A beautiful temple town, Uttaramerur stands on the shores of a lake, about a two–hour drive from Chennai. Like so many temple towns in Tamil Nadu, it has been continuously occupied for over a millennium, and its medieval shrines are well worth a visit. But right in its centre is the simple Vaikuntha Perumal temple, with a base covered in inscriptions. Surprisingly, it reveals a medieval community dealing with the same questions that have dominated India’s headlines over the past week. Who gets to vote? How should votes be counted? How should a society deal with electoral and financial fraud? And, looming under them all: what do citizens truly owe to their community?
When the inscriptions of Uttaramerur were discovered by epigraphist V Venkayya in 1906, they set off a sensation. They revealed that 1,200 years ago, possibly earlier, a royal figure called Uttaramerur had settled Brahmin families there, creating a Chaturvedi-Mangalam — essentially an autonomous settlement ruled by the community. The Brahmins had organised themselves into a Sabha — a town council — with smaller committees dedicated to the maintenance of reservoirs, gardens, and the verification of the quality of gold. The Sabha met regularly at the Vaikuntha Perumal temple — originally a simple pillared hall — and conducted their business, apparently with occasional oversight from the Chola dynasty. Amazingly, though, members of Uttaramerur’s Sabha were, in a way, ‘elected’. They served fixed terms, and precautions were taken to ensure that criminals couldn’t stand for election. The inscriptions that Venkayya found at the temple provided a public record, primarily from the 9th to the 12th century CE, of the Sabha’s works, procedures, and commitments.
Venkayya and his contemporaries were thrilled. After all, nationalist (and democratic) sentiment was on the rise in the early 20th century, and this seemed proof of ancient, enlightened Hindu village democracies across the subcontinent. However, in the decades after, Uttaramerur’s inscriptions received substantial reassessment. It turned out that Uttaramerur wasn’t exactly a democracy, but something altogether more unique.
Uttaramerur’s Sabha
In Uttaramērūr: Légendes, Histoire, Monuments (1970), historians Francois Gros and R Nagaswamy pointed out that Uttaramerur was both more and less unique than expected. It was an important town in the Tondai Nadu region (roughly northern Tamil Nadu), where many affairs were handled by social or occupational collectives. However, it was unique in just how much autonomy the Sabha had, and how much business they actually handled. As such, it might not offer much insight into how all south Indian villages worked.
Nor was the town a utopia: its infrastructure and resources, from land to healthcare, education, and drinking water, were dominated by Brahmins. They had been settled — most likely by royal decree — upon a large community of cultivators. The Brahmin Sabha were the pre-eminent landowners from the 9th-12th century CE. Even though the cultivators had their own assembly called the Ur, the Sabha spoke for them in property matters.
However, the Sabha was not omnipotent. It was bound by its relationships and obligations to other institutions: Vedic schools, temple administrations, devotee groups, private donors and investors, and the occasional king or aristocrat. While the Sabha attempted to follow the injunctions of the Dharmashastras, it was also often pragmatic. And by the 13th century, the centre of gravity of Uttaramerur had shifted toward the temple of Tiruppulivanam, where the Vellala cultivator caste had more of a say.
Even with all these caveats, it’s hard not to be impressed with Uttaramerur’s Sabha. Here are a few examples, from KA Nilakanta Sastri’s Studies in Cōḷa History and Administration (1932). They handled the affairs of at least six separate temples across multiple villages, which included lighting, flowers, offerings, and assigning qualified specialists for music, rituals etc. They administered land acquisition, rentals, endowments, and levied fines on other castes. They ensured the regular dredging and strengthening of the bunds of adjacent streams and reservoirs. They were trustees for gold, animals, and lands. They appointed Brahmin teachers and students to their exclusive schools. And to get all this done, they relied on elections.
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Elections and integrity
In 919 and 921 CE, Chola king Parantaka I (great-grandfather of the famous Rajaraja I) sent an emissary to Uttaramerur. In the emissary’s presence, the Sabha commissioned two inscriptions, literally setting into stone electoral procedures that they had already been following for some time.
This is the basic procedure, as inscribed in 919. The Uttaramerur town, we are told, was divided into 30 wards and 12 streets. The ‘people’ of all the wards — it’s not clear if this referred to both genders — were to gather and write, on little clay ‘tickets’, the name of their candidates.
The candidates were to be propertied, aged 30-60, be educated in the Vedas, and possess ‘material and spiritual purity’. Anyone who had served in a Sabha committee within the past three years could not stand for elections. Neither could their relatives. The ‘election’ itself was conducted in the open. The tickets were placed in a pot, and a little boy who could not yet read was to draw the tickets out. Each street was to have at least one representative on each committee.
We can already sense some of the Sabha’s motivations in this. The property and education requirements guaranteed that only Brahmins would be on the committees, and wield executive power. At the same time, there are also some rather far-sighted ideas, which, according to prof Sastri (Studies), could only have come from hard experience. Each street of the town was to have representation on each committee: gardens, water, gold. Since terms only lasted for a year, this meant that almost all adult men would serve on some or the other committee during their lifetimes — essentially, citizens directly participated in their own governance. ‘The people’ were expected to judge their candidates: not just for their properties and qualifications, but for their character. However, nepotism seems to have been a concern, as was the objectivity of the election process. That’s why the drawing of ballots was done by a child, and executives’ relatives were banned from being elected.
By 921 CE, the Sabha issued a much more detailed procedure, which seems to have been aimed at increasing the community’s trust in the electoral process. The property requirement was lowered (provided the candidate was educated in at least one Veda). Anyone who had failed to show accounts for their previous service was disbarred. Anyone who was violent, forged documents, associated with ‘sinners’, stole others’ property, committed incest, or partaken of any ‘forbidden dish’ was also permanently disbarred. When the results were announced, all community members young and old were to gather. An elderly temple priest was to display the pot to all, and once the little boy had drawn a ticket, it was to be handed to an arbitrator who must receive it ‘in the palm of his hand with his five fingers spread out’.
Within two years, the Sabha had taken additional steps to ensure that executives were beyond reproach. Citizens now witnessed every step of the election, which was infused with religious sanctity. And the arbitrator’s actions were also shown to be above suspicion. Once this new procedure was announced, there’s no evidence that it was further updated. It’s possible, then, that the people of Uttaramerur were satisfied that their elections were fair and objective.
We will never know exactly how or why Uttaramerur’s Sabha arrived at these electoral procedures. Their ideas certainly reflect their times — particularly of caste purity as a prerequisite to power. But they still had principles that we seem to have lost in the power-hungry electoral politics of the 21st century. It seems that unlike certain contemporary institutions, this medieval town assembly cared to ensure public trust in the electoral process, and demanded accountability from their executives. They tried to keep nepotism and crime away from power, and to ensure that there wasn’t a hierarchy between those who ruled and those who voted. These features do not automatically appear in democratic systems: they are learned and enforced at a dear price. We don’t know what price Uttaramerur must have paid, but we can see the price that the Republic of India continues to pay.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of ‘Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire’ and the award-winning ‘Lords of the Deccan’. He hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti and is on Instagram @anirbuddha.
This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)