Maurya and Shunga Art c5.4

c5.4

Karmakāra ), and there are definite evidences to show that these artists and craftsmen were organised into guilds. Localisation of certain industrial crafts also took place to the extent that an entire village or a particular locality in a town came to be designated according to the craft pursued there. The jātakas also afford a more or less vivid picture of contemporary city and village life, villages with scattered huts made of wood, bamboo and reed, cities with roads and lanes lined with buildings of brick and wood, all set off against the background of an agricultural, industrial and commercial life in small scale and within narrow proportions.¹² With the exception of certain stories in the Mahābhārata, there is nothing else to suggest that the canvas of contemporary life was large enough and that it was conceived in any magnificent and monumental scale. Tribal and primitive was indeed the character of the social psychology of Northern India during these centuries. This tribal and primitive outlook is also fully in evidence in the remains of the old city of Rājagṛiha with its walls and remains of dwellings built of rough cyclopean masonry¹³ which is the one definite architectural example that can be said to belong to pre-Mauryan times.