Christian missions in the Telugu country - Uecf.net

48
MISSIONS IN THE TELUGU COUNTRY
of society which were required were to be found in the
village. The result was that the Indian village, which
never felt its dependence on the outer world, became
self-centred to an extraordinary degree. It is true that
the bonds of caste, and the resulting intermarriages,
led to connexions between groups of villages. But
even these ties were sectional, and they were not ties
between whole vOlages. For the most part the village
preferred to live in its isolation. A curious proof of this
fact meets us everywhere in our part of the Telugu
country, in the absence of roads between villages. It
was not the custom for a village to make roads between
itself and its neighbours. Such tracks as there are have
been worn by the wheels of the country carts. And
though these tracks are so permanent that the writer,
using a map, thirty years old, of his district, which gave
these tracks, never once found a deviation sufficient
to be marked, yet it is probably the literal fact that not
once in a hundred years has a village sent out a gang of
men to clear away the smooth round stones that give
the springless carts such a terrible jolting. The writer
knows one village, on the tracks leading to which the
stones are bigger than usual, and which, on that account,
no heavily-laden cart can approach.
It was this hugging of their isolation on the part of
the villages that gave such a remarkable want of
cohesion to India. While village life was intense, national
feeling was almost non-existent. The villagers, in their
narrow outlook, desired nothing so much as to be let
alone. They were willing to pay tribute to the paramount
power as the price of security, and to pay even