Pre-Buddhist India: A Political, Administrative, Economic, Social and Geographical Survey of Ancient India Based Mainly on the Jataka Stories c5.380

c5.380

There were musicians (*gandhabbā*) who lived by practice of their art;⁹ so also the drummers (*bherivādakā*) and the conch-blowers (*saṅkhadhamakā*) earned their living by playing on their respective instruments at public festivities—to the crowds of holiday-makers.¹⁰ Then there were the actors and dancers (*naṭanattakā*) who, by the performance of their respective arts, somehow, gained their bread.¹¹ And the itinerant jugglers and acrobats (*māyākārās*) who knew the ‘javelin dance’¹² and exhibited a wooden puppet worked by hand,¹³ would roll about and play on the ground¹⁴ and, by such other slight performances, catered for the amusements of the crowd and got their living thereby.¹⁵ All those who were occupied in these, more or less parasitic, arts, formed what Fick would like to call a “multiform and chaotic society which resists more or less every attempt at classification and about which there can be no talk of an organization according to castes in that age.”¹⁶