Community of India is
at once an organised patriarchal society and an assemblage of
co-proprietors. The personal relations to each other of the men who
compose it are indistinguishably confounded with their proprietary
rights, and to the attempts of English functionaries to separate the
two may be assigned some of the most formidable miscarriages of
Anglo-Indian administration. The Village Community is known to be of
immense antiquity. In whatever direction research has been pushed into
Indian history, general or local, it has always found the Community in
existence at the farthest point of its progress. A great number of
intelligent and observant writers, most of whom had no theory of any
sort to support concerning its nature and origin, agree in considering
it the least destructible institution of a society which never
willingly surrenders any one of its usages to innovation. Conquests
and revolutions seem to have swept over it without disturbing or
displacing it, and the most beneficent systems of government in India
have always been those which have recognised it as the basis of
administration.

The mature Roman law, and modern jurisprudence following in its wake,
look upon co-ownership as an exceptional and momentary condition of
the rights of property. This view is clearly indicated in the maxim
which obtains universally in Western Europe, _Nemo in communione
potest invitus detineri_ ("No one can be kept in co-proprietorship
against his will"). But in India this order of ideas is reversed, and
it may be said that separate proprietorship is always on its way to
become proprietorship in common. The process has been adverted to
already. As soon as a son is born, he acquires a vested interest in
his father's substance, and on attaining years of discretion he is
even, in certain contingencies, permitted by the letter of the law to
call for a partition of the family estate. As a fact, however, a
division rarely takes place even at the death of the father, and the
property constantly remains undivided for several generations, though
every member of every generation has a legal right to an undivided
share in it. The domain thus held in common is sometimes administered
by an elected manager, but more generally, and in some provinces
always, it is managed by the eldest agnate, by the eldest
representative of the eldest line of the stock. Such an assemblage of
joint proprietors, a body of kindred holding a domain in common