India as Known to Panini: A Study of the Cultural Material in the Ashtadhyayi c9.s2.22

c9.s2.22

Sir Aurel Stein during his tours of the Upper Swat valley found blanket weaving as an ancient craft there: 'One of the crafts is represented by those heavy and gaily but tastefully coloured woollen blankets that the North-West of India knows as '*Swātī Kambals*' or rugs. They are all brought from Churrai and are mostly made by the womenfolk in the side valley of Chihil-dara which descends to that place from the high snowy range towards Kāna and Dubér on the east. To a lesser extent they are woven also in other side valleys of Torwal. That this local industry is as ancient as the Darad race that retains its hold there is proved by a passage of *Mahāvāṇija-Jātaka* which the great French Indologist M. Sylvain Lévi, quotes in his comments on that curious Buddhist Sanskrit text published by him under the title of 'Le catalogue géographique des Yakṣa dans la Mahāmāyūrī.' The Jātaka passage referring to commodities of great value mentions also 'the fabric of Kāśi' or Benares, and the *kambala* of *Uḍḍiyāna*, *Kāsikāni cha vatthāni Uḍḍiyāne cha kambale* (IV.352). There can be no doubt about M. Sylvain Lévi rightly recognizing *Uḍḍiyāna*, the true ancient name of Swat, in that of the locality here mentined ... Indian literature can scarcely contain any earlier testimony to the antiquity of a still flourishing local industry than this Jātaka passage. Unfortunately though the ancient skill in weaving and the use of traditional patterns still survive, the introduction of aniline dyes has here, as elsewhere in the East, brought about a sad and rapid decline in the harmonious blending of colours. Rugs produced with the fine old vegetable dyes, such as were still obtainable at Peshawar some thirty years ago, could now no longer be found for me even in the remote tract where this manufacture has had its home for so many centuries.’ (Sir Aurel Stein, *An Archl. Tour in Upper Swat and Adjacent Hill Tracts*, A.S.M., No. 42, p. 63). In my visit to Peshawar in 1940 I also purchased a Swati blanket with brilliant red has to deal with three kinds of orders. Firstly, new gold or silver in the shape of bar or ingot is brought to him to make ornaments. Secondly, old ornaments are brought in order to be melted and shaped into new forms. In these two cases he subjects gold to repeated heating and expands it by beating, for which the expression is *nistapati suvarṇam*. In the third case old ornaments are brought to him in order to be repolished or brightened by heating to look like new ones. For this the ornament is heated only once (*anāsevane*) and either rubbed or immersed in a solution to be made brighter. This operation was expressed by the cerebralised form *nishṭapati* (*suvarṇam suvarṇakāraḥ*).