another. Some of them were evidently interested in a particular
technology, or craft: as indicated by the writings on their
manufacture of iron and steel, the fashioning of agricultural
tools, the cotton and silk textiles, the materials used in
architecture, and buildings, the materials used in the building of
ships, the manufacture of ice, paper, etc. But even in such
writings, the interest lay in the particular method and
technology and its technological and scientific details; and, not
in how these were learnt.
Yet another cause for the lack of information on the
teaching of techniques and crafts may possibly lie in the fact
that ordinarily in India most crafts were basically learnt in the
home. What was termed apprenticeship in Britain (one could not
practise any craft, profession, etc., in England without a long
and arduous period under a master craftsman, or technologist)
was more informal in India, the parents usually being the
teachers and the children the learners. Another reason might
have been that particular technologies or crafts, even like the
profession of the digging of tanks, or the transportation of
commodities were the function of particular specialist groups,
some of them operating in most parts of India, while others in
particular regions, and therefore any formal teaching and
training in them must have been a function of such groups
themselves. Remarks available to the effect that, ‘it is extremely
difficult to learn the arts of the Indians, for the same caste, from
father to son, exercises the same trade and the punishment of
being excluded from the caste on doing anything injurious to its
interests is so dreadful that it is often impossible to find an
inducement to make them communicate anything’,^64 appear to
indicate some organisation of individual technologies at group
levels. However, to know anything regarding their teaching, the
innovations and improvisations in them, (there must have been
innumerable such instances even if these were on a decline), it is
essential to have much more detailed information on such
groups, the nature of these technologies, and what in essence
constituted a formal, or informal apprenticeship in the different
crafts. On this so far we seem to have little information.
The following indicative list of the crafts listed in some of
the districts of the Madras Presidency (collected in the early 19th
century records for levying tax on them) may give, however,
some idea of their variety.