THE FIVE TRADES.

-the leather-worker stitching leather for the feet; thus these five are needed (alike) for the wedding and the funeral."

They are, indeed, in Ceylon, often spoken of as "the five servants."

It is mentioned in the Mahavamsa that the heads of the five trades were chosen as messengers to carry a welcome from Kitti Sirimegha to his son Parakrama, afterwards Parakrama Bāhu the Great. We thus catch a glimpse of the social status and importance of he "five trades," but it is not quite clear whether these are the five just referred to, or the five sections of the artificers properprobably the former.

In Maratha villages, the craftsmen and menial servants formed a guild or institution, regulating the customary duties and remuneration of the craftsmen and servants, and called bara balute in as much as the full number of persons composing this body was reckoned at twelve. They included the craftsmen; the inferior servants, of low caste, as barbers and scavengers; and the Bhat, or village priest. They were all headed by the carpenter, who is called the Patel of the artizans, and decided all their disputes.*

*"The system has, indeed, been a good deal broken up in British districts, where work by contract and competition has superseded customary service.

But

BASIS OF SOCIETY.

The presence of the craftsmen in the midst of a simple agricultural society made possible the selfcontained life of the community, so striking a feature of the Indian village.

Living in a society organised on the basis of personal relations and duties,* which descended in each family from generation to generation, instead of belonging to a society founded on contract and competition, their payment was provided for in various ways, of which money payment was the least important and most unusual. The amount of money in circulation in the villages was, indeed, almost negligible, barter and personal service taking in the native States, where the innovating forces are less strong, the institution still flourishes, to the great satisfaction of all concerned."-"The Indian Raiyat as a Member of the Village Community," by Sir W. Wedderburn, London, 1883.

* Interesting light on village self-government is obtainable from the series of Chola inscriptions (ca. 900-940 A.D.) from the village of Ukkal, near Conjeevaram. The village was governed by an assembly (sabha or mahasabha), sub-divided into several committees. These were "the great men elected for the year,' ""the great men in charge of the tank," and "those in charge of gardens." The transactions of the assembly were put in writing by an officer who had the title of arbitrator (madhyastha), and who is also in one case called 66 accountant (karanattan).-Hultzsch, South Indian Inscriptions, Vol. XXIX, pp. 3, 28, etc.

PAYMENT OF CRAFTSMEN.

the place of money payments. Wealth was hoarded if at all, rather in the form of jewellery than of money. Prosperity consisted in having several years' provisions of grain in one's granary. Anything of the nature of a shop or store was unknown.

The payment of craftsmen was either a payment in kind, or a grant of land, besides perquisites on special occasions. For their customary services, the craftsmen were repaid at harvest-time, receiving a fixed proportion of sheaves of grain from the crop collected on the threshing floor, or they might be given a share of the communal land. In the last case, it followed that every man was a cultivator and directly dependent on the land for his subsistence whether he were a husbandman, a goldsmith, or a washerman by caste. To take, at random, a few examples of these payments: In the Gujrah district of the Punjab, the village servants are paid by grain fees, so many bundles of the crop of wheat or barley, each bundle of such a size as may be tied by a string of three straws in length. In the villages of another province (N. W. P.) the following persons received each a share of grain for each "plough of cultivated land in the village: the barber, washerman, carpenter, blacksmith and cowherd, besides a further allowance as an extra "when the business of the threshing-floor was over."* Thus, in * Baden-Powell," Indian Village Community,"p.17.

PAYMENT OF CRAFTSMEN.

Munda villages, "the lohar, or blacksmith, gets one kat of paddy and three karais for every plough in the village, and is also paid two or three annas for every new phar or plough-share; in a very few villages he holds half a pawa of land rent free."*

Almost always, too, there are set apart shares for religious and charitable purposes, before the remainder of the crop is divided between tenant and landlord, or removed by the tenant proprietor himself. In Ceylon if a man wanted a new cloth he gave cotton from his clearing, and a present of grain to the weaver. Sometimes the craftsman was paid in this kind of way whenever his services were required, sometimes he received a perquisite only on special occasions; very much as in England the postman, employed by the community, receives an annual "Christmas box" from each individual at whose house he delivers letters. At New Year, for example, it was customary, in some parts of Ceylon, to tie up a coin in each garment sent to the wash; and the washerman had other perquisites beside; and so with the other servants and craftsmen of the village.

*H. H. Risley, Census of India, Ethn. App., p. 158.

† Baden-Powell, loc. cit., p. 17.

CHAPTER II.

THE CRAFT GUILDS OF THE GREAT CITIES.

"THE typical Hindu village consists exclusively of husbandmen; but as husbandry and manufacture cannot exist without each other, the village had to receive a number of artisans as members of its governing body. But they are all 'strangers within the gate,' who reside in a village solely for the convenience of the husbandmen on a sort of service contract. It is a perpetual contract, but in the lapse of 3,000 years, the artisans have constantly terminated their connection with a village, or have had to provide for sons in some other place, and they at once sought their livelihood in the towns which began to spring up everywhere round the centres of government, and of the foreign commerce of the country. It is in this way that the great polytechnical cities of India have been formed."

Let us pass on to a picture of the craftsman as a member of a great guild of merchant craftsmen, controllers of the wealth of mighty cities and once of the markets of the world.

66

Community of interests would naturally draw together the skilled immigrants of these cities in trades unions; the bonds of which in India, as was