ld now call their _communes_. It is that village-life which in
India has given its peculiar impress to the Indian character, more so
than in any other country we know. When in Indian history we hear so
much of kings and emperors, of rajahs and maharajahs, we are apt to
think of India as an Eastern monarchy, ruled by a central power, and
without any trace of that self-government which forms the pride of
England. But those who have most carefully studied the political life
of India tell you the very opposite.

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 grama_g_ala), but
each is perfect in itself. When we read in the Laws of Manu[29] 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 behavior of these
villages. And when, in later times, we hear of circles of eighty-four
villages, the so-called Chourasees (_K_atura_s_iti[30]), and of three
hundred and sixty 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.[31]

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 times; and though they have since become far better known and
celebrated through the writings of Sir Henry Maine, it is still both
interesting and instructive to read Colonel Sleeman's account. He
writes as a mere observer, and uninfluenced as yet by any theories on
the development of early social and political life among the Aryan
nations in general.

I do not mean to say that Colonel Sleeman was the first who pointed
out the palpable fact that the whole of India is parcelled out into
estates of villages. Even so early an observer as Megasthenes[32]
seems to have been struck by the same fact when he says that "in India
the husbandmen with their wives and children live in the country, and
entirely avoid going into