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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 85

The Art Ware Courts. — General Remarks

The Art Ware Courts.

General Remarks.

Notice that the exhibits in these Courts are:—

1. The results of long-inherited skill and patient handicraft, and not of machinery.

In the Indian Museum is an enamelled plate which represents the work of four years, and a large engraved jade bowl, on which a family of lapidarians was engaged for three generations.

2. That the labour and time devoted to them could only have been given in a country in which labour was abundant, and the payment for labour and the cost of living very small.

3. With few exceptions, the Indian Art Ware in these Courts is similar to the Indian Art Ware of two thousand years ago. Contrast this almost stationary condition with the progress indicated by the exhibits in the Australian and Canadian Courts, and ask "Why?"

"Why?" The history of the Aryan races in India is involved in much obscurity. The following notes in the briefest form show how that history is connected with Indian Art Manufacture:—

Possibly some five hundred years after the Aryans had settled in the north of India, the Brahmans, i.e. prayer bearers, had acquired great influence. These Brahmans arranged society into four fixed Classes or Castes, and compiled the "Code of Manu."

The Code of Manu is the great Hindu law-book, by which every act of Hindu life has been regulated for nearly 3000 years. It has petrified

Hindu society, and this may be specially seen in the

Hindu Village System.—In the Hindu village, the ancestors of the village accountant, watchman, money-changer, smith, potter, carpenter, barber, shoemaker, have for hundreds of years, through the influence of caste supported by the Code of Manu, held the same office.