NATURE 



525 



THURSDAY, APRIL 7, 18S1 



THE ARYAN VILLAGE 



The Aryan Village in India and Ceylon. By Sir John 



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



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 rehc 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 

 ever>- 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 100 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 in 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 sociahstic way. The some- 

 VoL. xxiii. — No. 597 



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 pro- 

 viding 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 sub- 

 stratum 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 stronger 

 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 some- 

 what confused with the rights of the chief's family) would 

 be 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. 



One great value of books like the present is in showing 

 the analogies and differences of social institutions which 

 have much of their history in common with our own, but 

 have developed under other conditions. Feudal lordship 

 and feudal sovereignty have in the East overridden the 

 old village-system in ways curiously like those of the 

 West. Thus, as Sir John Phear says, the English manor 

 was the feudal form of the Oriental village ; the Bengal 



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