Local Government in Ancient India c9.25

c9.25

This exhortation is indeed symbolical and characteristic of the sacred and spiritual relations¹ that normally obtained between the master-craftsman and his apprentices—relations which were the direct outcome of the peculiar educational system and environment under which they worked. To these wholesome relations, and especially to the superior educational efficacy of the system which produced them, is to be traced the signal success which is admitted on all hands to have been achieved by the handicraftsmen of ancient and mediaeval India, and which so largely enabled her to command for much more than a thousand years (from Pliny to Tavernier) the markets of the East as well as the West, and secured to her an easy and universally recognized pre-eminence among the nations of the world in exports and manufactures. We are, however, more concerned with the system than its success, with the methods of training than their results, the character of the educational machinery and organization than the record of its magnificent output. The essence of the whole scheme or system, the fundamental feature on which it rests, is that the young craftsman is brought up and educated in the actual workshop of his master whose disciple he is, although the master may sometimes be even his father. This means that the pupil stands in a peculiar relation to his master, a sacred relation of devoted personal service and attachment in which alone can the learner best imbibe and most naturally and spontaneously assimilate the special excellences of his teacher, his true 'inward' method, nay, even his trade secrets which can no longer be hidden from one whom he has adopted as his son. The very intimacy and depth of the personal relationship between the teacher and the taught solves substantially the difficulties of the educative process, which is impossible in the case of the busy professor at a modern technical school where he is concerned with his students for a few hours in the week, and has no opportunity of associating them with his main business in which he is called upon to show his real worth and exercise his best talent. And this brings us to the other aspect of our indigenous organization, viz., training in the actual workshop where the teaching is learnt from the very beginning and in relation to real things, difficulties, and problems, and primarily by service, by personal attendance on the master. And it is not only technique that is learnt but something more valuable: in the workshop there is life itself, besides mere plant and tools, for the workshop is part of a home, which relieves its mechanical monotony and places the pupil in touch with life and its difficulties, human relationships, culture, and religion, whereby his heart is trained as much as his hand—a thing which is as necessary to art as technique¹ itself.