The artisan community, also known as Achari, whose members practised the five crafts — work in gold and silver, iron, brass, stone and ivory or wood. Much of the religious art that now defines Sri Lankan heritage was made by their hands.
The five crafts
The pancha karmakara or five crafts covered the goldsmith and silversmith, the blacksmith, the brass and bell founder, the stone carver, and the carver in ivory and wood. These were hereditary specialisms, taught within families over long apprenticeships, and each carried its own tools, vocabulary and body of design convention.
The output is not a marginal part of the island's heritage; it is a great deal of what survives. Carved stone doorways, moonstones and guardstones; bronze and brass images; temple lamps, reliquaries and ritual vessels; the metalwork and carving of the Kandyan period; the ivory and wood of palace and shrine — the Navandanna made these. Buildings are credited to the kings who commissioned them, but the craft was the artisans'.
Status and the making of heritage
Traditional ranking placed artisan communities below cultivators, an ordering common across South Asia and never straightforwardly explicable given the skill involved and the value of the work produced. The result is a familiar asymmetry: the objects are celebrated as national treasures, exhibited and photographed and used to represent the country, while the community that produced them is described in a single word — "artisans" — and passed over.
Naming the makers is part of what an honest heritage archive owes them.
The modern era
Traditional craft production contracted sharply with industrial imports from the nineteenth century onward. Some lineages continued, particularly in Kandy and the surrounding districts, and Navandanna craftspeople remain central to the conservation of temple and archaeological work, to the making of ritual objects, and to the Kandyan jewellery and brassware trades.