Practice of Accounting 📊
We followed the practices of both the village revenue accountant as well as the merchant accountant. The teacher to us is more a character of a pedagogue at work. This would mean where learning happened at the site of work, integral to the practice of making and doing, such as carpentry, sculpture, boat building, instrument making, architecture. In this collection, there is a predominant presence of texts, called the Kanakkatikaram.
This is a genre of texts, which testify to the routine job of a village accountant. These contain procedures as verses, to compute problems with respect to measures of land, gold, grain, solid stones and time. For example, the section on land has procedures to calculate areas of different dimensions of land, estimate of produce and other problems, using techniques such as the rule of three. They tell us how these texts show a training of the accountant to anticipate diverse situations, while measuring and calculating.
These texts were in circulation from at least the 16th century in the Tamil speaking region, and we have found these in different manuscript libraries.