Self-Sufficient Village Community in Pre-British India

A self-sufficient village, based on agriculture carried on with the primitive plough and bullock-power and handicrafts by means of simple instruments was a basic feature of pre-British Indian society. The structure of agricultural production in the Indian village thus remained uninterfered with for centuries. No emperor or his viceroy ever challenged the ultimate customary right over the village land by the village community.

Elphinstone (1929, 163) had described Indian villages as “Little republics”, having nearly everything they can want within themselves. The activities of the villages were regulated, as far as possible, a self-propelled and self-dependent economic unit. They opined that Indian villages have a simple form of government and are economically self-sufficient units.

Further, village agriculture was produced for the needs of the village and, excepting a share of this product which the village had to surrender to the lord of the moment-may, be the suba of the Delhi Emperor or the Sardar of the Poona Peshwa-the entire produce was almost locally consumed by the peasant and non-peasant village population. Besides the peasant families, the village population also included industrial workers such as a smith, a carpenter, a potter, a weaver, a cobbler, washerman, an oilman, a barber, and others. They all worked almost exclusively to satisfy the needs of the village population.

Thus, not only did the village not have any appreciable exchange relations with the outside world but also within itself, the phenomenon of a market was absent. Another feature of the villages economic life was the low stage of the division of labour based on insufficient differentiation of agriculture and industry. While principally attending to agriculture, the farmer family also engaged itself in domestic spinning. Similarly, the artisan, who was often given a plot of village land by the village committee, carried on agricultural activity for some time in the year.

The village artisans secured locally the raw materials, such as wood, clay and hide, required for their crafts. Wood was available from the forest area in the periphery of the village. The carcasses of dead animals of the village provided the cobbler with hides. Cotton grew in almost every part of the country. On the whole, the village was almost self-sufficient regarding the raw materials needed for the village artisan industry.

Thus, economically, the village was predominantly autarchic. Local produce prepared mainly by means of local labour and resources was almost locally consumed. There was very little exchange between the village and the outside world. Whatever little trade existed, was carried on, generally, on a specific day of the week, at the market in a big village where a variety of goods from a number of centres was sold. Their respective occupations had a religious sanction behind them.

The technique of village agriculture and industry was on a low level. Simple agricultural equipment and the hand-manipulated tools for manufacture were all that were known. Even wind-mills and water-wheels were seldom employed. The sickle and plough, the saw and chisel, the spinning-wheel and pit-loom, were made of a trifling amount of material in a very short time, but sometimes gave service for generations.

The village population lived for centuries an almost unvarying economic life based on self-sufficient village agriculture and industry carried on by means of this feeble technique. The autarchic village, almost completely independent of the outside world and with the resultant absence of any appreciable social exchange, remained for centuries an invulnerable stronghold of the same stationary, stereotyped social existence.

These small and extremely ancient Indian communities are based on possession in common of the land, on the blending of agriculture and handicrafts, and on an unalterable division of labour, each forms a compact whole producing all it requires. The chief part of the products is destined for direct use by the community itself and does not take the form of a commodity.

Another characteristic of the village community was that caste, rigidly, almost with the inexorable force of a natural law, determined the occupation of its members. Since castes were based on the principle of heredity, occupations also became hereditary.

Pre-British Indian society almost completely subordinated the individual to the caste, the family and the village panchayat, throughout its centuries-old existence. Even at the end of the eighteenth century, the Indian social order was, for the most part, equivalent to the discharge of obligations to the family, to the caste and the village panchayats working on the basis of an economic self-sufficiency in the rural units, and in addition, to the guilds and corporations on the basis of trade and commerce between urban areas.

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