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GUILDS IN AHMADABAD.

associations. The objects of the guilds are to regulate competition among the members, e.g., by prescribing days or hours during which work shall not be done. The decisions of the guilds are enforced by fines. If the offender refuses to pay, and all members of the guild belong to one caste, the offender is put out of caste. If the guild contains men of different castes, the guild uses its influence with other guilds to prevent the recusant member from getting work. Besides the amount received from fines, the different guilds draw an income by levying fees on any person beginning to practise his craft. This custom prevails in the cloth and other industries, but no fee is paid by potters, carpenters and other inferior artisans. An exception is also made in the case of a son succeeding his father, when nothing has to be paid. In other cases the amount varies, in proportion to the importance of the trade, from Rs. 50 to Rs. 500. The revenue derived from these fees, and from fines, is expended in parts to the members of the guild, and in charity. Charitable institutions, or sadavart, where beggars are fed daily, are maintained in Ahmedābād at the expense of the trade guilds."

How long ago the craftsmen were organized into these great municipal guilds, is suggested by a well-known passage in the Rāmāyana, describing the procession of citizens who went out into the

GUILDS IN THE EPICS.

forest with Bharata in search of Rama. The gemcutters, potters, weavers, armourers, ivory-workers, "well-known goldsmiths," together with many others, the foremost merchants as well as the citizens of all classes went out to search for Rāma; such a procession as even in the nineteenth century, perhaps even to-day, might be drawn together in one of the great merchant cities of Western India.

Again, we read in the Harivamsa,* of the preparations made for the royal family and citizens of Mathura to witness the contest between Krishna and Bālarāma and the king's champions.

"The amphitheatre was filled by the citizens, anxious to behold the games. The place of assembly was supported by octagonal painted pillars, fitted up with terraces, and doors, and bolts, with windows, circular or crescent-shaped, and accommodated with seats with cushions,"

and so on; and then we are told that

"The pavilions of the different companies and corporations, vast as mountains, were decorated with banners, bearing upon them the implements and emblems of the several crafts.”

It is interesting to note also how much all this splendour depended upon these very crafts whose

* Quoted by Wilson, Vishnu Purana, Vol. V., p. 27.

GUILDS IN THE EPICS.

position was thus recognized and honoured; for the tale goes on to say that

"The chambers of the inhabitants of the inner apartments shone near at hand, bright with gold, and painting, and net-work of gems; they were richly decorated with precious stones, were enclosed below with costly hangings, and ornamented above with spires and banners.”

Compare with this, also, such a description as the following account of the preparations for the marriage of a princess (in the seventh century, A.D.) : "From every county were summoned companies of skilled artists. . . Carpenters, presented with white flowers, unguents, and clothes, planned out the marriage altar. Workmen mounted on ladders, with brushes upheld in their hands and pails of plaster on their shoulders, whitened the top of the street wall of the palace. The outer terraces resounded with the din of gold-workers engaged in hammering gold. Plasterers were beplastered with showers of sand which fell over them from freshly erected walls. A group of skilled painters painted auspicious scenes. Multitudes of modellers moulded clay figures of fishes, tortoises, crocodiles, cocoanuts, plantains and betel trees. Even kings girt up their loins and busied themselves in carrying

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GUILD RESPONSIBILITY.

out decorative work set as tasks by their sovereign.

" *

Another interesting mention of craftsmen in procession is found in the Mahavamsa, where we are told that following the officials in the annual Perahera at Kandy, were "people of strange countries, and men skilled in divers tongues, and numerous artificers and handicraftsmen." The period spoken of is the latter part of the eighteenth century.

I have not been able to hear of any accounts of guilds in Persia, where they must have existed from the earliest times. It is reported, however, that when in the recent troubles 14,000 people in Teheran took refuge in the foreign legations, each guild organised with perfect ease and order the policeing and feeding of its own people. This makes one realise how powerful an element in social stability is represented by the guilds even at the present day.

The nature of guild responsibility† is well indicated in some of the Tanjore inscriptions. A common form of pious offering consisted in the dedication of a lamp, i.e., providing for a lamp to be kept continually burning before a certain image. This

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* Bana's Harsha Carita,' Trans. by E. B. Cowell and F. W. Thomas, p. 124.

† See also Appendix VII

GUILD RESPONSIBILITY..

was generally arranged by the payment of a sum of money, or more often by the gift of a certain number of sheep or cattle to the guild of shepherds, who undertook to provide the necessary oil in perpetuo. The payment for thus maintaining one sacred lamp was 96 ewes, or 48 cows, or 16 shebuffaloes. "The shepherds who received the cattle, themselves and their people, viz., their relations, and the relations of the latter, had to supply ghi to the treasury of the Lord, as long as the sun and moon endure, at the daily rate of one urakku of ghi for each sacred lamp.”*

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The manner in which the shepherds as a guild bound themselves jointly as security for an individual contractor is as characteristic of true guild methods as their solidarity in the defence of their own interests would have been. In an inscription of Rajendra Soladeva at Tanjore, we have a detailed account of this acceptance of responsibility by the guild of shepherds: "We," runs the inscription, "all the following shepherds of this village agreed to become security for Eran Sattan, a shepherd of this village, (who) had received 90 ewes of this temple in order to supply ghi for burning one perpetual lamp. We shall cause the shepherd E.S. to supply daily to one perpetual lamp one ulakku of ghi . . . If he dies,

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* Hultzsch, South Indian Inscriptions, Vol. II., part III., p. 251.

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