Local Government in Ancient India c8.6

c8.6

We thus see that guilds were but natural and necessary growths at a very early period of our history, due to the considerable progress which the country had achieved in arts, manufactures, and trade. They presuppose and imply in fact a development to which history testifies. And so when we consider the story of that development, the facts in the commercial and industrial life of Vedic India which can be gathered from the numerous references to trade and manufactures with which Vedic literature is replete—references which it is not the purpose of this monograph to bring together—we should not be surprised by the references to the guilds which some scholars find in the Vedas. The fact of the matter is that guilds or commercial associations must always wait on a certain degree of development to be attained by the particular commercial or industrial interests concerned ; guild-life in fact belongs to a considerably advanced stage of economic progress in which the individual mechanics, artisans, or traders have sufficient business instincts developed in them, and have achieved sufficient success in their several businesses to appreciate the necessity of organizing themselves into a community for the purpose of promoting their individual and collective interests. The growth of guilds thus means that the industrial units are sufficiently efficient to partake of a public life and regulate themselves by common rules as parts of a whole or a common organism. The extent to which the differentiation of economic functions or occupations was carried even in the Vedic period of our history will seem to point to the conclusion that those scholars who choose to find in certain passages from Vedic literature proofs of the existence of guilds cannot very well be considered as being guilty of making an extravagant claim and taking up an untenable position. The existence of such institutions is not quite out of relation to the economic progress of the period with its evolution and differentiation of numerous arts and crafts and of occupational castes jealously safeguarding their several interests as explained above.