DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

9.7] VILLAGE ARTISAN SYSTEM 339
absence ot commodity production, and hence of concentration for
artisans meant training within the family. Thus, caste had a strong
professional basis but also served to keep technique backward. The
second question is of the roots of the village artisan system. Some trace
them back to the gramah silpini of Pan. 6.2.62. Moreover, Pan. 5.4.95
makes explicitly the distinction between grama- and kauta-taksan which
is repeated in Amarakosa 2.10.4. The point is that PSnini’s grama
hearkened back to the sajata group that could be on the move for half
the year. The very etymology shows that the Paninian grama carpenter
is distinguished from the “independent carpenter with his own hut”, for
kauta derives from kuti = hut. It is certainly not to be argued that the
carpenter in a settled village had no hut of his own. It follows that the
earliest independent carpenters had fixed houses of their own. and did
not have to move with the grama. That the village artisans developed
out of those who, like carpenter, blacksmith, and barber, might have
served the semi-nomadic bullying grama of neo-vedic times is not to be
denied. Only the terminology must not lead to the false conclusion
that the grama in the oldest period was the self-sufficient ploughusing
Indian village familiar to all. Even more important is the question
of density of village settlement, which decided the fate of empires. The
grama-silpins or -karus do not appear in the Arth. nor in the Jatakas
(allowing for a mistey in Jat. 475). Certainly, the Dhenukakatan
carpenter Samina who signed the Karle doorway and the Kalyan
blacksmith Nanda (Luders 1032) who donated thf passage between
caves XIV-XV at Kanheri, each in his individual capacity, had wealth
far beyond the reach of the corresponding artisans of later times.
Only with the bourgeois economy did this system break up as the
workers found ways of earning cash incomes while shirking their village
duties without surrender of the shares. Nevertheless, the shareholding
artisans and their prerogatives survive in villages where transport of
commodities is still poor. For example : the ample supply of discarded
tins and the shrunken local market have driven surviving potters
out of most villages near the Bombay-Poona road to market centers