Uttaramerur's Village Assembly Wrote Its Election Rules on a Temple Wall Around 920 CE, With Thirty Wards, Pot Tickets Drawn by a Boy and a Three-Year Bar on Serving Again

Two inscriptions on the base of the Vaikuntha Perumal temple at Uttaramerur, in Tamil Nadu’s Kanchipuram region, set out how a Chola-era village assembly chose its committees. The village was divided into thirty wards, every ward put forward name tickets, a boy drew them from a pot in front of the full assembly, and nobody who had sat on a committee could be chosen again for three years.

The records are dated to the 12th and 14th regnal years of the Chola king Parantaka I. Anirudh Kanisetti’s account in ThePrint converts them to 919 and 921 CE, while R. Nagaswamy, a former Director of the Tamil Nadu Department of Archaeology, dates the second to 920 CE. The first text laid down the scheme. The second, written two years later, rewrote it with a clearer draw and a longer list of disqualifications.

A village that kept its rules on stone

Uttaramerur was a brahmadeya, a village granted to learned Brahmins, and its full old name was Uttarameru-caturvedimangalam. The historian K. A. Nilakanta Sastri of the University of Madras, whose 1932 book Studies in Cola History and Administration gives the fullest early reading, found inscriptions on the walls of seven temples there. They run from the last quarter of the eighth century to the middle of the thirteenth, and he used about sixty of them for his account.

The two election texts come from the Vaikuntha Perumal temple, where, Sastri writes, nothing of the original building survives except the high basement that carries the most valuable inscriptions. The epigraphist V. Venkayya published both in the Archaeological Survey of India’s report for 1904 to 1905. Sastri checked Venkayya’s text against the stone and found the readings perfect.

The village had two bodies. The Sabha was the assembly of the settled Brahmin families. The Ur was an older village body that, in Sastri’s reading, kept its own rights alongside the Sabha until at least the end of the tenth century. Sastri also notes that the Sangam poems mention the manram, an open meeting place under a tree, so some form of village assembly was known in Tamil country long before (Sangam literature covers those poems). The Chola records at Uttaramerur then continue almost unbroken from the reign of Rajaraja I.

Thirty wards, twelve streets, three committees

Both records say the village had thirty kudumbus, which Venkayya translated as wards, built up from twelve streets (seris). Every year the assembly was to fill three committees: an annual committee, a garden committee and a tank committee. Each year thirty names were drawn, one from each ward. In the first record twelve went to the annual committee, twelve to the garden committee and the remaining six to the tank committee.

A second draw of thirty tickets filled two more bodies, the gold committee and the pancavara committee. Sastri thinks the gold committee vouched for the weight and fineness of gold, since donors’ money endowments were reckoned in gold of a stated standard. He treats pancavara as a levy whose exact nature is unclear. The translations also differ on the sizes of these two bodies: Venkayya, as printed by Sastri, has six members each, while Nagaswamy gives 24 for gold and six for pancavara.

Who could put a name forward

The first record, dated to the 12th year, listed the qualifications in Venkayya’s translation. A candidate had to own more than one-fourth nilam (a land measure) of tax-paying land, live in a house built on his own site, be older than thirty and younger than sixty, and have a reputation for knowing the Veda, the Shastras and practical affairs. He also had to possess what Sastri renders as material and spiritual purity, and he could not have served on a committee within three years or be a close relative of someone who had.

The second record, from the 14th year, changed the terms. The age bracket became 35 to 70. Candidates had to know the Mantrabrahmana (a Vedic text) and have experience of teaching it. A man with only one-eighth nilam of land could still qualify if he was competent in one Veda and could expound one of the four bhasyas, the classical commentaries. Sastri suggests the age change had no special cause and may simply have reflected that the first rule shut out too many capable men over sixty.

The second record also added a long list of people who could never stand. Anyone who had served on a committee and failed to show his accounts was barred, and so were his relatives, named one by one down to a brother-in-law and a son-in-law. Others barred included those with incest or the first four of the five great sins recorded against them, those who had stolen property, those who were violent and, for the pancavara and gold committees, anyone who had forged a document or ridden a donkey. For several of these offences the bar lasted to the end of the person’s life.

How the draw worked

The second record describes the draw step by step. Tickets from each ward were bundled separately and put in a pot. The full assembly, young and old, was called together, and the temple priests present in the village sat in the inner hall. An elderly priest stood and held the pot up so everyone could see it.

A boy who did not know what the pot held took out one ward’s bundle. It was moved to a second pot, shaken, and a single ticket was drawn. The arbitrator (madhyastha), the officer who wrote the assembly’s records, received the ticket on his open palm with the fingers spread, read the name aloud, and the priests read it too. The name was written down. The same steps were repeated for each of the thirty wards.

Terms, audits and removal

Committee members served 360 days and then retired. A member found guilty of an offence was removed at once, and a replacement was chosen by a fresh pot-ticket draw. Someone who had served on the garden or tank committee could not have his name put in for the same committee again.

The three-year gap applied to everyone, not only to defaulters. Sastri read the purpose as simple: it made offices go round. The record also required the person who kept the village accounts to submit them for audit and be declared honest before he could take on other accounts.

The order of the two texts has its own reading. Venkayya had suggested that the second record answered scandal among outgoing committee members. Sastri found no evidence for that in the wording and argued that the first record was badly drafted on the mechanics of the draw, so the 14th-year text is, in his view, best read as a repair.

How the record is cited today

Nagaswamy calls the inscription, in a passage quoted by Madras Musings in 2010, “a veritable written constitution of a village assembly that functioned 1000 years ago.” In an address posted by the Press Information Bureau on 13 April 2023, the Prime Minister said of it: “The inscription found here is like a local constitution for the Gram Sabha at that time.” The speech says it records how the assembly should be run, what qualifications members needed and how they were elected. For how village councils are constituted under the Constitution today, see the 73rd and 74th Amendments.

What the texts leave open

Historians who have studied the records attach limits to them. The Sabha was a Brahmin body, and the learning and property tests meant its committees were drawn from that community. Kanisetti writes that those tests effectively limited the seats to Brahmins. Sastri warned in 1932 against reading modern democracy into records that mention elections and ballots while ignoring the caste and custom around them.

Whether the scheme came from the king is also not settled. Venkayya took it as a royal order that the assembly approved. Sastri argued that the assembly itself says it made the settlement, with a royal officer attending on the king’s instruction. Kanisetti, citing a 1970 study by François Gros and Nagaswamy, adds that Uttaramerur may have been unusually self-governing, so it cannot stand in for every south Indian village.

Other places show similar machinery. Sastri points to a Pandya record from Manur, in Tirunelveli, that in his view anticipates the Parantaka texts by more than a century. A decision of the sabha of Kavidippakkam, in North Arcot, printed in volume 19 of South Indian Inscriptions, makes its tank committee, which was chosen each year, responsible for a daily offering. The Week lists inscriptions on village self-government at Ukkal, Manur, Tirunindravur and Kaveripakkam in Tamil Nadu, at Thirubhuvanai in Puducherry and at Bagur in Karnataka.

Both Uttaramerur records end with the assembly’s own undertaking. In Sastri’s translation, they would choose committees only by pot-ticket draw “as long as the sun and the moon endure.”