JOIN USEarly Buddhist artisans: Skilled, well-read and privileged
Eminent historian Prof S Settar had an abiding interest in the artisans — a term which for him included sculptors, scribes, engravers and architects. His favourite term was ‘Ruvari’ which means ‘maker’. His monumental work Halegannada begins with the statement ‘we have thought about the inscriptions but not about the scribes or engravers. We have thought about sculpture but not about the sculptors.'
Over a period of nearly 50 years Settar continued to return to his preoccupation with the artisan class. His work Early Buddhist Artisans and their Architectural Vocabulary is a collection of six essays written over half a century on various unexplored aspects of the artisans.
Some of these had formed parts of his recent writings in Kannada. The first essay begins with the magisterial statement, “I am attempting to travel across the Mauryan empire in the company of artisans to explore whether this would bring about any change in the present perspective of the history of this dynasty.”
This beginning reminded me of the equally ambitious project announced by Stephen Greenblatt, the founder of the New Historicism “I wish to speak with the dead.”
The journey in which Settar’s urbane, nuanced voice accompanies us takes us to the earliest Buddhist artisans involved in building the stupas, chaityas and viharas and in inscribing the Ashokan edicts.
Fascinatingly, it was an artisan named Chapada from today’s Afghanistan and speaking Kharosthi who travelled thousands of miles to come down to Karnataka to engrave the Ashokan edicts. As Settar imagines it, his first work was a disaster, full of howlers.
Frustrated, Chapada looked for better rock surfaces and improved his work. There are such dramatically narrated events resurrected from the past which make this book eminently readable.
Ashoka who didn’t allow any name other than his own to appear on the edicts, was lenient with the artisans who inscribed their names and sometimes their positions and the names of their gurus. In the chaityas and viharas, the names and some details of the donors were also inscribed. It is these which have helped historians like Settar and Kumkum Ray to reconstruct the society of the ancient times at least partially.
By collating this information and drawing sound inferences, Settar is able to change many of the present or prevailing perspectives on the artisans. First of all, he deconstructs the notion of the illiterate scribe/engraver who could only skillfully copy what was composed and then written down with chalk by others who were more literate.
Settar demonstrates that artisans like Chapada were not only literate but well-read enough to paraphrase, rewrite, epitomise the original. In his other works, Settar convincingly argues that it was the artisan class, which was literate and educated contrary to the notion that this class, of a lower Varna, was deprived of literacy.
In the present work he refers to a number of artisans and supervisors who were privileged enough to donate for the construction of the chaityas and viharas. We also see references to more than 20 guilds or Shrenis and designations of skilled specialists in various arts.
One extraordinary group of artisans were the ‘mithaaks’ who knew the science and skill of polishing the stones, unmatched elsewhere. Their skills were buried with them. There were also master architects who made the complex, elaborate plans of the viharas.
This also meant that the Buddhist artisans developed a vast architectural vocabulary drawn mostly from the prakrits. As Settar argues, we need to study Buddhist architecture in the interrelated context of the choice of Prakrit (as people’s language), the idea of the dwellings for the Bhikkus and the social support for Buddhism from the trading and merchant class.
What we realise in this work is that the artisan class had a significant position in the network of power during the period. Even the astute author of Arthashastra went wrong, says Settar, because he had only seen state-dependent artisans and not artisan-dependent states.
Though he does not enter into details, Prof Settar hints at the existence of systematic training given by the acharyas, ovajas etc either in guilds or on the job. The figure of the benevolent emperor Ashoka looms large in this book. The edicts themselves say how Ashoka took the task of engraving the messages about dhamma so seriously that he was concerned about the errors which the scribes could make.
To reach out to the myriad ethnic and linguistic communities across his huge empire, Ashoka powerfully supported the Aramaic, Greek, Kharosthi languages and scripts. His greatest contribution was the introduction of the Brahmi script which later became the vehicle of many languages including Kannada. As Prof Settar says, the empire and the noble works of Ashoka didn’t survive him. But with the Brahmi script he popularised, many linguistic communities acquired identities which survive today.