A Guild of Silk Weavers Built a Sun Temple at Dasapura From Its Own Earnings, Repaired It 36 Years Later and Had Both Recorded in a 44-Verse Inscription at Mandsaur

A stone slab found at Mandsaur in western Madhya Pradesh records, in 44 Sanskrit verses, that a guild of silk weavers paid for a Sun temple out of its own earnings and, when part of the temple fell into disrepair, paid to restore it. Two dates in the Malava era appear on it, year 493 and year 529. They are 36 years apart, and the epigraphist J. F. Fleet converted them to 437 to 438 CE and 473 to 474 CE.

It belongs to the reign of the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta I and names his governor at Dasapura, the old name of Mandsaur, as Bandhuvarman. A poet called Vatsabhatti wrote it. Its last verse says the temple was made by order of the guild and out of devotion, and that Vatsabhatti composed the poem with care.

What the stone says

Fleet’s own summary, in the third volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum (1888), is the plainest short account. A number of silk weavers came from the Lata district, which he took to be central and southern Gujarat, to the city of Dasapura. Some of them took up other occupations. Those who stayed with weaving formed a guild that prospered.

While Bandhuvarman, son of Vishvavarman, governed Dasapura under Kumaragupta, the guild built a temple of the Sun. By the Malava reckoning it was finished when 493 years had passed, on the thirteenth day of the bright fortnight of the month Sahasya, which Fleet places in December and January. Later, under other kings, part of the temple fell into disrepair. Then the same guild restored it, when 529 years had passed, on the second day of the bright fortnight of Tapasya, in February and March.

Apart from the opening word siddham (a word of good omen) and the closing words on line 24, Fleet treats the whole poem as verse. Daniel Balogh’s digital edition for the Siddham database, made from his own photographs of the stone, divides it into 44 verses.

How a slab on a river ghat reached the scholars

In The Indian Antiquary for 1886, Fleet explains the find. Arthur Sulivan sent General Cunningham a hand copy of a damaged pillar inscription of Yashodharman from Mandsaur in 1879. He saw the copy in 1883, recognised the name of the Huna king Mihirakula in it, and sent his copyists to Mandsaur in March 1884 to take impressions. In their search they found the weavers’ inscription and a second copy of the Yashodharman pillar text. On a visit in February 1885 he described the weavers’ text as “now published for the first time”.

Fleet found the slab built into a flight of steps leading to the river at the Mahadeva Ghat, on the south bank opposite the fort, in front of a medieval Shiva temple. It is now in the Archaeological Museum at Gwalior, according to the Siddham record and to Puratattva, and Balogh photographed it there in January 2017. Open magazine places it in the Yashodharman museum at Mandsaur instead. Balogh’s visit is the better-documented of the two.

Weavers who also became archers, storytellers and astrologers

In his study of ancient Indian guilds (second edition, 1922), R. C. Majumdar calls the Mandsaur stone’s account “by far the most interesting account of a guild”. The verses show why, since they do not describe a closed trade.

Fleet’s translation says the weavers, renowned for their silk work, came to Dasapura “in a band”, with their children and kinsmen, drawn by the virtues of the kings of the country. Once settled, some mastered archery, some wonderful tales, some discourses on true religion, and some astrology. Balogh’s edition reads the word as jyotisham, the science of the heavens. Other members, the poem adds, were fighters who destroyed enemies by force in the poet’s own day, and that some stayed at the loom.

One verse praises the craft itself. A young woman does not go to meet her lover until she has put on silk, Fleet renders it, and in the same way the whole earth is adorned through the weavers “with a silken garment, agreeable to the touch, variegated with the arrangement of different colours”.

Scholars read the guild’s makeup differently. By Fleet’s summary, the guild was formed by those who kept weaving. Majumdar points to the verse saying the guild “shines” through men of all these kinds, and concludes that the guild included all of them, and that it kept its organisation after some members changed trades. Joseph W. Elder’s entry in the Encyclopedia of India follows the same line: members worked in many trades but still identified with their origins as silk weavers.

A temple paid for with craft earnings

Fleet’s translation says the temple was built “as a guild” with wealth gained by the weavers’ craft. Earlier in the poem, in his rendering, the weavers reflect that the world and accumulated wealth are unsteady and gain a steadier understanding.

Broad, lofty spires, a whiteness like moonbeams and the standing of a crest-jewel on the “city of the west” are how the poem describes the temple. Basham reads that phrase as Dasapura itself and Bhandarkar as the western quarter of the town, as Balogh records in his notes.

Without public donations, says Open magazine, the guild built the temple. The verse says the money came from the weavers’ craft and gives the guild’s command and devotion as the reasons, and the phrase “no public donations” is not in Fleet’s translation.

In the restoration verse, part of the temple fell into disrepair “in the course of a long time, under other kings”, and that the whole was “repaired again by the munificent corporation” so as to increase the guild’s own fame. What caused the damage is not stated. Open magazine ties it to the unrest after Kumaragupta’s death, which is that writer’s inference and not the stone’s statement. Elder’s entry notes only that the weavers repaired a temple they had endowed more than three decades earlier.

Why the dates read 436, 437 and 473

Counting for the Malava era starts in 57 BCE. Fleet identifies it with the Vikrama era in his introduction to the inscription of Vishvavarman, Bandhuvarman’s father, from Gangdhar in the same volume. On the weavers’ stone, 493 years and later 529 years had passed.

Fleet’s notation shows where the gaps in modern writing come from. He gives a year as expired or as current. For the Gangdhar stone he equates year 480 expired with 423 to 424 CE, and the same count puts year 493 expired at 436 to 437. For the weavers’ temple he gives the running year, the 494th, as 437 to 438 CE, and for the repair the running year 530 as 473 to 474 CE. Puratattva gives about 436 and about 473. The Open article gives 436 to 437 for the temple. Majumdar’s book prints 437 in one chapter, 436 in another and 472 for the repair. Every version keeps the same interval of 36 years.

Silk, Gujarat and Malwa

The Greek merchants’ guide known as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, translated by Wilfred Schoff in 1912 and attributed by him to a merchant of the first century, lists silk cloth among the exports of Barygaza, the Gujarat port Schoff identifies as modern Broach. Its section 48 says the inland city of Ozene, which Schoff identifies as Ujjain, sent muslins and other cloth down for the Barygaza trade. Our article on the Periplus covers that port in detail.

Schoff calls Ujjain the chief city of Malwa, and Fleet places Mandsaur in the western Malwa division. The corridor the Periplus describes therefore ran between the region the weavers left and the region where they settled. The inscription itself says nothing about trade routes.

Section 64 of the same text says raw silk, silk yarn and silk cloth reached Barygaza on foot through Bactria from a land called This. So the Periplus shows silk passing through southern Gujarat in the first century without saying who wove it. That part comes from the Mandsaur stone, which describes the Lata weavers as renowned in the world for their craft.

Two readings of the move

Majumdar reads the relocation as proof of strong organisation. In his view a body that could shift from one city to another and keep its unity and public confidence was well organised, and the weavers’ activity in several trades shows a guild open to learning and change.

R. S. Sharma, in Urban Decay in India, takes the same migration as one case of artisans leaving towns. He writes that the silk weavers of Gujarat faced shrinking markets even in the fifth century, and he places the move in the late fifth century. The stone shows the guild already at Dasapura by Malava year 493, about 436 CE. Sharma sets the weavers inside his wider argument about falling long-distance trade in the centuries after the Guptas.

The verses give a third reason, the one the poet chose to record: the weavers were drawn by the virtues of the kings of the country. Markets are not mentioned.

For the poem’s place among Gupta-era verse, see our article on Kalidasa, which discusses its use as a dating anchor, and the Gupta golden age reconsidered for the wider debate on the period.

Today the slab is held in the Archaeological Museum at Gwalior, and Balogh’s edition of its 44 verses is dated January 2019 on the Siddham site.