The subjects of the village gathering were, in rough order: the weather and the crop, land, water, prices, marriages, deaths, court cases, politics, other villages, and whoever was not present.
It settled things. A dispute over a field boundary, a strayed animal, an insult, a broken engagement, could be brought and argued and disposed of without anyone going to a court, and mostly was.
It also enforced. Social boycott, hukka pani band, was the sanction: a household could be cut off from the shared hookah and the shared water, which in a village was comprehensive.
That sanction was applied for offences against caste rules and against izzat as often as for anything else, and it is still applied, and it is illegal.
The satth had no women in it and nobody from the outer part of the village.
This site is named for it, and the name is not a compliment to it. It is a name for the place where what people knew was said out loud, which is the only reason any of it survived at all.
The subjects are the crop, the price, the water, the neighbours, the marriage market, the politics, and who has gone abroad and what it cost them.
It is also where the village's arguments are conducted in public, which means a dispute has a forum before it has a court, and most disputes stop there.
The satth is thinning. The men who sat there are abroad or working shifts, and the conversation has moved to a group on a phone where the whole village can read it.