary stability. Paradoxically an institution devised to unify the peoples of India has in the course of time become the greatest obstacle to their unity. Caste and predetermined vocations and stations in life are an anomaly in a democratic age. Caste is the antithesis of democracy and national unity. A social constitution based on the principle of the absolute equality of all men can alone form the basis of a democratic government.

We may turn now to a brief consideration of the political heritage of the Muslim period of our history. In the thousand years from the first Muslim invasion of India in the eighth century to the eighteenth, there is no trace of any democratic institutions except in the villages. Muslim and Hindu rulers of this period were all autocrats whose power was based on the army. Neither in theory nor in practice were there any limitations on their absolute power. Except during the enlightened rule of Akbar (1556-1665) there was no attempt at a political synthesis of the adherents of Islam and Hinduism. The Muslims who were mostly foreign immigrants constituted the ruling caste and the vast majority of their Hindu subjects were denied equality. The latter were subjected to the worst exactions and humiliations. In the suppression of the Hindus the Muslim ruler combined with the priest, and his military despotism assumed the character of a theocracy as well. The common people, Hindu or Muslim, had no political existence except as tax-payers and soldiers. They rendered to the ruler implicit obedience within the limits of custom and necessity. During all these centuries the benevolent ruler was the rarest exception and the capricious tyrant the general rule.

The period of Muslim rule has left a legacy that affects vitally the prospects of democracy. Under their rule the people came to regard government as completely alien and as something with which they had no concern. The fear and suspicion of government and the anxiety to avoid all contacts with it, the indifference to common affairs, the selfish concern with their own particular interests which most of our countrymen exhibit in their daily conduct are, in large measure, a legacy of a millennium of autocratic misrule.

There are two other results of significance of this period. Muslim rulers of India, with the single exception of Akbar, followed policies that tended to divide their Hindu and Muslim subjects and drove a wedge between them. They kept alive and indeed did their best to foster the exclusiveness of Islamic culture. The followers of Islam, as a result, remain after a thousand years of residence in India a distinct and different group clearly marked out from their Hindu neighbours. Their religion, language, social customs, manners and dress, are all different from those of the Hindus. Their loyalties remain extra-Indian and their sympathies and fellow feeling with their Hindu countrymen are ill developed. This separatism runs counter to the Hindu tradition of the oneness of India. The creation of Pakistan has not wholly solved the problem of Muslim exclusiveness. A difficult problem of minorities is still with us awaiting a just solution.

The second result is that our politics have become suffused with religion. Religion is the first and last interest of the Muslim. The appeal to religious sentiment is what moves the Muslim to instant and irrational action in politics. The Hindu masses are only a little less moved by religious feelings. This is a result of the long period during which they remained in political subjection, when religion perforce became the rallying point of their patriotism and their sole hope of survival as a community. As a result of their age-long conflict the followers of the two religions find it hard to extend the hand of tolerance to each other. Fanatics and zealots of both religions have always been busy sowing the seeds of distrust and fostering hostility between them. The task of creating a truly secular outlook and territorial patriotism is, with this ground, one of immense difficulty.

Such is our legacy from the past. From the point of view of building up a secular and democratic political order, it presents great difficulties and offers little help. There is in the legacy much that we have to unlearn or destroy and little that we need cherish, if our new venture in democracy is to succeed.