- After reading Pookuzhi, I wrote a blog post in Tamil: பூக்குழி நாவலிலிருந்து சில குறிப்புகள் - அரசியல் அமைப்பு சட்டத்தின் அடிப்படையில் (Some notes from the Pookuzhi novel, with the constitution as the basis). I write that much the landscapes and the happenings in the book are new to me, very sharply so… It was a serious lesson that you have to keep reading a language to keep up with the euphemisms, metaphors and even the vocabulary.
The question that arised from reading Pookuzhi, of the village and why it was not chosen to be the governing unit led me to enquire more. I asked this question to the Constitutional Observer: Why must the village not be the unit of governance? The beginning portion of the EPW article, Nation and Village: Images of Rural India in Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar, dated August 10 2002: 1 2
For me, India begins and ends in the villages (Gandhi 1979b:45, in a letter to Nehru written on August 23,1944.).
…the old Indian social structure which has so powerfully influenced our people…was based on three concepts: the autonomous village community; caste; and the joint family system [Nehru 1946:244].
The Hindu village is the working plant of the Hindu social order. zone can see there the Hindu social order in operation in full swing [Ambedkar, in Moon 1989:19]
It was a very illuminating and well written paper, generative of enquiries for me into the history of the village vs person debate… and how villages have functioned or have been thought to have functioned in our civilizational history
It has been a busy week, and I have failed constantly to remember the day. This year I want to be able to remember the day in its entirety and weeks together.
The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in Karnataka are beginning. There was a public meeting in Bidar about it. Parakala Prabhakar criticizes SIR process as bloodless political genocide
- Led here by the notion of the village and the
self-government and swaraj ideals that have appeared to emerge from
there… Thanks to M for sharing: Idiculla, M. (2020). Unpacking Local
Self-Government: The Uncertain Power of Cities in the Indian
Constitution. Verfassung in Recht Und Übersee, 53(1), 30–50.
https://doi.org/10.5771/0506-7286-2020-1-30
The term “local self-government” has been commonly used in Indian right since the days of British colonial administration. India had a system of self-governing village communities with relative autonomy for regulating its affairs for much of its ancient and medieval history. However, the village community was not organised based on a set of strict rules laid down by any local authority. Since there was no uniform pattern of organisation, each village “panchayat” often had the freedom to set up its own rules of governance.24 While the orientalist views of British officers like Charles Metcalfe and Henry Maine regarding the existence of pristine “village republics” need to be questioned for their factual correctness, the observations in The Imperial Gazetteer offers some insight: “While the Hindus had . . . for many ages a system of village self-government, neither they nor their Muhammadan conquerors succeeded in evolving a local administration such as that which grew up in Europe. Neither the customary rule of the Indian village communities nor regulations of the industrial castes, which in some respects resemble mediaeval trade guilds, ever grew into a true municipal system; and accounts which have reached us of the method of town government in Hindu and Muhammadan times show the authority vested not representative body of inhabitants, but in the police officers, tax gatherers, and other officials of the Sovereign”.
↩︎ Jodhka, S. S. (2002). Nation and Village Images of Rural India in Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar. Economic and Political Weekly, 37(32), 3343–3353.↩︎