The Social Organisation in North-East India in Buddha's Time c16.30

c16.30

More wonderful than these manufacturers' villages in the immediate neighbourhood of a big city which could find an easy market for their products and also could have their needs, such as clothes, implements, supplied, from the City, is the existence of such professional villages in the middle of the flat country. We read in the Sûci Jâtaka of two smiths' villages lying side by side, of which one consists of a thousand huts (sahassakuṭiko kammâragâmo III. 281). From the neighbouring villages, people go to this village in order to provide themselves with axes, hatchets, ploughshares, spikes and other implements. When one reflects what a difficulty such a local isolation creates in the economical relations, one will see in these manufacturing villages not a phenomenon of secondary importance, but a highly important factor and one that is characteristic of the physiognomy of the social life of that time. The power of traditional customs which suit the spirit of the Indian people inclined to schematism, has created and maintained here a new impetus which is stronger than the practical need which obviously points to a variety of professions within the same common life. However much the origin of professional communities may have to be traced, as we have to do in the case of the Russian village communities, to the close relationship of the villagers with one another and to the equal right of all in the common property,¹ on the Indian soil, the maintenance of such a remarkable institution seems to have been due principally to the inborn tendency towards organisation, classification, schematism in the minds of the Indians. As the Brâhmaṇas worked together in villages in which foreign, especially, lower, elements were not tolerated, so, following their example, social groups, united by community of profession, separated themselves from one another and helped to create the manifoldness of modern caste-life.