By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik - Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist
In ancient India, the village fields did not belong to any single person. There was no concept of individual land holdings. The entire land of the village belonged to the village community. Therefore, the village was dedicated to a Goddess. She was said to be the owner of the land. It was a kind of a proto-institutional model where everybody worked on the land for the Goddess. The harvest then belonged to the Goddess and it would be shared among the people who worked in the field.
