Tracing the Roots of Self-Governance to the Countryside
THE BOY STEPS forward, the pot taller than his ribs, the palm leaves inside shifting and whispering. Each leaf carries a name written in the hand of the village scribe. Not everyone is eligible: a man must own taxed land, be free of debt, have no kin disgraced by embezzlement, be the right age, be sound in his ritual duties. The sabha is here in full—Brahmin landholders with their foreheads marked, their veshtis pleated and tucked at the back, their torsos bare. They are waiting to see who will serve on the committees: the one for the great tank, the one for the temple gardens, the one that watches the gold in the treasury, the one for all the other affairs that bind a village together. The boy's hand dives into the pot. The leaves rasp as he stirs them and draws one up into the light. This scene from 10th-century Uthiramerur, a Brahmadeya village in northern Tamil Nadu governed by variyams or committees, tells us how the kudavolai—literally, "pot lottery"—method worked. Names of qualified candidates were inscribed on palm leaves, placed in a pot, and drawn by a child, his innocence a safeguard against manipulation, before the watching eyes of the village. By drawing the leaves, he was literally deciding who would serve in which specific brand of government for the next three years.
This was not an election in the modern sense. "We cannot equate this system with modern democracy which has an electoral process at its core. The kudavolai is a selection procedure with certain rules. It is a draw-of-lots method. However, it is a unique system of democracy, since it involves people coming together to manage their own affairs. The qualification of the candidate to enter into the fray based on the proper code of conduct is a very important step in the development of Indian administrative history," says historian V Selvakumar, a professor at the Department of Maritime History and Marine Archaeology, Tamil University, Thanjavur, who has studied medieval Tamil inscriptions. Accountability was embedded into the system by way of stringent conditions for eligibility. "If somebody is closely related to a person who did not submit his accounts or who made false claims, they would fail to qualify. This gives the system a kind of accountability and transparency," says Selvakumar.
The exacting rules were intended to keep the assembly from becoming a closed cartel, though they also encoded the exclusions of caste, gender, and landholding privilege. Still, in the Chola era, the kudavolai was radical. The act of public, transparent selection carried a performative legitimacy. It made the process visible. The sabha's decisions touched everything from the maintenance of irrigation tanks to the management of temple lands, the arbitration of disputes, and the collection of taxes. They were not sovereign—the king's writ still ran—but they were autonomous in the day-to-day governance of their domain.
And they were not alone. Alongside the Brahmin sabhas existed the ur, the assemblies of non-Brahmin villages, and the nagaram, the corporate bodies of merchants. Each had its own rules, membership, and spheres of influence. Temples, too, were administrative nodes, holding their own treasuries and appointing accountants—sometimes the same man would serve as both the temple and village accountant. The system was not uniform. Some villages welcomed the presence of a royal representative, while other assemblies operated without the oversight of a king's agent, guarding their autonomy as jealously as a tribal panchayat might do to keep the police out of its affairs.
THE DOCUMENTARY LEGACY OF the Brahmadeya sabhas is far richer than that of the non-Brahmin assemblies. "Brahmins in these settlements were often migrants, granted land by royal donation, and needed copperplate charters to prove their rights. Local non-Brahmin landholders, whose titles rested on long occupation and hereditary rights, had less need for such durable documents. The accident of preservation means we know more about the sabha than about its peers," Selvakumar says.
The village, KA Nilakanta Sastri reminds us in his seminal work on the Cholas, was "the unit of local administration before the advent of British rule," and in Chola times it functioned almost as a miniature state. He quotes historian Mountstuart Elphinstone's observation that villages "contain in miniature all the materials of a state within themselves, and are almost sufficient to protect their members if all other government were withdrawn". The Chola-era village assemblies were more than custodians of irrigation channels and tax rolls—they were buffers against "tyranny and rapacity" from above, able to check neglect and resist overreach. Autonomy here was not a fragile concession from the crown but an inherited habit, a civic muscle honed over centuries.
For even before Uthiramerur etched its electoral clauses in stone, villages of the Pandya country were already practising a comparable sophistication in governance, as the Manur inscription makes clear. In the early ninth century, the village of Manur convened its mahasabha to do what many modern states still struggle with—constitute a court free from executive interference. The Manur inscription, dated back to 805CE under King Parantaka Varaguna, details the rules: only landholding men steeped in Vedic learning and dharmasastra, and of proven moral conduct could sit in judgment. The court recognised two classes—manraduvar (the judges) and sravanai puhuvar (the hearers)—each bound by rules to ensure continuity and impartiality. The assembly could fine members for obstruction and disqualify the unqualified from other village committees. No royal officer presided. Justice here was a local prerogative, embedded in the architecture of a village that understood its own constitutional authority. Together, the Manur and Uthiramerur inscriptions suggest that in Tamil country, the village was not merely the tax-gatherer's unit but a polity in miniature, capable of legislating, administering, and delivering justice within its jurisdiction.
The vocabulary of assembly was already centuries old in these parts. Sangam literature, written in the early CE centuries but drawing on older oral strata, preserves glances of public spaces where local life was transacted: the manram, an open meeting-place often beneath a large tree in the village centre; the podiyil, a courtyard or shrine enclosure on the outskirts where travellers lodged and disputes were heard; the ambalam or avai, a raised platform or hall doubling as a stage for performance and a floor for deliberation. In these places, the elders arbitrated quarrels, coordinated repairs to tanks, or pronounced on the timing of harvest. Even monarchies were hedged by counsel such as the Aimperunkulu, "five great assemblies" of ministers, priests, army chiefs, envoys, and spies; the Enperayam, an "eight-member body" which blended military, administrative, and diplomatic offices. Scholars see in this arrangement a deliberate restraint on royal autocracy. The king was bound to seek their counsel before deciding on matters of weight. Historian and Indologist VR Ramachandra Dikshitar goes further, noting that the monarch's authority was "so limited by a system of checks and balances, the council, the purohit, and public opinion, that he dared not misuse his rights". Together, these assemblies formed a lattice of accountability—religious, medical, divinatory, administrative, and popular—ensuring that even in a world of hereditary kingship, the right to rule was continually tested against the will and the wisdom of the realm.
What we see in the medieval period— the sabha, the ur, and the nagaram—is likely the evolved form of much older arrangements, adapted to the agrarian, mercantile, and devotional economies of their time. In the Chola heartland, where irrigation tanks gleamed like silver coins across the countryside, the sabha's role in water management was crucial. Channels had to be cleared, sluices repaired, embankments maintained. The assembly supervised these works, collected the taxes to pay for them, and levied fines on those who defaulted. There are records of assemblies that met to set an irrigation schedule with breathtaking specificity. Standing on the tank bund, the sabha measured the sluice aperture in hand-spans, fixed opening days and hours, and named the last plot to be watered before the shutter fell. Any unauthorised diversion drew a fine payable into the common treasury; repeat offenders could be barred from the sluice entirely in the next cycle.
One inscription records a debate over whether to hold meetings at night. The decision was against it on the grounds that oil for lamps was an unnecessary expense. Daylight was cheaper. Freedom, in this world, was the freedom to manage one's own commons, to decide when to meet and how to spend the village's oil, to exclude the unaccountable and discipline the corrupt. It was bounded, exclusionary, and imperfect, but it was also, in the words of political theorist Charles Tilly, part of the "contentious politics" of the rulers and the ruled that made governance possible. The kudavolai's draw of lots, the public reading of accounts, the ritual exclusion of defaulters—these were performances of legitimacy as much as they were mechanisms of administration. They demonstrated, in a pre-modern idiom, that power was accountable to more than the king. In our own age, when the word "democracy" is applied with indiscriminate ease, the village assemblies of South India offer a more complicated genealogy. They remind us that self-rule has rarely meant equal rule, that transparency can coexist with exclusion, and that the forms of accountability are as culturally specific as the festivals and liturgies of a community.
THEY ALSO INVITE a broader meditation on freedom. For the sabha, freedom meant autonomy from royal interference, the right to enforce its own codes, to discipline members, and control resources. For the ur, it meant managing common lands without ceding authority to a caste that claimed divine sanction. For the nagaram—merchant nagarams like the Ayyavole had charters granting self-regulation of trade, tolls, and dispute resolution—it meant regulating trade on its own terms, unburdened by courtly monopolies. These were not the freedoms of the modern citizen, but they were freedoms nonetheless—hard-won, defended, and inscribed in stone. The idea of freedom here was never freedom from rules, it was freedom through rules. To be free was to have your life ordered by norms you helped shape, enforced by people you recognised as peers, without arbitrary intrusion from outside.
By the Vijayanagara era, these local councils endured under new titles and continued to act as collective landholders, empowered to acquire and alienate property in the village's name. But centralising tendencies thickened: Nayaka-appointed officers appeared above village heads. The freedom of the sabha and ur did not vanish, but it narrowed: autonomy survived, often, at the pleasure of a more present state.
If we look northward to the floodplains of the Ganga in the centuries before and after the Buddha, the political forms change but the principle of deliberation in assembly recurs. Here the vocabulary is gana and sangha, literally, a multitude, but in practice a self-governing body of equals making decisions in council. The Licchavis of Vesali, the Mallas of Kusinagara, the Vajjian confederacy: these are the names that survive in the Pali Canon and in Greek reports from Alexander's invasion. Some were large enough to be called confederations; others, as Panini's grammar notes, could be as small as a hundred families breaking away to form a new gana. Their assemblies were sovereign; their members rotated leadership; their decisions were taken in full public meetings, ideally in concord. The Buddha himself, in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, held up the Vajjians' habit of "full and frequent assemblies" as a bulwark against decline.
The sangha of Buddhist monks, with its intricate rules for motions, unanimous consent, and, when necessary, majority vote, drew consciously on these republican procedures. It is our most detailed record of early Indian parliamentary method, right down to the way a motion was called thrice before adoption, or a dispute sent to a committee elected for that single purpose. It also shows the anxieties that shadowed these systems: fear of faction, the premium on unity, the preference for concord over bare-majority imposition.
Between these two poles—the Tamil sabha with its codified kudavolai, the northern gana with its council—lies a mosaic of proto-democratic institutions: village assemblies managing endowments and irrigation, guild councils regulating trade, clan confederacies governing by discussion, and monastic orders formalising debate into law. They emerge in inscriptions, in the granite grammar of temple walls; in epic and Pali verse; in the notebooks of Greek envoys; in the quiet survivals of practice into the colonial record.
To follow them is to question the received map of democracy's origins. The Athenian ekklesia remains the canonical ancestor in most histories, while panchayat appears as a picturesque rural custom—the centuries between are often blank. Yet the Uthiramerur inscription of 921CE is as detailed a blueprint for regulated, participatory local governance as any medieval polity in Europe. The Mahaparinibbana's republican virtues are as explicit a statement of assembly as anything by Aristotle. That these systems were embedded in caste hierarchies, restricted franchises, and theocratic economies does not disqualify them from the history of self-rule any more than the slave-holding basis of Athens has erased its place in that story.
By the early centuries CE, the political tide was turning. Monarchies—Mauryan, Shunga, Kushana—expanded over the Gangetic plain, absorbing or subordinating the gana-sanghas. Kautilya's Arthashastra, written in this transitional moment, is unambiguous about the threat these republics posed to kings. He advises sowing dissension among their members, drawing them into dependency, converting their elected heads into hereditary rulers. By the Gupta period, many former republics were monarchies in all but name, their assemblies reduced to municipal councils or caste panchayats, stripped of sovereign power. But for as long as they did function autonomously, they unsettle the story that democracy's only lineage runs from Athens to Westminster. They show a long Indian tradition of communal self-government that coexisted with kingship and caste, that valued procedure and transparency, and that built freedom not as a solitary right but as a shared covenant.