Working together, living apart

In 1196, the sculptor Malloja engraved a monumental record for the Hŏysaḷa chancellery (Figure 1).Footnote ² Standing at almost three metres in height, and carved into the striking, dark chloritic schist that was a hallmark of Hŏysaḷa temple architecture, the record is topped with an intricate capital decorated with delicately carved human figures engaged in the act of donation. Presiding over the scene is a miniature, stylized tiger-head that often was used to mark the entrance of Hŏysaḷa temples. The letters are written neatly and clearly—easily legible after more than 800 years—and they are decorated with ornamental flourishes that extend the curvature of the Kannada script into elegant paisleys and florets. At the base, we are told that the record consists of the poetry of Janna, who was the scion of the most prominent Kannada literary family, and who—according to the inscription—served as ‘the god Śiva to haughty poets and as a friend to good poets’. We are also told that it was engraved by Malloja, who was ‘a tumult among the entitled sculptors’.Footnote ³

Figure 1.

Donative inscription from the Amṛteśvara temple in Amṛṭapura, Karnataka (a), with enlargements of the capital and plinth (b and c). Carved in 1196 by Malloja and composed by Janna, this inscription displays the ornate epigraphic style of Kannada letters developed among artisans working in the late Western Cāḷukya and the Hŏsaḷa domains.

Source: Photograph by Dinesh Kannambadi.

It is difficult to know what to make of this relationship. It is not something that poet or artisan spoke about in detail. We cannot know whether Malloja consulted Janna when he had questions about the text he was inscribing; we cannot know whether Janna broke normative caste guidelines and ate lunch with Malloja as they produced the documentary records of the Hŏysaḷa court in tandem.Footnote ⁴ But their relationship provides an entry point into thinking about the subaltern forms of intellectual labour that existed alongside elite understandings of language and literature in pre-colonial South Asia. This article argues that artisans and other caste-marginalized people did not merely subtend intellectual life by providing the material support, the conditions of possibility, for elite intellectual projects—whether through the resources that were extracted from their labour or through the paper, ink, and stone they furnished for others. Artisans in medieval and early modern India deftly manipulated the written word to their own ends, and they theorized their work as intellectual labour. We would do well to take them at their word.

The inscription from 1196 was not the first time Janna had composed a poetic encomium for King Bhallāla. And it was also not the first time someone named Malloja had engraved Janna’s words into a permanent surface. Six years earlier and some 120 kilometres south, Janna composed a record of a donation that would be engraved onto copper plates. This record celebrated the deeds of one Māci Rāja, who served as a governor and financial minister for the Hŏysaḷa king Ballāḷa II (r. 1173–1220).Footnote ⁵ As with Janna’s later compositions, the record has a flair for the macabre; it describes King Ballāḷa as fertilizing the ground from Sŏṟaṭūr to Beḷvŏḷa with the corpses of Sevuna soldiers.Footnote ⁶ The purpose of the inscription was fairly prosaic: it recorded that a portion of the rent from the tenant farmers at Ānĕganakĕṟĕ was to be handed over in perpetuity to local brahmans. The elite patron of this exchange, Māci—unlike King Ballāḷa—was lauded less for his martial prowess than for his epistemic abilities; namely, his literacy and numeracy. He was, as the record reads, ‘the foremost among accountants’, and he served as ‘the guardian of the literate’.Footnote ⁷ But courtly elite such as Māci were not the only people who boasted of literacy in medieval India. The vast inscriptional corpus of pre-colonial South Asia offers us an opportunity to explore the lives of more subaltern individuals and their deft engagements with the written word.

We cannot be sure that the two engravers named Malloja were one and the same person. Their names are written slightly differently. But the evidence points to the fact that—at least for several years in the early part of his career—the poet Janna laboured alongside a sculptor named Malloja. The two formed a professional pair of literate specialists employed together in state service for more than a dozen years in the region that the Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock has called ‘one of the most densely inscribed pieces of real estate in the world’.Footnote ⁸ What happens to the intellectual history of South Asia when we start not with poets and elite scribes but with those individuals who appear at the very bottom of inscriptions, and who belonged to the margins of the social hierarchy? Just as much as the well-connected Māci—who was trained in Vedic recitation and who occupied a position close to the king—the artisans who engraved lithic and metallic surfaces boasted of their literacy and numeracy.Footnote ⁹ A close reading of the words these artisans left behind challenges the notion that in pre-colonial South Asia literacy was exclusively available to those born into privileged castes. And it forces us to confront the uses to which literacy has been put in a historiography that too often replicates elite and modern understandings of education and textuality, prima facie excluding caste-marginalized people from the realm of the literate.

Like many records from the period, the six copper plates onto which the record from 1190 was inscribed concluded by listing the individuals involved in their composition: an author who composed the text, a scribe who transcribed it onto an enduring surface using an impermanent substance, and an engraver who followed the tracings and inscribed the text in its final form.Footnote ¹⁰ In this case, the poet is Janna, the scribe Dāvaṇṇa, and the artisan Mallovaja. Mallovaja’s name, ending in -ovaja or its contraction -oja, marked him as belonging to a hereditary caste of artisans. Although the texts were in dispute, artisans such as Mallovaja, who made their living inscribing stone and metal, did not fare well in classical brahmanical jurisprudence.Footnote ¹¹ For instance, the Laws of Manu (Manavadharmaśāstra) stated that ‘When a Śūdra is unable to enter into the service of twice-born men and is faced with the loss of his sons and wife, he may earn a living by the activities of artisans.’ This would make it seem that artisans were more disenfranchised than agrarian cultivators. Taking Manu’s somewhat elliptical statement and expanding it, the sixth-century scholiast Bhāruci noted ‘from that it is understood that the professions of artisans are significantly inferior to the professions of Śūdras—this is the profession of an outcaste’.Footnote ¹² Lest anyone doubt which professions were classed as artisanal, Bhāruci went on to say that ‘the professions of artisans include things such as carpenters and blacksmiths. They are the various crafts such as inscribing.’Footnote ¹³ But Manu would not have the final word. The Law Code of Yājñavālkya (Yājñavalkyadharmaśāstra)—often invoked and commented on in medieval Southern India—presented a vision of statecraft founded on the maintenance of a robust documentary information infrastructure.Footnote ¹⁴ Together with the eleventh-century Short Commentary (Mitākṣara) composed in the region by the royal jurist Vijñāneśvara, this text provided a more nuanced view of professional letter writers, viewing them as objects of suspicion but also as necessary to the functioning of state power.Footnote ¹⁵ And, as we will see below, the ‘various crafts such as inscribing’ were invoked by particular artisan castes in medieval India to claim new social and ritual privileges.

To some, the division of labour between poet, scribe, and engraver in many epigraphs might imply that the artisans at the end of the chain of inscription were illiterate. After all, the artisans who engraved the letters of inscriptions often followed the chalk and ink tracings of others who belonged to a more prestigious profession and a more privileged caste. But, as Daud Ali reminds us, ‘all of these roles, however they were divided, required some scribal training’.Footnote ¹⁶ Just how much scribal training did artisans have? And what did they think of their skill? When it comes to the intellectual history of South Asia, scholarship has done an admirable job of explicating the place of poets and scribes. We now have a detailed sense of the role poetry played in medieval politics, statecraft, and identity formation.Footnote ¹⁷ And we are beginning to develop a picture of the elite bureaucratic and scribal cultures of medieval and early modern South Asia.Footnote ¹⁸ But we rarely treat the artisans—coppersmiths and stonemasons—who incised these records as epistemic actors in their own right.Footnote ¹⁹ This article argues that we should.

Understanding the lives of literate artisans does not require reading against the grain to find their muffled voices in elite literary texts. Rather, it requires turning to the immense documentary archive that artisans left behind and treating it as the output of their epistemic labour. It requires what we might call, thinking with Ann Stoler, reading along the grain of the lithic surfaces onto which artisans carved letters. This means approaching the inscriptional archive as not merely a source for information about elite economic exchanges and political events but also as a subject itself. Inscriptions constitute evidence of their own coming into being as documents.Footnote ²⁰ And reading along the grain of this imperial archive with care and humility allows us to trouble familiar stories. ‘Reading along the archival grain,’ in the words of Stoler, ‘draws our sensibilities to the archive’s granular rather than seamless texture, to the rough surface that mottles its hue and shapes its form.’Footnote ²¹ The lithic surfaces on which artisans recorded the transactions of imperial states contain watermarks of history. By shifting the angle at which light hits them ever so slightly, the narratives of their making come into view. As objects that materially instantiate the practical knowledge and knowledgeable practice of artisans, stone and copperplate inscriptions offer an opportunity to rethink some of the basic assumptions of social and intellectual history of pre-colonial South Asia.

Writing technology

Literacy is a charged topic in the historiography of South Asia, and it has been for a long time. As it is, literacy is tied up in narratives of education, technology, and industrial modernity. As the East India Company transformed itself from a mercantile trading house into a de facto sovereign state, education policy became a heated topic of debate among colonial officials. Throughout the nineteenth century, British observers presented India in need of improvement and framed colonial difference in racialized technological terms.Footnote ²² As historian David Arnold puts it, ‘the poverty of India and the recurrence of widespread famine were understood as the consequence of a primitive, technologically inefficient agricultural system’.Footnote ²³ These supposed technological deficiencies were in turn linked with educational deficiencies. New forms of education that conveyed ‘useful knowledge’ were presented in colonial thought as the solution to this state of affairs.Footnote ²⁴ And, while the ends were different, the idiom of improvement that linked mass education and wealth was taken up by Indian social reformers and anti-colonial nationalists.Footnote ²⁵ Literacy was understood to be a direct index of development in the industrializing post-colonial nation-state, and education was written into the constitution as a fundamental right as successive governments put the rhetoric of literacy at the heart of development plans.Footnote ²⁶ With these new understandings of progress that linked industrial productivity with education, technology itself was recoded. ‘Over a century,’ anthropologist Ajantha Subramanian writes, ‘technical knowledge went from being the purview of lower-caste artisans to becoming integral to state power, economic development, and upper-caste status.’Footnote ²⁷ The emergence of a new cohort of caste-privileged engineers that was seen as the solution to India’s underdevelopment was set in contrast with an image of illiterate, premodern, caste-oppressed artisans.

Such a view linking artisans, technology, and education was consolidated as a common sense among a colonial-era elite after the first publication of account of Indian architecture in English. In his Essay on the Architecture of the Hindús, Rám Ráz dubbed Indian artisans as ‘generally men of very limited acquirements, and totally unacquainted with the science’ of architecture and mechanics.Footnote ²⁸ Lest anyone miss the point, Henry Harkness—who saw the book to publication after Rám Ráz’s untimely death—asserted that ‘the rules and precepts of architecture and sculpture had been, with some solitary exceptions, locked up in the Sanscrit language; and, as the study of this language was limited, in general, to the higher classes; the only means of improvement left to the artist, who in all cases would be of a subordinate class, were the verbal instructions’.Footnote ²⁹ Artisans, the story went, were illiterate and certainly did not have access to Sanskrit.

We have by now come a long way from such patronizing judgements. Drawing on a wealth of primary source material, Vijaya Ramaswamy reins in these claims, writing in a pathbreaking article that ‘craftsmen engraving inscriptions and putting their names on them is the proof of their literacy in a society that was largely illiterate’.Footnote ³⁰ Still, an overall image of an illiterate social base of agrarian and artisan labourers—with literacy reserved for brahmans and a few other literate service elites—remains standard in depictions of pre-colonial South Asia. For instance, in his magisterial account of the information order in colonial India, C. A. Bayly argues that prior to the colonial period ‘schooling and literacy were specialist resources open only to particular elites who used their learning as badges of status’.Footnote ³¹ And writing of ‘the predominantly illiterate world of South Asia’, Manu Devadevan—in his pioneering interpretation of Hinduism’s late medieval origins—asserts that brahmans and elite scribes ‘had a near-total monopoly over the use and abuse of writing’.Footnote ³² These statements seem innocuous enough. The scale and nature of education changed dramatically with the rise of industrial society, as has the presence and availability of cheap texts in a mass-mediated world.

But, as we have started to see, the literacy—or rather, supposed illiteracy—of artisans is often granted enormous historical explanatory weight, taken as a driver or impediment for the onset of modernity. Artisans have been made to bear the burden of the scientific and industrial revolutions and hence the economic divergence of Europe. The role of the literate artisan as the source of these so-called revolutions has a lengthy pedigree within the history and sociology of science and technology, where a unique artisanal intellectual culture in Europe was used as an explanation for modern social, technological, and intellectual revolutions.Footnote ³³ And while historians of science and technology have sought to recover the figure of the artisan outside of such teleological frameworks, these arguments continually resurface among economic historians.Footnote ³⁴

Meanwhile, for India, the inverse figure of the illiterate artisan separated by caste from theorization—an old Weberian trope—remains singled-out as the source of colonial poverty and hindrance to post-colonial development. Here we see histories of caste intercalated with histories of technology and economic prosperity.Footnote ³⁵ Equating science with brahmanical scholarship and technology with artisan production, the economic historian Tirthankar Roy attributes the economic divergence of Western Europe and South Asia to illiterate artisans, when he asserts that in pre-colonial India:

It is not difficult to multiply such statements. No doubt, caste oppression had—and continues to have—an immense impact on access to education and epistemic authority.Footnote ³⁷ Creating a literate population is often seen as the central tool for empowerment and self-realization in contemporary Dalit uplift movements.Footnote ³⁸ But, at the very least, the presumption of pre-colonial illiteracy—in light of the tens-of-thousands of textual inscriptions carved by artisans—should give us pause.

We should pause to consider whether to accept at face value the assertion that the professional letter carvers were, in fact, illiterate. This strains the limits of the English language, at least in its everyday uses. It is a truism that bears stating that in medieval South Asia, as in most other times and places, if you needed a rock engraved or a copperplate incised, you would turn to a stone mason or a coppersmith.Footnote ³⁹ This is what kept the sculptor Malloja employed in state service for a career that spanned more than a dozen years in this densely inscribed region.

We should also pause to consider the applicability of a stark literate-illiterate binary as a category of historical analysis. Such a dichotomy papers over the large range of literate activities and the diversity of competencies that exist around the written word. There are many different uses to which written language is put, and these are not captured by dividing the world into the two camps of literate and illiterate. We should, for instance, be able to differentiate those who can read but not write from those who can write but not read and from those who can both read and write; and among those who can both read and write, we need categories to acknowledge that access to certain linguistic registers and epistemic genres is unevenly distributed. Historians of medieval and early modern Europe have been particularly attentive to these complexities and, in what Mark Hailwood explains as ‘the proliferation of more precise subcategories of literacy’, they have developed nuanced terminology to explore literacy as a spectrum.Footnote ⁴⁰ So, we can now talk of pragmatic literacy, abcedarian literacy, and letteracy as well as graphic literacy, partial literacy, and private literacy to accommodate the fact that people have engaged with the written word and put it to different uses in distinct contexts.Footnote ⁴¹ Amanda Lanzillo invites us to talk of ‘community literacy’ when it comes to artisans participating in colonial-era print cultures in South Asia.Footnote ⁴² Indeed, such subdivisions can be extended almost indefinitely along a continuum of literate practices.Footnote ⁴³

What these studies point to is that literacy is not a historical given. Rather, it is a category that has been defined and debated within history. It is a category that allows actors in particular contexts to place certain writing-and-reading practices on one side of an imagined dividing line while placing other writing-and-reading practices on the other side of that line. Where, and how, that dividing line is drawn is a matter of contestation, the product of historically specific understandings of what counts as ‘literate enough’. Rather than using literacy as a category of analysis—as the timeless benchmark of progress—we should instead treat it as a category to be analysed. And we should be wary of any historical analysis that uses the production of literature as the primary index of literacy. When literariness is treated as the final stage of literacy, everything that is not literary risks falling short. But literariness is not the goal of most uses of writing, which is more-often-than-not concerned with the everyday acts of recording experiences for later retrieval. Not achieving literariness is not a failure of literacy. Indeed, most of us who use words cannot profess to be all that literary.

Reading along the grain

So, what did literacy look like in pre-colonial India? Here is where we should pause for the longest. This is because literacy was often depreciated in pre-colonial South Asia, where ideologies of reading, writing, and textuality were largely unassociated with progress and intellectual life. These terms look different when placed within the history of the subcontinent. ‘In the world of Sanskrit culture, grammaticality was divorced from literacy’, Sheldon Pollock has argued, going on to say that ‘accordingly, literacy and learning were never directly correlated’.Footnote ⁴⁴ While modern historians may be, as historian Michael Clanchy has put it, ‘prejudiced in favour of literacy’, Pollock has shown that ‘long after writing became an everyday practice in the Sanskrit world, a bias toward the oral persisted’.Footnote ⁴⁵ A deep scepticism long existed towards the written word. Scribes often found themselves the butt of jokes.Footnote ⁴⁶ And while manuscripts—in Buddhist, Jain, and brahmanical contexts—were often treated as sacred objects, the transmission of knowledge was seen to be possible only when such manuscripts were accompanied by embodied and recited knowledge.Footnote ⁴⁷ Talking of vernacular-language, written collections of songs, the scholar of religion Christian Novetzke concludes that in early modern Maharashtra, ‘the tongue would always make the best book’.Footnote ⁴⁸ In these understandings, actual books are see more as a cultural or cult object than as an epistemic or communicative one.

When it comes to intellectual cultures centred around Persian, the early modern period saw the rise of a powerful scribal class that ensured a new proliferation of the written word.Footnote ⁴⁹ But here too, writing is often treated as a secondary and subsidiary project. ‘Knowledge was located primarily in persons rather than in books’, the historian Nile Green has argued, before going on to say that ‘books were not considered independent sources of knowledge’.Footnote ⁵⁰ And taking an expansive view, the literary scholar Tyler Williams argues that ‘whereas authors operating within the literate social contexts of Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian focus on the need for human mediation of written texts’, vernacular-language authors in North India, ‘deny any epistemological privilege or pedagogical utility whatsoever to writing’.Footnote ⁵¹ Across literary cultures in pre-colonial South Asia, writing and inscription were often seen as subsidiary to textual composition.

But at particular moments and for certain communities, literacy was taken to be a marker of epistemic value. We have already seen the wealthy patron Māci boast of being ‘the foremost among accountants’ and the ‘the guardian of the literate’. And for some people from caste-marginalized backgrounds, the written word could serve as an entry point into new spaces. Here, we need not entirely rethink literacy. The public life of inscriptions can help us to see otherwise. This is a point that the art historian and epigraphist S. Settar has driven home in a series of writings in both Kannada and English.Footnote ⁵² Taking a wide view of over a millennium of South Asian history, Settar sees writing not as a tool of elite knowledge but rather as the means by which knowledge was spread from the few to the many. While ‘the key of knowledge was hidden behind the bars of the throat’, Settar argues, early Buddhist writers from artisanal classes, ‘released it and taught the way to grow through writing’.Footnote ⁵³ In this re-evaluation of the history of literacy, writing is seen as the workaday instrument of labouring people who were integrated into state service in the heyday of the Mauryan empire. Only later would brahmans take to reading and writing, which were largely everyday tools by which people navigated the everyday world.

To bring us back to an example from the context with which this article opened, a collection of biographies and poems of twelfth-century religious reformers brings such everyday literacy of people outside of elite social settings into focus. It tells the story of how the temple drummer Allama Prabhu was inspired upon ‘seeing and reading a prose description of the city Kalyāṇa that the blessed Cĕnnabasava had written on an inscription on the front gate of that city’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The reading of public documents is at the centre of this important narrative of devotion, and the inscription that Allama read was itself a description of the districts and the religious sites in the city Kalyāṇa, written as something of an accountant’s catalogue. Cĕnnabasava wrote as a holy tax collector, surveying a populace in the midst of a devotional upheaval. The inscription at the heart of this story was itself, in large part, about writing. Cĕnnabasava concluded his composition by looking back and declaring that ‘writing and then reading the brilliant inscription’ served for him as ‘the cause for the cessation of the suffering of existence’.Footnote ⁵⁵ This is just one example, selected from a narrative text, and I do not want to belabour the point. But here we see the mundane acts of reading and writing inscriptions put to use as a tool of state bureaucracy and celebrated as effecting public events—perhaps supermundane events—within the world among people such as the temple drummer Allama.

While expanding the stark literate-illiterate binary has been salutary, and while South Asian literary cultures can serve as a rich source for retheorizing literacy, before engaging in such a task, we should turn to those artisans who could—by all accounts and by all definitions—read and write, and who celebrated this as an accomplishment in the inscriptions they left behind. These figures at the heart of pre-colonial documentary infrastructures boasted of their skill in the literate arts and can help to reposition intellectual history beyond the realm of texts produced by people from caste-privileged backgrounds. As Elaine Fisher emphatically argues in her contribution to this special issue, ‘non-brāhmaṇa communities were consuming, transmitting, and even producing knowledge in Sanskrit without interruption down through the centuries’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Writing about the lives of these caste-marginalized individuals does not require a heroic act of historical interpolation or imagination. We simply need to read the archive, so to speak, along the grain. Which brings us back to the artisan Malloja, with whom this article opened.

Artisanal epistemologies

There were several artisans named Malloja employed in the documentary infrastructure of the Western Cāḷukya and Hŏysaḷa courts. Artisan-scribes had long left their traces in stone and copper plate, and they had carved their names into near construction sites for some time.Footnote ⁵⁷ But an unprecedented brashness marked artisan writing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as artisans began to sign their sculptures and express themselves with elegant, metrical compositions. The study of such artisans was inaugurated by S. Settar and Kelleson Collyer, who published foundational art historical studies attentive to the epigraphic richness of Hŏysaḷa temples some 30 years ago.Footnote ⁵⁸ This work documents two dozen inscriptions related to people named Malloja between 1095 and 1306. While their ground-breaking scholarship has largely been confined to the world of art historians and regional specialists—and it is even sometimes neglected there—it offers the intellectual and social historian an invaluable vantage point into the worlds of non-elite literacy.

So, what can we say about all these Mallojas who were carving statues and inscriptions in the medieval Deccan? People named Malloja served as sculptors and scribes, carpenters and architects, sometimes taking on multiple roles at the same time.Footnote ⁵⁹ Some, at least, were quite arrogant. They bragged about their artistic prowess. One Padari Malloja called himself a ‘guillotine for the entitled sculptors’ at the base of a statue he carved.Footnote ⁶⁰ We have already seen Janna’s colleague Malloja call himself a ‘tumult among the entitled sculptors’.Footnote ⁶¹ Artisans also boasted about their ability to write. After all, writing too is a way of shaping the material world through the deft manipulation of matter. The sculptor Malloja son of Māḷoja concluded a stone inscription that he engraved in 1159 with a verse that demonstrated his skill as a scribe in a range of documentary forms. In Kannada verse, he called himself the ‘preceptor (upādhyaya) of scribes who have titles in the royal camp’ and said that he had ‘pleased the three rulers with his writing of the Cow Stealing episode of the Mahābharata on a single palm leaf perfectly, with his protection, and with his truthfulness’.Footnote ⁶² In this boast, Malloja son of Māḷoja invoked the language of pedagogy—calling himself an upādhyaya—while also praising his artisanal dexterity, his ability to deftly construe letters in the miniscule. Poetic, grammatical, and clear language was taken to be central to these professional artisans. Another artisan, Malloja Māṇiyoja, served as the architect for the Lakṣmi temple at Doḍḍa Gaddavaḷḷi, and was said to be endowed with ‘articulate speech, produced by the artisan god Viśvakarma’ when he was granted land in payment for his services by a wealthy merchant.Footnote ⁶³ And at the end-of-the-fifteenth and start-of-the-sixteenth centuries, a particularly prolific carpenter with the related name Mallana worked with his father Vīraṇācārya and the poet Sabhāpati to inscribe almost a dozen stones for the Vijayanagara bureaucracy.Footnote ⁶⁴

These inscriptions reflect language from architectural texts (vāstuśāstra) in asserting and defending the moral worth of artisanal professions. Time and again, architectural manuals dwell on the epistemic virtues of the labouring artisan and architect, connecting hand and mind in a vision of artisan life as a form of epistemic labour. Such a person was supposed to be ‘knowledgeable in architectural plans, of light-of-hand, and one who has overcome toil’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Writing in the northern Deccan, King Bhoja of Dhārā (r. 1010–1055) described the ideal architect as ‘a person who is skilled in theoretical treatises, their objects, definitions, and meanings; joined with labour, as well as theoretical treatises, practical action, wisdom, and grace, and also knowledge of palmistry, mathematics, astronomy, metrics, knowledge of the veins, the crafts, and the means of mechanical action’.Footnote ⁶⁶ By the medieval period, a wide range of Sanskrit texts—largely anonymous or pseudepigraphical—asserted the social status of certain types of artisans and architects in relation to royal patrons based on their moral, manual, and epistemic virtues.Footnote ⁶⁷

Increasingly, artisans would include verses and designations in their inscriptions that proclaimed their artistic skill to those who could read. And they counted writing as one among many learned skills that set them apart from others. Writing sat at the intersection of epistemic and manual skill—both knowledgeable practice and practical knowledge—that allowed for artisans to make a place for themselves in a competitive world ruled by royal courts. Writing can be a sensuous and embodied artisanal practice in addition to a solitary scholarly one. Inscriptions themselves grew ornamented and ornate at this moment. Malloja’s floral embellishments extend and transform rounded Kannada letters into flowing tendrils and buds at the margins of the colossal stone he carved (Figure 1). Words did not merely convey lexical meanings; they were turned into the medium for artistic expression. The art historian C. Sivaramamurti drew attention to this phenomenon long ago, when he spoke of the twelfth-century artisan Sovaraśi, who boasted of his skill at entwining elephants, lions, and parrots in his letters, and whose inscriptions are some of the most breathtaking in the history of South Asia.Footnote ⁶⁸ The artful and elegant strokes made by artisans from this moment—found inscribed on both stone and copperplate—are a world away from the dot-punched copper plates that are occasionally found in an earlier period. These phonemes emphasize the confident, knowing hand of artisans who subtly blended text and ornament. Challenging hierarchies of knowledge that divided the mind and hand, these artisans—in both their writing and their carving—made a new place for themselves through their deft engagement with the written word.

Counter-discourses of caste in the longue durée

What did writing do for artisans at this moment? Among other things it helped them to claim ritual and legal privileges from which they had earlier been excluded on caste grounds. While brahmanical legal texts were in disagreement over the matter, for many jurists, artisans were classed as Śūdras and could even be considered as ‘untouchable’. But starting in the eleventh century, across southern and western India, a community of five artisanal castes—blacksmiths, goldsmiths, coppersmiths, masons, and carpenters—formed larger associational groups and used them to assert professional and social privileges.Footnote ⁶⁹ To do so, they claimed descent from the god Viśvakarman, and they linked themselves with the mixed-caste group of ‘chariot makers’ (rathakāra) described in classical dharmaśāstra literature. By associating themselves with the ‘chariot makers’ of earlier juridical literature, these artisans used their manual skill to claim higher caste status, and as they did so, they also made epistemic claims.

How did this work in practice? A series of three mixed-Tamil-Sanskrit, twelfth-century inscriptions from the Kaveri River basin help us to see how disputes around caste status and artisans were resolved.Footnote ⁷⁰ These inscriptions record a dispute adjudicated by a group of local brahmans over whether artisans of the five professional castes should be counted as ‘chariot makers’, and whether ‘chariot makers’ were an ‘along-the-grain’ (anuloma) or an ‘against-the-grain’ (pratiloma) mixed caste.Footnote ⁷¹ At stake was the extent of social and ritual privileges this grouping of artisans should be granted. At the bottom of each inscription, a dozen signatures of brahmans authorized this conclusion, and it was then ordered that the judgement be engraved on stone and copperplate.Footnote ⁷² While these inscriptions have been used to show the application of Sanskrit juridical texts in producing legal decisions, I want to emphasize two or three aspects of these inscriptions that have gone unnoticed in recent discussions.

The first is that in invoking a dispute over ‘chariot makers’, the adjudicators of this caste controversy did not merely draw on juridical literature to justify their positions. As artisans sought new caste privileges, ritual, legal, and architectural manuals that lauded their epistemic abilities were educed as evidence. One inscription quotes an architectural text attributed to the artisan god Viśvakarman which stated that a chariot maker ‘should always act in accordance with the science of architecture and craft’.Footnote ⁷³ Such an artisan should, according to another text, ‘be good at writing (sulekha) and have good qualities, be intelligent and knowledgeable of texts (śāstra), be skilled in labour (karma), be practiced in the science of architecture, and be skilled in removing thorns’.Footnote ⁷⁴ The qualifications listed in the inscription—and it provides several further similar quotations from other texts—describe this sort of artisan as a person who brought together action and thought. Artisans, much like people who belonged to professional castes associated with medical and scribal labour, attempted to translate—sometimes more successfully, sometimes less—epistemic accomplishments into social privilege by defending the moral worth of their profession.Footnote ⁷⁵

Further, in making their arguments, these inscriptions follow a dispute broached in the first instance not by jurists, but by mīmāṁsā philosophers. Discussions of the rights and privileges of Rathakāras—literally, ‘chariot makers’—had a lengthy pedigree going back to the late Vedic period.Footnote ⁷⁶ But it was only with the rise of mīmāṁsā hermeneutics in the early medieval period that this would turn into a topic of dispute. Later scholiasts would turn to the sixth chapter of Jaimini’s Mīmāṁsā Sūtras, which covered the people qualified to carry out Vedic rituals and sacrifices, to debate whether Rathakāras should count as a privileged caste.Footnote ⁷⁷ By the late medieval period, these discussions reached a fever pitch such that the early Indologist Albrecht Weber would say that the problem ‘gave many headaches’ (viel Kopfschmerz gemacht) to scholars of mīmāṁsā.Footnote ⁷⁸ It is important to stress that this was not merely seen as a social or a ritual problem. In the hands of mīmāṁsā philosophers, the question of the chariot maker’s place within the caste hierarchy became one of the primary sites to theorize language. It was a hermeneutic question. In particular, it was taken as an opportunity to interrogate whether words should be understood according to their etymological roots or according to their conventional usage; should we understand ‘chariot maker’ to describe anybody who builds a chariot, or should we understand it to describe a particular professional, endogamous caste?

Finally, just as the issue of chariot makers was not raised for the first time in the twelfth century, it would also not be the last. In this final section of the article, I turn to a series of texts written on the eve of colonialism that invoked the figure of the chariot maker to claim new social and ritual status for artisans. In the intervening centuries, much would change for the material conditions of artisans.Footnote ⁷⁹ And the assertions made by artisans would change. While the twelfth-century mixed Sanskrit-Tamil inscriptions conclude that artisans were to be granted some of the rights and privileges of twice-born groups, by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at least—the early modern period—some artisans began to claim a status higher than that of ordinary brahmans. But their arguments would continue to centre the identity and status of the ‘chariot maker’ and how such an individual was defined in Sanskrit juridical and hermeneutic texts. The scholars Rosalind O’Hanlon, Gergely Hidas, and Csaba Kiss talk of ‘discourses of caste over the longue durée’ to emphasize the importance of medieval and early modern brahmanical texts for caste-based disputes adjudicated by colonial courts.Footnote ⁸⁰ What interests me here are the counter-discourses of caste that existed alongside and against the materials that O’Hanlon, Hidas, and Kiss describe. Authors belonging to artisan communities would turn brahmanical texts against each other as they used the philosophic and argumentative tools of Sanskrit philosophy to invert normative hierarchies of caste. And sometimes—whether by political manoeuvring or by force of argumentation—they would make brahmans ratify their positions. Again, literacy and education in Sanskrit were at the centre of these arguments.

Debates about chariot makers would continue into the early modern period among mīmāṁsā philosophers. For instance, the Viśiṣṭādvaitin scholar Śaṭhakopa Sūri son of Rāmadeśika authored a disputational monograph on the topic while he was on the banks of the Candrapuṣkariṇī reservoir at the temple town of Śrīraṅgam in central Tamil Nadu.Footnote ⁸¹ Śaṭhakopa argued that ‘it is the case that between the etymological meaning of a word and the conventional meaning, it is actually the conventional that is predominant’.Footnote ⁸² More specifically, he asserted that ‘the word “Rathakāra” serves as an example of the predominance of the conventional meaning’.Footnote ⁸³ Śaṭhakopa wrote at a moment when exegetical questions were a topic of heated dispute.Footnote ⁸⁴ But while this might seem like a rather arcane hermeneutic point, its implications were quite significant.Footnote ⁸⁵ Because it was at this moment that Rathakāras themselves turned to Sanskrit philosophy—bringing it together with their own caste histories—to argue for their superiority over brahmans.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, one Basavācārya Svāmin, who spoke on behalf of an artisan community associated with the artisan god Viśvakarman, engaged in a series of scholastic inquiries and investigations. His interlocutors were 20 brahman jurists and philosophers, who were said to be ‘scholars in the three schools of Advaita, residing between the Kṛṣṇā and Godāvarī Rivers’. This group had assembled at the court of King Vijāya Rāma Rāju (r. 1708–1757) of the Pūsapāṭi dynasty, then ruling from Vizianagaram in Andhra Pradesh, to debate the social and religious status of artisans.Footnote ⁸⁶ As if in response to the early modern brahman philosopher Āpadeva’s assertion that ‘a Rathakāra, even though having authority for simply the kindling of sacred fires, does not have authority in subsequent rituals, owing to his lack knowledge’, Basavācārya asserted the authority of artisans through a virtuoso engagement with brahmanical literature.Footnote ⁸⁷ He provoked responses from different brahman scholars, gathered their discussions together, and shaped them into a single dialogic text that argued for the privileged status of artisans.

At the same time, he inverted the authority of many classical Sanskrit texts. For instance, a brahman named Bhaṭṭala Veṅkaṭācārya of Kambhammeṭṭu engaged in a debate over the status of chariot makers by invoking the most authoritative Sanskrit lexicon: Amarasiṃha’s Instruction in Nouns and Genders (Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana). The argument opened by stating that ‘since the author of the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana enumerated chariot makers to be an inferior lineage (apakṛṣṭavaṃśaja), how can they be considered “upper caste” (agravarṇa)?’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Amarasiṃha’s lexicon had dived occupations into the four major caste groupings, and it had placed chariot makers in the Śūdra section. In response to this, the question was turned back around on the brahman opponent, arguing, ‘This is not a proper conclusion, because that author is unpermitted, on account of his belonging to the position that the Vedas are unauthoritative. Because, [were that the case], non-violence as taught by the Buddhists would also be considered to be dharma.’Footnote ⁸⁹ The challenge stimulated by Basavācārya is subtle, but it managed to strike at the most important Sanskrit lexicon by counterintuitively invoking the violence of brahmanism. The argument of Bhaṭṭala Veṅkaṭācārya refers to the fact that the lexicographer Amarasiṃha had listed synonyms for the Buddha at the start of his text, prior to listing synonyms for Hindu gods. Since at least the twelfth century, Sanskrit lexicographers had hinted at the fact that Amarasiṃha might have been a Buddhist.Footnote ⁹⁰ If the brahman opponent were to grant Amarasiṁha authority, it would open up a whole host of problems. Among other things, Bhaṭṭala Veṅkaṭācārya coyly referenced the violence of the Vedas—which was a heated topic of dispute among contemporary mīmāṃsā philosophers—as something that would have to be excluded from practice. The text then goes on to invoke the authority of the twelfth-century lexicographic commentator Liṅgayasūri to argue that Rathakāras are, in fact, eligible to perform sacrifices.Footnote ⁹¹ In making this argument, the text makes a masterful display of erudition, appealing to the most authoritative Sanskrit lexicon in order to argue that, using the tools of Sanskrit philosophy, it should not be taken as authoritative. Basavācārya brought this and other evidence together, sorting through and selecting portions of Sanskrit literature that would support his position, using this to reject other parts of the Sanskrit textual tradition.

In compiling this text, which included the words of many others, Basavācārya stressed his own authorship and literacy, concluding it by saying that ‘the book was written (likhita) by the scholar, preceptor, and great soul, renowned as “Śiṅgara” and named Basavācārya’.Footnote ⁹² This yielded a composite work that was significantly longer and more detailed than those of philosophers such as Śaṭhakopa or the sections on chariot makers in the works on caste privileges written by Kamalākara Bhaṭṭa, Kṛṣṇa Śeṣa, and Gopīnātha.Footnote ⁹³ But the text deployed the same rhetorical style and covered similar topics as these brahman theorists. At the same time, Basavācārya made his own arguments based on caste-particular histories that had emerged in the prior centuries within artisan communities. He would go on to compile a standalone text based on his reading of these histories, titled the Viśvavidyābharaṇa, in which ‘the Vedic authority of the well-born Viśvakarmas, who are useful to the entire world, is investigated by means of revelation, tradition, and history’.Footnote ⁹⁴

Textual inquiry was at the heart of Basavācārya’s investigations, which he claimed were ‘accepted, after texts such as scripture, revelation, and the Purāṇas had been fully investigated by the brahman scholars and the best intellectuals in the intellectual court of the king of Vizianagaram, and once it had been philosophically determined by Basavācārya Svāmin of Kanurpati, who was the preceptor of the viśva brahmans’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Over the course of his argument, Basavācārya led his readers through an array of orthodox Sanskrit writings, citing passages from the sacred narratives and epics such as the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, Mahābhārata, and the ever-expanding Skandapurāṇa to the foundational writings of the mīmāṃṣā philosophers Śabara, Prābhākara, and Kumārila. He surveyed the later medieval writings of the scholiast Pārthasārathi Miśra, the jurist Vijñaneśvara, and the lexicographer Liṅgayasūri, along with more recent texts, such as the seventeenth-century mīmāṃsā writings of Khaṇḍadeva and Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita’s contemporaneous grammatical treatise, the Siddhāntakaumudī. These texts were put into conversation with one another and selectively excerpted to provide artisans with the strongest case possible. And Basavācārya came to a startling conclusion: artisans constitute a special class of brahmans that was, in fact, superior to ordinary brahmans.

To arrive at this conclusion, he quoted an otherwise-unattested caste Purāṇa, the Tvaṣṭṛpurāṇa, which said that ‘the family of brahmans was divided in two by the gods’.Footnote ⁹⁶ There were sacred (ārṣeya) brahmans and human (pauruṣeya) brahmans. He would go on to summarize the position, saying that the brahmans who descended from Viśvakarman, namely the five types of chariot maker, ‘have the authority to perform Vedic sacrifices, have authority in the Vedas, can serve as Purohit priests, and are preceptors’.Footnote ⁹⁷ The evidence that Basavācārya relied on is just as significant as the conclusion to which he came. He drew on a group of caste-particular Purāṇas developed by artisans that circulated in Sanskrit as well as regional languages.Footnote ⁹⁸ Given names such as the Viśvakarmapurāṇa or the Mūlasthambhapurāṇa, these texts describe the ontology of the universe, while placing it in a narrative of decline. Associating artisans with the creator god Viśvakarman, these texts describe how the original order of the world was inverted so as to dispossess artisans and displace their original texts. There were initially five Vedas, each belonging to one of the five major artisan professions. These texts were supposed to have been the original scriptures for the world until they were subverted by jealous brahmans. A copy of one of these works from Thanjavur contains a short introduction not found in other versions that describes the project. ‘The wonderful scripture called the Mūlasthambha is the greatest of all scriptures’, it reads, saying that it is the ‘original root of all canonical texts and Vedānta’.Footnote ⁹⁹ This was not a text meant for everybody. ‘In the world,’ it goes on to say, ‘hearing that scripture is a wonderful secret that is difficult to obtain.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Here, we see a narrative of textual decline and recovery, in which it was artisans who were able to preserve the original textual corpus of the Vedas. The Mūlasthambha goes on to discuss the origins of the five artisan castes from the five children of the god Viśvakarman, and the different forms of labour along with the epistemic goods they were each given.

These Sanskrit texts were translated into regional languages across South Asia, and vernacular versions were written down. For instance, a bilingual Sanskrit-Kannada version was recently edited by B. O. Gangadharappa.Footnote ¹⁰¹ And a bilingual Sanskrit-Tamil version is held at the Saraswathi Mahal Library in Thanjavur (Figure 2).Footnote ¹⁰² Jason Schwartz describes an unpublished Marathi Śilpaśāstra that narrates similar events.Footnote ¹⁰³ Vijaya Ramaswamy discusses an unpublished Tamil Viśvakarmapurāṇam that does the same.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ And Velcheru Narayana Rao summarizes these narratives as they circulated in early modern Andhra.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Such narratives did not end with the rise of colonial power or the printing press; they proliferated. Jan Brouwer catalogues the colonial uses of similar caste histories in the colonial Deccan, where they were often used in the legal disputes over caste that arose in the wake of the decennial census, first carried out in 1872.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ And George Varghese and Sowparnika Balaswaminathan, along with Kirin Narayan and Kenneth George, document how caste-advocacy groups have printed and reprinted accounts of court cases that often draw on such narratives from the nineteenth century onwards within the post-colonial—and post-Mandal—nation state.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Figure 2.

(a) and (b) A bilingual Sanskrit-Tamil copy of the Mūlasthambhanirṇaya, a text that explains the theology and origins of the five-fold artisan community.

Source: Thanjavur Maharaja Sarfoji Saraswathi Mahal Library MS 11073.

Literate cultures from the ground up

Where does all of this leave us? This article has pursued a rather simple point: many people who were not from caste-privileged backgrounds could read and write in pre-colonial South Asia. And yet this fact often goes unacknowledged in a scholarship that connects literacy and brahmanism. The evidence is there in the tens of thousands of inscriptions that litter the landscape. It is there in the words of artisans themselves. We just need to look. We need to read along the grain. This brought the article to another simple point: most reading and writing is not of literary texts. Rather, reading and writing are largely everyday activities that we use to make sense of receipts, to send letters, compose promissory notes, glance through menus, fill prescriptions, balance account books, and find our way along new roads. Occasionally we may stop to read a book, but this should be seen as a special case rather than the norm. It is but one small suburb in the massive city teaming with boroughs and alleyways that is the written word. And words are not merely written with pen and ink; they are chiselled into rock, etched into copper, and sewn and stamped onto fabric (Figure 3). Artisans can help to show this larger world of writing. While this article touched on such materials only glancingly, these everyday uses of writing offer productive avenues for broadening our perspective on literacy in pre-colonial South Asia.

Figure 3.

(a) Early twelfth-century, block-printed textile fragment with a repeating Arabic inscription offering blessings to its owner. Source: Ashmolean Museum EA1990.150. (b). Weaver’s signature stitched into a Kanchipuram sari, late nineteenth century.

Source: Courtesy of Sonya Sapru.

Finally, the article came around to one final point: while it may be salubrious to rethink our basic categories of literacy, we need not reject them outright. Even by the most conventional standards, people from caste-marginalized backgrounds were reading and writing, and they sometimes composed recondite Sanskrit texts in addition to vernacular-language and everyday ones. The ability to read and write in Sanskrit was itself a way of claiming privileged status, but this use of Sanskrit did not amount to Sanskritization à la the sociologist M. N. Srinivas. The article concluded by showing how one artisan-scholar named Basavācārya used the tools of brahmanical philosophy to undermine traditional brahman claims to authority. Basavācārya was unique, but he was not an aberration. He built on a larger tradition of Sanskrit caste histories that had been composed before he wrote: what I called counter-discourses of caste in the longue durée. And he seems to have been effective. His intellectual project was backed up by local political authority in the moments before its collapse in the face of French and British colonial expansion.

Despite these simple points, and despite a wealth of contemporary scholarship to the contrary, the intellectual history of South Asia remains ridden with presumptions when it comes to discussing literacy, caste, and premodernity. Why the disconnect? Here, there are several explanations. In this article, I have chosen to focus on a particular way of narrating the history of technology and economic divergence. While we have done an admirable job of narrating South Asian literary cultures from the inside out, we have been less diligent in narrating literate cultures from the ground up.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This article has sought to show the sometimes mundane, sometimes elegant, and often contentious ways in which artisans put the written word to use in pre-colonial South Asia. Scholars such as Malloja—and the many Mallojas this article has traced—left much for us to think about, if only we would listen.