The Extraordinary Universe of Artisan Guilds in Ancient India - Sandeep Balakrishna

 At a high level, there was a clear difference between trading and merchant guilds on the one hand and guilds of artisans on the other.

To understand this in a clearer fashion, in that era, typically, hereditary families following certain branches of trade formed themselves into exclusive corporations with a Jyeshtaka or Jyeshta as their head.

The Brilliant World of Artisan Guilds

However, the artisans were rather strict in this regard. The son of an artisan had to compulsorily undergo an apprenticeship under his father for several years starting from childhood. Quite obviously, skill, talent and expertise in a particular craft or profession was honed generationally. It rarely passed out of the family.

In fact, artisan guilds or corporations were also a powerful force to reckon with in both politics and society. An eminent proof of this fact emerges when we observe town planning methods in ancient and medieval India. Entire townships, villages, streets, and quarters were named after specific artisans. Even until recently, it was common to find streets with such names. In Karnataka, every city and town had a Ganigara-Keri (quarters of oil millers), Kumbarara-beedi (carpenters’ street) and so on. We once again notice how this even facet indicates the Hindu civilizational continuity viewed from the perspective of our commercial history. For example, in ancient India, the word Kammara-Gaamo meant a village of ironsmiths. The Kannada word Kammara even today means an ironsmith.

An intriguing fact is that these guilds were also highly mobile and could move or migrate to long distances at astonishing speeds. We have an example of a guild comprising one thousand families of carpenters near Varanasi who left the town during a troubled period and settled in a faraway island.

Next, we’ll look at some major aspects of how these artisan guilds were organized, broadly around three factors:

1. Heredity of profession

2. Localisation of different branches or specialisations within the profession

3. The office of the Jyeshta, the supreme head of the guild

The Jyeshta was akin to an Alderman in the western parlance (who typically served on the city council or county board, etc). In ancient India, the Jyestha sometimes performed the role of a Governor or local magistrate or head of a city council and generally held a powerful position in the state’s administrative apparatus. Some Jyeshtas were the favourites of the King as well.

Thus, owing to this kind of power and prestige, quarrels and fights erupted among various Jyeshtas on several occasions. It is said that Buddha himself had to step in to settle their disputes in his own lifetime. Over time, when the frequency of such disputes increased, it led to the establishment of a Special Tribunal. The first recorded such Tribunal was the Office of the Supreme Head of Guilds in the ancient Kingdom of Kashi. The Bhāṇḍāgārika or royal treasurer (akin to the RBI Governor in contemporary parlance) himself was appointed to this post. He had full judicial powers over all the Jyeshtas in the kingdom.

Laws and Regulations

In fact, the more we dig into these primary sources, the more gold we get. But all these sources clearly prove the same historical point: the centrality and inseparability of corporations in ancient India’s political, social and cultural life.

Within each corporation, rules and regulations and laws were uniformly and strictly binding on all members from the chief to the office-bearer occupying the lowest rung.

Guilds were also entitled to arbitrate and adjudicate even in certain personal matters concerning its members and their wives. Not infrequently, the wives were formally ordained to manage several key areas of the corporation’s activities. In a highly interesting episode in the Vinayapitaka, we learn of how some wives of the guild members were even permitted to become Sanyasinis.

Corporations in the Kautilyan Period

And now, we can consider some aspects of ancient India’s commercial and corporate activity in the epoch-making and epoch-altering period of Kautilya.

In this period, we notice a gradual but systematic crystallization in the realms of economics, commerce, trade and corporate activity, broadly speaking. These areas were also arranged in a profound manner, in the sense of Na Bhuto na bhavishyati.

I’ll touch upon just some of the major features in this connection.

In the Kautilyan and broadly speaking, the Mauryan Empire, taxes remitted by guilds and corporations were one of the most important sources of revenue. The Superintendent of Accounts had to enter the following information in registers and account ledgers prescribed by the Government:

1. A detailed history of the customs of each guild or corporation

2. Specific details of the customs themselves

3. A list of each profession, trade, craft, industry, etc., in the Empire

4. Details of the transactions of each guild or corporation

A well-defined process was established whereby guilds or corporations could elect three ministers who enjoyed their confidence. These ministers would be their quasi representatives within the Government machinery looking after their interests and pleading their case. As a mark of their confidence in the ministers, guild or corporate heads voluntarily made refundable deposits to the royal treasury. A measure of the mutual trust that existed between these corporate bodies and the government was the fact that they rarely asked for a refund, except in extreme conditions such as famine, etc.

This system turned out to be phenomenally enduring and was pan-Indian in scope. It was maintained almost intact even during the reign of the Nayakas in southern India, after the fall of the Vijayanagara Empire.

Courtesy: https://www.dharmadispatch.in/history/the-extraordinary-universe-of-artisan-guilds-in-ancient-india

The Exciting World of Corporate Bodies in Ancient India - Sandeep Balakrishna

THE DEFINING, DISTINCTIVE AND CARDINAL FEATURE of life in ancient India from the Vedic era was the foundational spirit of honest cooperation and harmony. This reflected itself in all areas: religion, society, politics and economics.

Perhaps the best illustration of this spirit is just one word: Yajna. Today, we associate Yajna almost exclusively with a religious ceremony or what is wrongly known as ritual. But as long as India retained her original character, Yajna was a profound activity of national sharing…in fact, the correct meaning of Yajna is “sharing,” and not “sacrifice.” In a sense, Yajna was an institution which provided a spiritual basis for national cooperation. It is in Yajna that we see the practical manifestations of profound conceptions such as Rta, Rna, Dharma, etc. It was also a significant engine of economics but that is a topic for another day.

The spirit of cooperation is primarily a social instinct rooted in basic human impulses. Spirit acquires meaning only through activity. And so, the aforementioned cooperative spirit derives meaning and will function in the real world only through conscious social organization.

Further, this organization—its form, nature, structure, and practical operation also depends on the circumstances that births it and in which it operates. But while the nature of these circumstances dictates its form, functioning, etc., the character of its evolution and development depends to a great degree on the unique genius of the society and culture in which it is incubated and fostered.

This genius is precisely what we observe in the corporate and business life of ancient India. In the real world, this life revealed itself in the following organizations, which continue to exert an enduring influence on our contemporary life as well. Here is a partial list:

• Jati (not caste)

• Sangha

• Shreni

• Puga (can be likened to today’s Association of Persons, a cooperative society, and so on).

• Gana

ON A FUNDAMENTAL PLANE, a study of business and corporate life in ancient India will open up a whole new world, to put it mildly. It will reveal itself to us a stunning array of the real perspectives, attitudes and impulses of life that animated our people so far back in time. More importantly, this study of business life in ancient India shows us the innate spirit of nobility and refinement that informed and permeated all other areas of our national and social life. 

What has been unfairly propagandized as the “caste system” was actually two things at the same time: one, it was a social corporation much like today’s FICCI and similar bodies; and two, it was also an economic unit taken as a whole.

An Exciting History

The Shreni
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Corporate organizations in ancient India have interesting roots. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad for example, is an early reference. It says that just as how society was divided into four Varnas, the Devatas also had four Varnas.

The story which follows is pretty thrilling.

Brahma was not content with creating only the Brahmanas and Kshatriyas because these two Varnas did not know how to create and acquire wealth. And so, he created the Vaishya known by the term Gana-shah. In fact, the meaning of this word is highly interesting in itself. It basically implies that it is only through cooperation and not by individual effort that wealth is acquired.

This evidently shows the fact that there was thriving corporate activity in India’s economic life as early as the Vedic period. Indeed, for countless centuries, the business community throughout India had organized itself into Ganas.

But on a very mundane plane, this cooperation or organization of business community into Ganas was also practical necessity as we shall see.

Now we can quickly look at only some of the major forms of corporate organizations in ancient India:

• Gana: It was an overarching and a highly fluid organization which generally means an association of traders and merchants…on in general, any corporate body in the current sense of the term.

• Pani: similar to Gana. It is derived from the root, Pann: to barter; to negotiate. Over time, it acquired other meanings such as a miser, a path, a

• market, and so on.

• Puga: Corporations living by the profession of arms. Or entities which supplied soldiers for hire. This genre of corporations also had a clear leadership hierarchy. We can think of them as corporations of warriors and they were in continual existence for several millennia.

• Samavaya: in general, an assembly or congregation of people meant to discuss or carry on some kind of commercial activity.

• ONE OF THE MOST ENDURING and ubiquitous corporate organizations was something known as the Shreni, and it merits some detailed examination. But before that, we can cite an interesting titbit. The head or chief of a Shreni was the Shreshti. This is the origin of the ubiquitous surname, Seth.

  In general, a Shreni was a guild or commercial body in ancient India. We can think of it as follows: practically, all different branches of occupations, professions, and trades had a well-defined organization of some sort. Each such organization or corporate had the authority to lay down rules, laws and regulations for its members, and these were recognized as valid in the eye of the law. The representatives of a Shreni had a right to be consulted by the Government authorities including the King himself in any matter that concerned it.

  A highly interesting facet of Shrenis is the fact that while its legal character was a guild or corporation — I will use the terms guild and corporation interchangeably—its members belonged to the same or different Varnas and Jatis. But all of them followed the same trade or industry.

• Thus, nearly all branches of professions, industry, trade, etc., formed their own guilds but their numbers varied over different periods and geographical locations throughout our history. However, the most common or standardised number of guilds starting from the Buddhist period onwards is eighteen. In some cases, there were as many as thirty-two. But overall, the number of guilds or corporations in the long history of India is rather substantial, which only shows how pervasive and complex the system of our corporations was. Here is a partial list of such guilds or corporations:

  1. Guilds of wood-workers including carpenters, cabinet-makers, wheel-wrights, builders of houses, builders of ships and builders of vehicles of all sorts.

  2. Workers in metal, including gold and silver.

  3. Stone workers

  4. Leather workers

  5. Ivory workers

  6. Workers fabricating hydraulic engines (Odayantrika).

  7. Bamboo workers

  8. Braziers or brass workers

  9. Jewellers

  10. Weavers

  11. Potters

  12. Oil millers (Tilapishaka)

  13. Basket makers

  14. Dyers

  15. Painters

  16. Corn-dealers

  17. Cultivators

  18. Fishermen

  19. Butchers

  20. Barbers and Shampooers

  21. Garland makers and flower-sellers (Malakara)

  22. Mariners

  23. Herdsmen

  24. Traders, including caravans and merchants

  25. Robbers and freebooters

  26. Militia who guarded caravans

  27. Moneylenders

  28. 
      

  29. These professional guilds also formed part of the local political assemblies.    

  
  
• Courtesy: https://www.dharmadispatch.in/history/the-exciting-world-of-g%C4%81na-%C5%9Br%C4%93%E1%B9%87i-p%C5%ABga-and-corporate-bodies-in-ancient-india