FOREWORD.

For our immediate purpose, too, the purpose of this book, the common reason of the world" includes and defines the Indian craftsman and the Indian village community; it gives them a definite and necessary place not only in the Indian order of things, not only in the culture of the East, but in the world. It shows them to be reasonable and right, and it shows them, what is still more important, to be the counterpart one of the other.

Here once more we are learning from the East. The English craftsman and the English village are passing, or have passed away; and it is only in quite recent times that we have discovered that they, too, are the counterpart one of the other. Industrial machinery, blindly misdirected, has destroyed them both, and recent English land legislation has been trying, with allotment and small-holdings acts, to re-establish the broken village life. Those of us,

however, that have studied the Arts and Crafts in their town and country conditions, are convinced that the Small Holding Problem is possible of solution only by some system of co-operation, and if some forms of craftsmanship are simultaneously revived and added to it. "Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee"; that is an old lesson, and it is true not only of England, but of all Western countries that have been touched by the greensickness of industrial machinery. With us in the

FOREWORD.

West it is the newest of new ideas that the arts and crafts and the revival of agriculture are the corollary of one another. In India they always appear to have thought this, and to have held by the truth.

I never heard of the god Viśvakarma, the god of the Arts and Crafts, before I learned of him from Dr. Coomaraswamy. But he seems strangely like a personification of that Platonic idea of abstract beauty which for so many centuries has haunted the Western mind. Whether it be Plato or Plotinus, Pico della Mirandola or Rossetti, ever and again in the great periods of our Western development the idea recurs. Who knows, perhaps Viśvakarma is the god for whom we in the West, in our spiritual reawakening, are in search; possibly he can help us!

C. R. ASHBEE.

B

The hand of a craftsman engaged in

his craft is always pure."-Manu.

"Those that are craftsmen of the people are welcome over all the wide earth.”—Odyssey.

"All these trust to their hands:

And everyone is wise in his work.

Without these cannot a city be inhabited."-Ecclesiasticus.

CHAPTER I.

THE VILLAGE CRAFTSMAN.

INDIAN society presents to us no more fascinating picture than that of the craftsman as an organic element in the national life. Broadly speaking, he is associated with that life in one of three ways: as a member of a village community; as a member of a guild of merchant craftsmen in a great city; or as the feudal servant of the king, or chieftain of a temple. First let us enquire into the position of the lesser craftsmen, within the agricultural village community.

The craftsmen thus working within the village community, are there in virtue of a perpetual contract whereby their services are given to the husbandmen, from whom they receive in return certain privileges and payments in kind. Each has his own duties to perform.

The woodwork of ploughs and other implements is made and repaired by the carpenter, the cultivator merely supplying the wood; the blacksmith supplies all the iron parts of the implements, and repairs them when necessary, the cultivator supplying the iron and charcoal, and working the bellows; and

THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY.

the potter* supplies each cultivator with the earthenware he needs. The list of artisans is not always the same, only those most indispensable to the community being found in all cases, such as the carpenter and blacksmith, potter and washerman. Others may be the barber-surgeon, messenger and scavenger, astrologer, or dancing girl. It will be seen that not all of these are technically craftsmen, but all occupy their position in virtue of the professional service which they render to the agricultural community. This is well illustrated by a verse of a fifteenth century Shalese poemt dealing with the origin of caste as a method of division of labour. The verse in question emphasizes the indispensable character of the services of the carpenter, tailor, washerman, barber and leatherworker.

"Both for the weddings and funerals of Rājas, Brāhmans, cultivators, merchants, S'ūdras and all men-the carpenter giving chairs, bedsteads, pavilions and the like—the tailor sewing and giving jackets and hats the washer spreading awnings and bringing clean clothes-the barber cutting the hair and beard, trimming the face and adorning it

* See Appendix 1.

† Janavamsaya, trans. by H. Nevill, Taprobanian, Vol. I., 1886, pp. 74-93 and 103-114.