Maniammai had woken up before the streak of dawn lit up the lower part of the sky. Her husband and two children were still fast asleep. She gathered her clothes and hurried to the nearby river down the winding path from her house. Thick bushes of the snow white mullai and the red and orange kanakambaram covered the two sides of the narrow path. If it had been any other day she would not have hurried.

(Image source: James Kutty)

Maniammai had woken up before the streak of dawn lit up the lower part of the sky. Her husband and two children were still fast asleep. She gathered her clothes and hurried to the nearby river down the winding path from her house. Thick bushes of the snow white mullai and the red and orange kanakambaram covered the two sides of the narrow path. If it had been any other day she would not have hurried.

(Image source: James Kutty)

She would have slowly wafted down the path inhaling the heady perfume of the thazhampoo, a fragrant pine flower, and gathering enough mullai and kanakambaram flowers to string together a strand for her dear daughter. Today she could not afford to do that. She had to get ready in a short time and leave for her first assignment as a member of the Nyayattar.

Under the reign of Sundara Pandyan in the twelfth century a system of popular courts and people’s judicial committees was functioning. Innocence of persons was presumed by the courts, while guilt had to be proved. Popular and lesser courts dispensed justice in their own way. These courts included the village assemblies, merchant guilds, caste elders, meeting in the local temple or the village public hall, to decide the cases which came within their purview.

Maniammai was a member of one such judicial committee. She was a Nyayattar – a juror. Along with other jurors she was to give her verdict on two cases involving different villages. The fact that these cases had come up to the popular court indicated that they were more than minor disputes concerning only a few individuals. In that case, Maniammai knew that they would have been settled at the village level itself in the local assembly, which had enormous powers in settling local disputes. The erring individual would be made to pay a fine or donate to a charitable endowment at a place called the Darmaasana (the seat of justice). Even crimes such as manslaughter or murder were punished by fines. She recalled a case where a man who had stabbed an army commander in a fracas was ordered to maintain a perpetual lamp at a temple. Capital punishment was generally used as a last resort. Crimes against the state such as treason were heard and decided by the king and his ministers.

When she reached the large mandapam where the cases were to be heard, Maniammai was surprised to see the huge turnout. Obviously today’s cases concerned a whole lot of people. "This means that I have to be very vigilant, the decision is not going to be so simple", she warned herself. Hundreds of villagers had turned up to witness what was expected to be a fiery session. The men wore white dhotis girdled around their groin and neatly tucked behind. All of them had angavastrams, and some of the older men had made a turban out of it to shield them from the hot sun during their walk from the village to the mandapam. In contrast to the rather drab attire of the men, the women had dressed themselves in a mind blowing array of colours, the older women turning out in sarees and the younger ones in skirts and davani. Most of the women wore gold or diamond rings, for these were a must on special occasions, even for village women. Most of them had long plaited hair decked with flowers. Others had stacked their hair into a conical kondai. Women belonging to one village were silently appraising their counterparts from other villages while the men were chewing scented betel leaf or engaged in quiet conversation. Clearly, today was an outing as well, besides the business of arriving at a reasonable settlement in the dispute.
People from the two warring villages, protagonists of the first case, stood glaring at each other while their headmen came out in front of the nyayattar and presented their case. It appeared that the two villages, Navalur and Kulattur, had a common irrigation channel that served both of them and which flowed from Navalur to Kulattur.

The headman of Kulattur, Nadalvan, started his defence in an austere tone. "Learned judges", he said. "This year, as you are aware, the monsoon failed us miserably. But should we not have shared whatever water that came down from the skies? The Navalur people gave us puny amounts of water just to quench our thirst. The rest — they used it all up for growing paddy in their area. Our crop has been completely ruined". He eloquently described the plight of his people since then. Quite satisfied with his presentation he went back to his seat.

The Navalur headman, Vamanabhatta, admitted in a very forthright manner that this is exactly what happened. "How could we share the water with them", he pleaded. "With the amount of rains that we received, it would have been suicidal to cultivate in both the villages. So, we decided that the wisest thing to do was to cultivate at least one crop". A lot of sympathetic clucking was heard from his village people.

Vamanabhatta went on to narrate several finer details of the case about the amount of water received and the actual amount of paddy harvested. The paddy crop had already been harvested and threshed a few days earlier.

Maniammai gave her verdict after consulting the other jurors. "Divide the paddy crop according to the acreage of the two villages" she announced, "and share it so that no one goes hungry. We will appeal to the King’s court to waive the taxes for both villages and if necessary supply grains from the granary".

A murmur of appreciation and acceptance swept though the mandapam. But Nadalvan, the headman of Navalur advanced an important argument. "We don’t mind sharing the harvest, but what about our labour? We were the ones who sowed, harvested and threshed the crop while the Kulattur people were twiddling their thumbs. Should we not be compensated for this?"

To this, Vamanbhatta sprung up from his seat and said, "why didn’t they ask us for help when they harvested their crop? We wouldn’t have refused. They just went ahead and made it a fait accompli!"

Maniammai upheld the objections of the Kulattur headman. She again went into a huddle with the jurors. Coming to a decision quickly she declared, "We agree that the people of Navalur had invested their labour also. But they failed to take the help of the Kulattur people since the dispute over water overshadowed everything. So, the harvested paddy should be shared between the two villages in the proportion of the usual sowing area. However, during the next harvesting season, we recommend that ten persons from Kulattur assist the Navalur people in harvesting their crop".

A roar of applause greeted the decision of the jury and the two headmen embraced each other. With the water dispute settled, women and men from the two villages rushed towards each other eager to catch up with all the gossip that they had missed during the dispute.

The jury took their seats again to hear the next case. (This story was inspired by the interview with Dr Kamala Sankaran in the last issue, "British colonialism and the Indian legal system"– The Author)

S Raghavan is the editor of the Ghadar Jari Hai Magazine. He has a deep interest in India’s cultural, economic and social past, present and future

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