Sir Charles Metcalfe, a leading civilian in the service of East India Company…

Concept

British administrators of the early 19th century studied the Indian village as a self-contained unit of governance and economy. A recurring characterisation in their official records is that the traditional Indian village ran its own affairs, met most of its own needs internally, and survived intact even as ruling dynasties rose and fell — the imagery of a small, self-governing community.

Application

Sir Charles Metcalfe, a senior civil servant of the East India Company (and later acting Governor-General), put this idea on record in his famous Minute of 1830. He described India's village communities in terms of small, self-sufficient, self-managing units that outlasted every change of ruler. The phrase he used for the village panchayats was “Little Republics.”

So the blank is completed by the term Little Republics.

Cross-check

Metcalfe's exact words are often quoted: “The village communities are little republics, having nearly everything that they want within themselves, and almost independent of any foreign relations.” The same idea was later echoed by Sir Henry Maine, Karl Marx and Mahatma Gandhi, which fixes “Little Republics” as the standard, source-attested phrase — not any of the other look-alike wordings.