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THE PEOPLE
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COMMUNITY LIFE
The joint family under the protection of the grandfather and
the grandmother with not only brothers and sisters but even
cousins under the same roof and a house with score of rooms and balconies and galleries will only be rarely met with in some villages of Sangli district. Even brothers when married now live together but in very few families. The joint family system has broken down even in villages where it was a sort of a co-operative for joint agricultural endeavour. The matriarchal system prevails nowhere. The patriarchal system also is now extinct. Ancestral property according to Hindu usage is divided equally among sons and if in the life-time of a father, his sons and he begin to live apart, the property has to be equally divided. With recent amendments in Hindu law. even a sister has a share in the father's property if it is not self-acquired. If self-acquired its owner can dispose of it in any way he likes. He need not, if he choose, leave anything to his sons and daughters and can gift, it away to any charitable institution or religious organisation or any other purpose. This could be done by leaving a will behind
and appointing executors. An issueless parent used to adopt a son but even that tendency is weakening under the influence of modern ideas. Instances of a widowed mother and her adopted son coming to loggerheads are by no means rare and the old idea of having one's family name perpetuated is no longer found fascinating enough to go in for adoptions. The other-worldly consideration of having a son to perform the sraddha etc. for the benefit of the dead in after-death life does not carry much weight with men under the influence of modern education. They are. more and more, developing a materialistic outlook on life and affairs. Under the new adoption laws a man and wife may have separate adopted sons and daughters if they so desire.
Majority of the people in this district follow Hindu religion which emphasizes the attainment of Moksa as the ultimate end of an individual's life. The proper means towards this end is through Bhakti yoga. This philosophy was preached for centuries together by all the saints and religious leaders of Maharastra under the name of Bhagavatdharma. Although it conflicts with the basic concepts of community life in the modern sense of the term, it provided people with ample opportunities to come together under a common bond of religion, especially on occasions such as Bhajana, Pujana, Kirtana and Pravacana selected for the purpose.
Religion, however, was not the only force binding together the society at large; the then prevailing economic system based upon the self-sufficiency of village as a unit was also responsible for the rise of what is popularly known as village community. In Sangli district, as in other parts of the then Bombay Presidency, the village communities with all their merits and drawbacks thrived under that system.
During this period when the social life of an individual was conditioned by the complex mechanism of the village community, the people were very much divided by the barriers of castes and class and could seldom come together except on the common platform popularly called cavadi. The only social events that could bring them together were the different festivals like Vijayadasmai, Divali and Holi, in which they participated freely and in large numbers. At that time there were no reading rooms, clubs or recreation centres throughout the district, except at the district headquarters, i.e., Sangli. There were no theatres, too. The dramas were staged only occasionally, usually by local artists.
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