Evolution of Hindu Administrative Institutions in South India

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The University of Madras invited me to deliver the Sir William Meyer Lectures in History for the academic year 1929-30, and the following pages contain the lectures and the material upon which the lectures were based. Sir William Meyer was a Madras civilian, and during his stay in Madras was associated with the University for a number of years. His interest in University education was great, and he carried that interest in his retirement. The lectures instituted at the University here are the result of a bequest that he made for the purpose, and the lectures were actually inaugurated two years ago.

Having accepted the invitation, it was a matter of some difficulty to choose an appropriate subject for the occasion. The choice has had to subserve two ends;- it must first be sufficiently attractive to a general audience; and secondly it must be acceptable, as far as may be, to the tastes and inclinations of the founder. One might almost say Sir William's partiality was for administrative history. He translated a work on British Administration in India by Joseph Chailley, a treatise expounding the British administration of India as it appeared to a talented Frenchman. Some- time before he left India, while yet serving the Government of India, he delivered a lecture to the United Ser- vice Institution in Simla, under the presidency of the then Viceroy, Lord Curzon, on "How Rome would have governed India". An administrator of eminence as he was, and showing such interest in the British administration of India, I thought it quite fitting that the Sir William Meyer Lectures delivered by me should bear on the administrative institutions of India. India is too wide in area and would be too vast even otherwise to be dealt with as a whole, having regard to the advance made in the study of the subject as a whole. At the present stage, the problem could be attacked only in blocks. South India and the administrative institutions that she developed in the first 1500 years of the Christian era under Hindu rule, constitute a distinct division of the subject. Almost at the outset of my work in this line, very near thirty-years since, I made an effort to reconstruct the Chola Administration from the inscriptional material then made available. At the time the first volume of South Indian Inscriptions, 3 parts of Vol. II and the first part of Vol. III were all that had been published. We have now six volumes available. The last three contain only the texts. The actual inscriptional material accessible now may be about five to six times what we then had. An attempt at a fuller picture of Hindu Administration in Tamil India has become possible. The following lectures therefore attempt to pass in review, in the light of this vast material, what the administrative ideas and ideals had been, and what the actual institutions were that had developed to give practical effect to these ideas and ideals of administration.