Opinion: Why shudras must build museums of agrarian and artisanal instruments

Shudra history survives and exists in the furrows of agrarian lands and in artisanal fossils and living tools. The living shudras are also a huge repository of their history. India’s science exists in these unwritten furrows and in the deep wells of the wealth of labour. This nation’s future has to be built, taking lessons from these sources.

The day-to-day discourses of shudra food producers are replete with philosophical, economic and scientific thought. Unfortunately, this thought has not been recorded and textualised. Since most of their socio-economic and spiritual history is in the villages, young intellectuals of good calibre must engage in textualising it.

Shudra civilisation is spread out across many regions and states and is recorded in some regional languages and oral histories. Several scholars must undertake the painstaking work to study and write about shudra philosophy, science, and economics, in all regions and states mainly in English. Though it is not an easy task, given the denial of their history for millennia, it is possible to retrieve it.

There is a major task at hand for shudra voters, activists, leaders and rulers, whether at the state or central levels, to establish good museums of artifacts of production, social use, cultural use and architectural value that survived the historical neglect of the brahminic negative knowledge system. Indian agriculturist and artisanal forces constructed highly sophisticated tools such as spades, buckets, pots, plough, ropes, construction materials like bricks, cots, hunting and fishing instruments as time, production, and survival demanded.

By the time the shudras built the Harappan civilisation, they constructed houses with burnt bricks and built their homes with crafted wood. At the time, the migrant Aryans had no knowledge of such civilisational technologies. Tools and technology development occurred much before the Aryans arrived and constructed the ideology of brahminism. They did not help in the scientific process of life.

Millions of instruments went into oblivion without getting written about or their shapes and uses sketched.

Pre-Independence times stored brahminic music or written material in museums, libraries and temples. Kings, whether shudra or dwija, gave importance only to divine idols and sculpture. Even the erotic life of brahminic society was preserved in the Khajuraho and Konark temples, but no king built an agrarian artisanal museum. No ruler had a contemporary sculpted plough placed in a temple. This only shows that agriculture, which is the mother of all cultures, had no value in any mode of civilisational history under pre-colonial, colonial or postcolonial rulers. So far, shudra rulers have not shown any concern for agrarian artefacts or understood the need to museumise them.

As a result, this ancient civilisation did not preserve the fundamental source of its culture, science, technology and history. Anti-science brahminism made us slaves of the Euro-American knowledge systems. Hence India borrows science and social science knowledge from them even in postcolonial times.

The shudras must now strive to build many museums of agrarian and artisanal instruments, and write about their modes of use. For example, there is repeated mention of soma (in modern times, this drink is known as toddy, called kallu in Telugu) even in brahminic books like the Vedas. But nobody wrote about what kind of technology was used to tap the drink from trees. Toddy tappers use moku, mutthadu and guji to climb a tall toddy tree, even in modern times to harness the drink.

In ancient times too, the tappers of soma must have used several instruments and techniques, but there is no record of these technological instruments.

A toddy (sura) tapper has to climb a tall tree that has no branches to tap the drink at the top and bring it down. Using these instruments and risking their lives, tappers do this hard labour with great scientific skill. Every day, the tapper climbs several trees and brings down the drink from the top of the trees. They use the moku to support their back, placing this around the tree stem, while their hands are pressed to the tree. The guji keeps the feet pressed to the tree. The mutthadu holds all kinds of sharp knives that are used to cut the trunk to get the drink from the tree.

Likewise, several shudra occupational groups use different technological instruments to perform their skilful tasks. Many such technologies are going out of existence and their history erased if they are not written about. Museums of such tools will be great historical resources of knowledge to remain for millennia.

This op-ed has been adapted from Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd’s The Shudra Rebellion (Southside Books).

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a former Director of the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at Maulana Azad National Urdu University in Hyderabad.