FROM THE JOINT FAMILY TO THE VILLAGE. MANY years ago I ventured to describe in this place1 some of the more prominent features of the Hindu joint-family as they appeared to one who had then recently arrived in this country. At that time I was unacquainted with the labours of Nasse, Sir H. Maine and others, who have shown the true character of this still living institution and the place it has held in the progress of Aryan civilization. 1 The following pages reproduce a paper which was read at a meeting of the Bethune Society, Calcutta, in 1872. At that time the writer had no knowledge of Ceylon, and the paper has been allowed to retain its original form because of the completeness with which it seems to account for the facts of the Singhalese agricultural village, to which it was not directed, as well as those of the Bengallee village for which its explanation is designed. I may now assume that its historical value is generally well understood. On inquiring into the growth in India of proprietary rights in land, we find the joint-family at its very origin. The village was at first, and still is in a large degree, a group of such families, often all sprung from or appendant to a central family. They were seldom, however, even from the very outset, all of equal rank. The mode in which this came about may be taken to be pretty accurately ascertained, for the founding of a new village in waste and unoccupied ground has always been, even down to the present day, a not uncommon occurrence. In the days of Manu, according to the Institutes, it was quite probable in any given case that persons might be alive who remembered the foundation of the village; and at the present time every settlement report sent in to Government will be found to furnish instances, and to describe the circumstances, of newly created agricultural communities. We shall hardly be wrong if we assume that the process which we see in operation now-a-days does not differ essentially from that which gave rise to the village in archaic times. I imagine that one or two enterprising persons more or less connected together by ties of relationship, started the little colony. Of these, doubtless, one would, in some special manner, be leader, and would together with his family after him maintain a pre-eminence in the new society. Next would come the family of the man who was especially learned in, or who became charged with the care of, religious matters-precepts and ceremonies-in other words, who was the repositary of the higher law of the small community. Very soon other persons would be allowed to cultivate land, and to have place within the ambit of the new settlement upon terms prescribed to them as to the situation of their allotment, performing work on the land of the leaders, and other conditions of subordination. Others again would. merely obtain the comparatively civilized shelter |