History is as much about anonymous contributions as the more trumpeted ones. Who did those monks living high up on the hills of Pavuralakonda, Bavikonda, and Thotlakonda depend on for food and labor? There must have been a thriving village or two down by the sea whose residents fed the monks and worked at the monastery, but we know nothing about them.
Who were those weavers and craftsmen whose products the Europeans valued enough to cross miles of ocean to take back to their land and whose labor they tried to harness? We hear that the cloth produced in and around Vizag was highly valued, but who made it? And did these craftsmen form guilds and unions as did their more organized counterparts in the south? And did they ever sail to the Andamans and further east to Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Phillipines?
And who was this person only identified as a “native artist” who filled Patrick Russel’s publications with the most detailed and beautiful sketches of fishes and serpents that won the scientist his fame in England? We’ll probably never know.