India as Village Repuplics - Dharampal

"Modern Indians tend to quote foreigners in most matters reflecting on India’s present, or its past.

One school of thought uses all such foreign backing to show India’s primitiveness, the
barbaric, uncouth and what is termed ‘parochial’ nature of the customs and manners of its people, and the ignorance, oppressions and poverty which Indians are said to have always
suffered from. To them India for most of its past had lived at what is termed, the ‘feudal’ stage or what in more recent Marxist terminology is called the ‘system of Asiatic social organisms’. 

Yet, to another school, India had always been a glorious land, with minor blemishes, or accidents of history here and there; all in all remaining a land of ‘Dharmic’ and benevolent rulers. 

For yet others subscribing to the observations of the much-quoted Charles Metcalfe, and Henry Maine, it has mostly been a happy land of ‘village republics’.
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"The basic element of this ‘village republic’ was the authority it wielded, the resources it controlled and dispensed, and the manner of such resource utilisation. Notwithstanding all that has been written about empires— Ashokan, Vijayanagar, Mughal, etc., and of ‘oriental despotism’ it is beyond any doubt that throughout its history, Indian society and polity has basically been organised according to noncentralist concepts. This fact is not only brought out in recent research.

The eighteenth and early nineteenth century European reports, anuscript as well as published writings also bear evidence to it. That the annual exchequer receipts of Jahangir did not amount to more than 5% of the computed revenue of his empire, and that of Aurangzeb (with all his zeal for maximizing such receipts), did not ever exceed 20% is symptomatic of the concepts and arrangements which governed Indian polity."