, 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 organised society, and besides providing for the
management of the common fund, it seldom fails to provide, by a
complete staff of functionaries, for internal government, for police,
for the administration of justice, and for the apportionment of taxes
and public duties.

The process which I have described as that under which a Village
Community is formed, may be regarded as typical. Yet it is not to be
supposed that every Village Community in India drew together in so
simple a manner. Although, in the North of India, the archives, as I
am informed, almost invariably show that the Community was founded by
a single assemblage of blood-relations, they also supply information
that men of alien extraction have always, from time to time, been
engrafted on it, and a mere purchaser of a share may generally, under
certain conditions, be admitted to the brotherhood. In the South of
the Peninsula there are often Communities which appear to have sprung
not from one but from two or more families; and there are some whose
composition is known to be entirely artificial; indeed, the occasional
aggregation of men of different castes in the same society is fatal to
the hypothesis of a common descent. Yet in all these brotherhoods
either the tradition is preserved, or the assumption made, of an
original common parentage. Mountstuart Elphinstone, who writes more
particularly of the Southern Village Communities, observes of them
(_History of India_, i. 126): "The popular notion is that the Village
landholders are all descended from one or more individuals who settled
the village; and that the only exceptions are formed by persons who
have derived their rights by purchase or otherwise from members of the
original stock. The supposition is confirmed by the fact that, to this
day, there are only single families of landholders in small villages
and not many in large ones; but each has branched out into so many
members that it is not uncommon for the whole agricultural labour to
be done by the landholders, without the aid either of tenants or of
labourers. 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. A landholder, for
instance, can sell or mortgage his rights;