The Aryan Village in India and Ceylon by JB Phear

Description: The Aryan Village in India and Ceylon by JB Phear – Rare 1stedition 1880 by Sir John Budd Phear Macmillan and company 295 pages +42 pages of book adverts Condition: good, chipping and damage to top and bottom ofspine corners bumped with marks and scrapes on black end pages, red clothbinding with guilt on black lettering. Binding is tight and clean with nofoxing. This scarce antiquarian book, is mostly only available asfacsimile reprint. This is a rare opportunity to own a 1st editioncopy. Extract from a Review of the book by EDWARD B. TYLOR; published in Nature volume23, pages 525–526 Published: 07 April 1881 IT is now twenty yearssince a remarkable page in Sir Henry Maine's “Ancient Law” drew attention tothe prevalence in India of the village-community, a system of society strangeto the modern English mind. Before that work appeared, even special studentshad little idea how far the ancient communism, under which the Aryan racecolonised so much of Asia and Europe, was still to be found not as a mere relicof ancient society, but as the practical condition of modern life among Hindusand Slavs. The historical importance of this early institution is now fullyrecognised, and our archaeologists are alive to the relics of the oldvillage-communities in England. Not only are these seen in the public commons,but here and there in certain fields where, after harvest, the neighbours stillhave the right of turning their cattle in among the stubbles, while even a fewof the great old “common fields,” where once each family had its free allottedportion, are still to be discerned by the baulks or ridges of turf dividingthem into the three long strips, which again were cut crosswise into the familylots. Thus every contribution to the argument on the development-of modernlandholding from the communism of ancient times, finds interested readers. Thepresent volume is such a contribution, and in several ways new and important.Sir John Phear thoroughly knows and carefully describes native life in Bengaland Ceylon, and one of his points is the remarkable parallelism of theagricultural village, as it has Shaped itself in these two widely-separateddistricts. Up “to a certain stage, the development of the village-community hasbeen everywhere on much the same lines, and those not hard to trace. It springsnaturally out of the patriarchal family, which, living together on itsundivided land, tilling it in common, and subsisting on the produce, becomes ina few generations a family-community. There are now to be seen in and aboutCalcutta families of 300 to 400 (including servants) living in one house, and50 to roo is a usual number. The property is managed by the karta, who is usually the eldest ofthe eldest branch, and what the members want for personal expenses beside thecommon board and lodging, he lets them have in small sums out of the commonfund. Now and then there is a great quarrel, when the community breaks up andthe land is divided according to law. It is easily seen how such a joint-familyor group of families settling together in waste unoccupied land would expandinto a village-community, where new households when crowded out of the familyhome would live in huts hard by, but all would work and share together as ifthey still dwelt under one roof. In fact this primitive kind ofvillage-settlement, according to our author, is still going on at this day hiCeylon. In districts where, as in ancient Europe, patches of forest are stillfelled and burnt to give a couple of years' crop of grain, and where in thelowlands rice-cultivation requires systematic flooding, we find the whole settlementat work in common in a thoroughly socialistic way. The some what differentcommunistic system prevails more in India, where the land is still the commonproperty of the village, and the cultivated plots are apportioned out from timeto time among the families, but these families labour by and for themselves,pay the rent or tax, and live each on the crop of their own raising. In Bengala step toward our notion of proprietorship is made, where custom more and moreconfirms each family in permanent ownership of the fields which their fathershave long tilled undisturbed. Tenant-right, so pertinaciously remembered by theIrish peasant, is older in history than the private ownership of land. Next, inthe Hindu village as it now exists, a further stage of social growth appears.Families carrying on certain necessary professions have been set apart, or havesettled in the village. The hereditary carpenters and blacksmiths and pottersfollow their trades, the hereditary washerman washes for his fellow-villagers,and the hereditary barber shaves them, paid partly for their services at fixedcustomary rates, and partly by having their plots of village-land rent free, ornearly so. All this is intelligible and practical enough, and indeed stronglyreminds those of us who got our early politics out of “Evenings at Home,” ofthe boy colonists providing for their future wants under the direction ofdiscreet Mr. Barlow, by taking with them the carpenter and the blacksmith andthe rest of the useful members of society. But the village-community as itactually exists in India, or Servia, or anywhere else, only forms thesubstratum of society, on the top of which appear other social elements whosedevelopment it is not so easy to trace with certainty. The “gentleman,” with hisclaims to live in a better house than the others whose business is to drudgefor him, seemed absurd to Dr. Aikin's political economy, yet he makes hisappearance in the Hindu village-community as elsewhere. Sir John Phear seemsdisposed partly to account for what may be called the landholding class, aswell as the endowed priesthood, as having held a privileged position from thefirst settlement of the villages, and it is in favour of this view that in suchsettlements the founder's kin naturally have superior rights over the land tonew-comers. But he does not the less insist on another and yet stroager socialprocess which has tended to give to individuals a landlord-right over fieldsthey do not till. When quarrels between two villages end in actual war, theconquering warriors (whose claims however seem to be here somewhat confusedwith the rights of the chief's family) would ae rewarded for their prowess bygrants of land carved out of the common lands of the conquered village, and thenew lords being absentees would naturally put in tenants who would pay inreturn a share of the crops. Such metayage, or farming “on shares,” is ascommon in India as in the south of Europe, and is evidently the stage out ofwhich arose our rent-system of landlord and tenant.

Price: 590 GBP

Location: Ormskirk

End Time: 2025-01-10T12:58:29.000Z

Shipping Cost: 63.7 GBP