Pre-Buddhist India: A Political, Administrative, Economic, Social and Geographical Survey of Ancient India Based Mainly on the Jataka Stories c5.t3.30

c5.t3.30

Some trades and crafts were followed outside the towns or cities, although mostly in their proximity. Amongst these the potter's craft seems to have been the most important. The *Kumbhakāra Jātaka*⁴ mentions a suburban village (*dvāragāma*) in the vicinity of Benares, inhabited by the potters. Similarly, "not far from Benares" as the *Alinacitta Jātaka* says,⁵ "lay a carpenter's village (*vaḍḍhakigāma*) which, as we have already noticed, provided a splendid example of co-operative work.⁶ Further instances of such settlements, places occupied only with particular branches of industry, are also to be found in the stories.⁷ These craftsmen's villages or settlements, in the immediate neighbourhood of a big city, could find an easy market for their products and could also supply themselves with their ordinary needs, such as clothes, foodstuffs, implements and the like, from the city. About one of such villages, that of the carpenters, we learn moreover that it contained a thousand families. These were divided into two parts of five hundred families, each under a head or a leader (*jeṭṭhaka*).⁸ This may or may not be taken to show that at times there existed more than one union of the same class of craftsmen in the same locality. Another interesting sidelight thrown by the same story on the organization of such unions is that the carpenters living in that village, failing once to carry out the orders placed before them for which they had received large advances, were harassed and summoned to fulfil their contract. But, instead of doing that, they built a mighty ship secretly, emigrated *en masse*, with their families, "slipping down the Ganges by night and so out to sea, till they reached a fertile island" where they ultimately settled.⁹ Such a mobility of guilds is also witnessed in the inscriptions of a later period.¹⁰