Place · Chola assembly village · India
Uttaramerur
The Chola village of Uttaramerur in Kanchipuram district, Tamil Nadu, holding a 10th-century inscription (919-921 CE, under Parantaka Chola I) in the Vaikundha Perumal temple that records in extraordinary detail how the village assembly (sabha) drew lots for its 30 committee seats — including the qualifications required (land ownership, Veda training, honest conduct), the disqualifications (debt, criminality, failure to render accounts), the term limit of one year, and the kudavolai lot-drawing procedure. The Uttaramerur inscription is one of the clearest surviving documents of democratic local governance in medieval India. Modern Tamil Nadu courts have cited the inscription in local-election judgments.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Chola
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 12.620, 79.750
Connections (1)
- Imperial administration ofThanjavur Brihadishvara
The Uttaramerur inscriptions set out how a Chola village assembly chose its committees: property and literacy qualifications for candidates, disqualification for anyone who had failed to account for public funds and for their close relatives, names written on palm leaf and drawn from a pot by a boy, and fixed one-year terms with a bar on immediate re-election. Nothing comparable survives from anywhere else in the medieval world, and it is cut on a temple wall because that is where a Chola village kept its records.
On these journeys
Sources
Uttaramerur inscriptions
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