Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: The panchayat, or customary village council, holds an iconic place in Indian social and political ideology.Largely due to the influence of Mahatma Gandhi, the panchayat came to possess almost mythic standing as an indigenous democratic institution that could form the basis for an authentically Indian democracy.Gandhi's imagining of the panchayat, however, was only one of many that circulated among Indian nationalists at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.Few, if any, of the most prominent nationalist leaders ever had actually seen a functioning village council.Indeed, by the time of the nationalist movement, the panchayat, as an institution to order village affairs, had become largely moribund, although caste panchayats often continued to regulate the norms and practices of separate castes. 1 Nevertheless, the resurrection of the all-village panchayat became one of the essential unifying elements of the movement to create a truly national identity.2 A significant portion of the explanation for the survival of the panchayat ideal lies with the British idealization of the institution.Twice during the nineteenth century, British administrators in India "discovered," romanticized, and attempted to institute a form of panchayati raj, or rule by panchayat.The first discovery, which will be the focus of this essay, dates to approximately the first third of the nineteenth century, when several prominent East India Company military officers sought to adapt the panchayat to the needs of the British administration of justice, especially in the newly-conquered regions of southern and western India.To meet these requirements, the panchayat was put forth as an Indian analog of both the English jury and European tribunals of arbitration.The second "discovery" dates to the final third of the nineteenth century.At that time, the necessities of urban and rural development required new forms of local and municipal administration.The consequent widespread support among British administrators in India for political decentralization was expressed in the form of a new desire to recreate the panchayat, but this time as a
Source: FIU Law Review
Author: James A. Jaffe
Institution: University of Wisconsin–Whitewater
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1867808142