The Aryan Village in India and Ceylon

Abstract

IT is now twenty years since a remarkable page in Sir Henry Maine's “Ancient Law” drew attention to the prevalence in India of the village-community, a system of society strange to the modern English mind. Before that work appeared, even special students had little idea how far the ancient communism, under which the Aryan race colonised so much of Asia and Europe, was still to be found not as a mere relic of ancient society, but as the practical condition of modern life among Hindus and Slavs. The historical importance of this early institution is now fully recognised, and our archaeologists are alive to the relics of the old village-communities in England. Not only are these seen in the public commons, but here and there in certain fields where, after harvest, the neighbours still have the right of turning their cattle in among the stubbles, while even a few of the great old “common fields,” where once each family had its free allotted portion, are still to be discerned by the baulks or ridges of turf dividing them into the three long strips, which again were cut crosswise into the family lots. Thus every contribution to the argument on the development-of modern landholding from the communism of ancient times, finds interested readers. The present volume is such a contribution, and in several ways new and important. Sir John Phear thoroughly knows and carefully describes native life in Bengal and Ceylon, and one of his points is the remarkable parallelism of the agricultural village, as it has Shaped itself in these two widely-separated districts. Up “to a certain stage, the development of the village-community has been everywhere on much the same lines, and those not hard to trace. It springs naturally out of the patriarchal family, which, living together on its undivided land, tilling it in common, and subsisting on the produce, becomes in a few generations a family-community. There are now to be seen in and about Calcutta families of 300 to 400 (including servants) living in one house, and 50 to roo is a usual number. The property is managed by the karta, who is usually the eldest of the eldest branch, and what the members want for personal expenses beside the common board and lodging, he lets them have in small sums out of the common fund. Now and then there is a great quarrel, when the community breaks up and the land is divided according to law. It is easily seen how such a joint-family or group of families settling together in waste unoccupied land would expand into a village-community, where new households when crowded out of the family home would live in huts hard by, but all would work and share together as if they still dwelt under one roof. In fact this primitive kind of village-settlement, according to our author, is still going on at this day hi Ceylon. In districts where, as in ancient Europe, patches of forest are still felled and burnt to give a couple of years' crop of grain, and where in the lowlands rice-cultivation requires systematic flooding, we find the whole settlement at work in common in a thoroughly socialistic way. The some what different communistic system prevails more in India, where the land is still the common property of the village, and the cultivated plots are apportioned out from time to time among the families, but these families labour by and for themselves, pay the rent or tax, and live each on the crop of their own raising. In Bengal a step toward our notion of proprietorship is made, where custom more and more confirms each family in permanent ownership of the fields which their fathers have long tilled undisturbed. Tenant-right, so pertinaciously remembered by the Irish peasant, is older in history than the private ownership of land. Next, in the Hindu village as it now exists, a further stage of social growth appears. Families carrying on certain necessary professions have been set apart, or have settled in the village. The hereditary carpenters and blacksmiths and potters follow their trades, the hereditary washerman washes for his fellow-villagers, and the hereditary barber shaves them, paid partly for their services at fixed customary rates, and partly by having their plots of village-land rent free, or nearly so. All this is intelligible and practical enough, and indeed strongly reminds those of us who got our early politics out of “Evenings at Home,” of the boy colonists providing for their future wants under the direction of discreet Mr. Barlow, by taking with them the carpenter and the blacksmith and the rest of the useful members of society. But the village-community as it actually exists in India, or Servia, or anywhere else, only forms the substratum of society, on the top of which appear other social elements whose development it is not so easy to trace with certainty. The “gentleman,” with his claims to live in a better house than the others whose business is to drudge for him, seemed absurd to Dr. Aikin's political economy, yet he makes his appearance in the Hindu village-community as elsewhere. Sir John Phear seems disposed partly to account for what may be called the landholding class, as well as the endowed priesthood, as having held a privileged position from the first settlement of the villages, and it is in favour of this view that in such settlements the founder's kin naturally have superior rights over the land to new-comers. But he does not the less insist on another and yet stroager social process which has tended to give to individuals a landlord-right over fields they do not till. When quarrels between two villages end in actual war, the conquering warriors (whose claims however seem to be here somewhat confused with the rights of the chief's family) would ae rewarded for their prowess by grants of land carved out of the common lands of the conquered village, and the new lords being absentees would naturally put in tenants who would pay in return a share of the crops. Such metayage, or farming “on shares,” is as common in India as in the south of Europe, and is evidently the stage out of which arose our rent-system of landlord and tenant.

The Aryan Village in India and Ceylon.

By Sir John B. Phear. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1880.)