In pre-colonial India, village communities were in many ways self-sufficient and dealt with the machinery of the state as a group. In the plains, taxes were paid in the form of surplus production of grain to the state by the village community as a whole, and not by any individual householder. Village Councils regulated most of their socio-economic affairs themselves. Any recourse to an outside authority was a rare occurrence. Though each member of the community had a piece of land to be cultivated, the peasant did not have the exclusive right to sell or dispose it off. Ownership of the land was collective, more so in the case of common lands. The caste based village society had developed a variety of institutions to regulate the use of resources. The pre-colonial rulers only claimed the taxes on the produce and not the right on the land itself from the village community.
There were various ways in which the traditional communities adapted to their existing habitat. They organized themselves to live in harmony with their surroundings. For instance in pre-British Maharashtra, village community assigned village guards to prevent any unauthorized wood cutting in village common land. In addition, they had to harvest and deliver all the wood needed by village householder. Harvests from village common lands were governed by a variety of regulations, notably quotas on the amount harvested by different families and in different seasons.
Here, it is appropriate to talk of the different ecological stratum of the various caste groups in terms of the habitat they occupied, and the relationship with other caste groups with whom they interacted. We can take the example of Masui Lukheri village situated on an island in the estuary from the river Aghanashinc close to the town of Kumta in the state of Karnataka. Spurs of the hill ranges of Western Ghats ran along this region right upto the sea, giving the region a rich mosaic of territorial, repairers and coastal habitats, supporting a great diversity of natural resources.
One can find as many as 13 different endogamous groups co-existing in the same region. Resource use was diversified among different castes, fishing community (Ambigas), agriculturists (Malakkis, Palgars and Naiks), horticulturists (the Haviks), entertainers (Bhandaris and Deshbhandaris), service castes (Kooleyas-barbers and Madwals washerman), artisans (Slets, Achari and Muhkri) and traders (Gowd Saraswats). These different caste groups had their characteristic modes of subsistence and often occupied their distinct habitat much like the species within a biological community. Within this institutional set up of caste system, different social groups were regularized in harmony with each other and their habitat.