India’s Societies & the Dharma Traditions

In every society, a division of labor develops as skills are passed on from one generation to the next. People groups develop specialization based on the needs of their society, the quality of available resources, and their skills in transforming resources into specific goods and services. Over time, they may become known for these goods and services as the complexity of production increases. This took place in the Indosphere as it did throughout the world. Access to a resource or product that was specific to the territory of a clan or tribe could also be negotiated through treaties and alliances. With the passage of time, trade increased within and between groups, though some remained more isolated and self-sufficient, either not prioritizing or not needing specialization or more demarcated divisions of labor.

In ancient India, for example, certain clans or tribes living closer to the mountains may have developed skills for mining Himalayan salt. As demand would grow, more people would be trained at mining to keep up with supplying it. As a specialized good or service became more lucrative, some clans and tribes would join that particular specialized trade, while others would choose to continue with their own work or specialized trades.

As groups grew and interacted and specific goods and services became more renowned through trade networks, supply chains, alliances, treaties, and even marriages between rulers/administrators developed and grew. With growing trade networks and alliances, more planning, execution, delegation, specialization, and analysis also became necessary to ensure efficient and effective interaction, cooperation, innovation, exchange of goods and services, logistics, governance, defense, etc. within and amongst groups.

In the ancient Indosphere (as in other societies across the globe), as clans and tribes formed confederate nations and trade networks grew even more, the nations’ councils and leaders leveraged trade and the specialization of each clan and/or tribe for the benefit of the collective. The most prosperous trade-based clans and tribal nations generally developed ways of streamlining things, including developing raw materials (primary), manufacturing (secondary), services (tertiary), and education and training (quaternary) sectors of industry that were grouped in a variety of ways. People in these sectors (described by Vedic people as the varṇas – laborers, traders, defense and administrators, and scholars) shared best practices, training, human resources, evaluations, etc. This happened across similar industries. As a result, guilds in these various sectors developed naturally in these societies. Their relationship to the nation – taxation, logistics, infrastructure projects, etc. – was decided by the council of leaders/experts. These developments led to greater complexities and a need for a new group of intermediaries, such as administrative and compliance guilds.

Only in those Hindu societies that consisted of a large population, usually from different tribes with their own spiritual traditions and cultures, did guilds play an important role. These guilds tended to be more restrictive and represented specific professions, e.g. doctors to administrators. They also looked at admission – just like a doctor trained in the Australian medical system must undergo extra training before being deemed competent in the American context, so too, guilds would determine how the skills of a doctor from a tribe that came from a humid region could apply in the common settlement in a dry region. This point is especially important considering that Hindus were trading across the whole of Asia and well into Europe and Africa from ancient to modern times.

The alternative method of integrating societies was through the spiritual traditions and developing a common framework which held space for the individuality of the tribe/clan. These could not be scaled in the manner that guilds were, but this alternative was more prevalent in Asia. The urbanized nations, as such, tended to prefer guilds, as the administration’s directives and taxation were easier to implement.

Only one task was and is sex specific: though a male is involved in conception, females give birth and have the ability to breastfeed children. This does not mean, however, that the plethora of tasks or work that exists (or existed) is not performed by women. There simply may be a period of time in some women’s lives when doing those other tasks may not be possible or preferred. Age and ability may also influence one’s ability to perform certain work. Very young, elderly, and differently-abled people may not necessarily be able to do some tasks with the same efficiency of able-bodied, trained people. Though, with assistance, they could be supported to do so. Similarly, in ancient India and the Indosphere, age and gender were natural limiters of certain work. Additionally, a young person could be fit and healthy, but not yet have the skills required for the job, so the duration of training and education were also times when a person could not be a fully productive member of the society – yet this was understood to be a good investment of time and resources, as through education they would become skilled members of society rather than unskilled laborers.

As clans and/or tribes came together, spiritual and cultural experts also naturally tended to coalesce together. Additionally, people who provided manual labor for either the industries or the spiritual and cultural enterprises also naturally grouped themselves together. Furthermore, as trades became specialized, defense of the clan became delegated to specialists who were physically and mentally best suited to this task.

Each clan and/or tribal nation in ancient India and Asia in general had their own organizational models. Many insular tribes have governance (elders), spiritual and cultural leaders or guides, defense, and manual labor groups, with people sometimes taking on multiple responsibilities. Some nations in ancient India simply allowed for the proliferation of different groups of people. Others, especially those that became sāmrājyas, needed to coordinate these groups over vast distances and a variety of clan and/or tribe cultures. Such sāmrājyas, particularly those nations that were based on a particular culture, deliberated on how their societies would be organized in line with the needs of the day.

The majority of ancient Āryan sāmrājyas (Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu, c. 300 BCE to 11th century CE), tribal confederations, and settlements of isolated clans, generally adopted a model in which those that governed were supported by the laborers, industries, defense guilds, and the spiritual and cultural experts per the needs of the people. People could move around in these various sectors on the grounds of their callings and talents (guṇa-karma). Clan identity did not tie a person to a specific sector, though given that much industrial training was passed on from parents to children or through apprenticeships, it was common for clans to become adept in a certain sector.

The sāmrājyas that were intent on either expanding in trade or territory, however, required more thought behind their organization. A few among the original sixteen mahājanapadas – not all – decided to codify regulation of their social sectors in order to augment their efficiency, and evidently, especially augment the ability to collect taxes and enact government initiatives easily. They assigned a chief skill or product to a given clan and organized them in groups known as jātis. While they may have originally been egalitarian in their approach, ubiquitously humans do develop possessiveness and prejudices based on the groups to which one belongs. Additionally, some of these codes, in reaction to the realities of the day, were very specific about how each sector and even clan should interact, reminiscent of Christian feudalism or the Muslim Arab land-ownership birth-based hierarchy. The chief type of Āryan culture that preferred this model of jāti-based social organization was that based on the Mīmāṃsaka spiritual tradition.