India everywhere

Home > Teachers > Background Essays > Author: Donald Johnson Background Essay: India in World History, Production and Global Exchange

Consumers in most major cities of the world can buy Indian jewelryand clothing. This statement is true today, but it would also have been true four thousand years ago. Goods, ideas, and religious concepts “made in India” have been exported to markets around the world since the people of the subcontinent built their first cities in the Indus Valley in the third millennium B.C.E. In 1959, excavations at Lothal in the present state of Gujarat clearly demonstrated that by 2000 B.C.E. trade and traders were going back and forth between Indian ports and Sumerian and Egyptian cities in West Asia.

The exchange of material goods between the Indus people and West Asia is evident from the similar styles of shaving and dress across this vast area and the common use of the swastika and other religious symbols. Excavations in West Asian cities have unearthed beads and other jewelry and even an Indus seal showing a Sumerian and an Indus trader making a deal with the help of an interpreter. Indus knobbed pottery vases were exported to Sumer. The Indus people also exported food to West Asia. It is clear that they grew and used cotton and were probably the first people in the world to do so. The ancient Greeks thought cotton came from “wool-bearing trees.” Bead making was a major industry in Indus Valley cities, and craftsmen developed sophisticated shaping and drilling techniques using raw materials such as lapis and carnelian. They also worked with shells, agate, and copper and fashioned jewelry out of gold and silver and semiprecious stones. Less expensive mass-produced ornaments were manufactured out of terra cotta.

Lothal, which is now about 30 miles inland from the Arabian Sea, was then a port city and perhaps the capital of the southern province of the Indus civilization. Lothal had a scientifically designed dockyard, the earliest of its kind in the world. Ships entered the dock at high tide and a watertight locking device in the spillway in the southern wall kept the water level even at low tide. As many as 30 ships were able to dock at Lothal at any one time.Indian mariners also sailed along the northern coasts of the Indian Ocean. Should they stray too far from land, navigators released birds and followed their flight so as to move back nearer the mainland. A seal found at Lothal had an Egyptian pyramid on it, suggesting contact with the Nile Valley. Indus tablets have been found as far away as Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean.Indo-European Migrations After the Indo-European migration in the middle of the second millennium B.C.E., the Aryans, as they called themselves, gradually settled down and began to farm and build towns across the extensive Gangetic Plain. They also participated in a lively trade with the peoples of West Asia. Phoenician shippers loaded teak logs, ivory, cotton cloth, jewelry, and other goods from India onto their ships and later sold them in Mediterranean markets. This trade was important enough to facilitate the introduction of Sanskrit terms into the Semitic languages of West Asia.

The Sanskrit word for “ivory,” elph, is ibha in Hebrew, and the Sanskrit word for “sandalwood,” valgu, is closely related to the Hebrew term almug. In 1963 seals were found in Bengal inscribed with Cretan Linear A script, another example of India’s long-distance trade with the Mediterranean in the second millennium B.C.E. As the Aryans intermixed with the various local peoples of the subcontinent, they produced a vibrant heroic literature that strongly echoes their cousins in the Mediterranean world. The Indian Ramayana and the Greek Iliad share the same basic frame story about the abduction of a royal lady and how warrior tribes go to her rescue. These epics likely emerged from a common Indo-European legend. Later, animal tales that originated in the Indian Panchatantra found their way into Buddhist Jataka Tales and a Muslim version known as Kalila wa Dimnah. Echoes of these stories can be found in Uncle Remus tales of tar babies, foxes, and sour grapes.The Reurbanization of India and the First Empires (700B.C.E.–500 C.E.)

Around 700 B.C.E., as new cities such as Ujjain, Patilaputra, and Varanasi developed in the Indo-Gangetic plain, thinkers began to bring together the many strands of religion, science, and philosophy into a creative new synthesis. New world views were worked out in such classical works as the Upanishads. By the sixth century B.C.E., a number of reformers were challenging many of the Brahminical values and practices, particularly caste hierarchy and the emphasis on elaborate fire rituals and sacrifices. Two major reformers of the time were Mahavira, the historical founder of Jainism, and the Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. They were contemporaries and many of their teachings were based on earlier Hindu ideas, such as karma, dharma, and reincarnation. These reform movements, in reaction to the confusion and constant warfare spurred by the nomadic migrations and invasions of the previous millennium, should be seen not as isolated in India, but rather as responses to the more universal issues that so many Eurasian societies were facing during this era. The ideas were aimed at finding new meanings in a drastically changing world. In this effort, Indian philosophers shared a common endeavor with their Greek, Hebrew, Persian, and Chinese neighbors.

During the Hellenistic age (320 B.C.E.–31 C.E.), stimulated by Alexander’s conquests, India engaged in an active exchange with theMediterranean world. Ambassadors, traders, and philosophers movedregularly in both directions. Many Greek concepts entered India, including Greek and Roman images of deities, and the Persian idea ofempire building. The Greek ambassador in the Mauryan capital at Magadha asked the Greeks to send not only wine and other consumergoods but also a sophist. Conversely, the Indian idea that the material world is an illusion, and the belief in an underlying divine force in the universe spread to the Mediterranean world and north to China. Under the Ptolemies in Egypt (331–01 B.C.E.), Roman trade with India intensified. Indian spices, perfumes, precious stones, elephants, fine cotton cloth, ivory, iron ore, and animals and birds such as peacocks, parrots, tigers, elephants, and monkeys all were exported in large numbers, and most of these products ended up in Roman territories. After their conquest of Egypt, the Romans were brought into direct contact with India. During the Kushan rule in north India beginning in the first century C.E., a vigorous trade and exchange of people, goods, and ideas ensued. Taking advantage of the seasonal shifts of monsoon winds, Indian merchants plied the waters of the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea on their way to East Africa and West Asia. During the reign of Augustus, a major Roman geographer reported that 120 Indian ships had arrived at the port of Hormos in a single season. There are records of at least eight Indian trade missions to Rome from the Rule of Trajan (98–117 C.E.) to Justinian (527–565 C.E.). Pliny the Elder, among others, complained of the great drain on Roman gold and silver because of Romans’ voracious appetites for Indian luxuries. There are large finds of Roman coins in south India where they were once exchanged for jewels and spices. Pliny went on to point out that Indian wares cost a hundred times more in Roman markets than in India.

An Egyptian Greek merchant composed the Periplus, a practical handbook for merchants that describes the active India trade and the number of Indians living in Alexandria. The brisk trade between Rome and South India is further attested to by the presence of diaspora European communities who lived near the Kaveri River and around Madurai in the modern day state of Tamil Nadu. The Mediterranean world not only wanted Indian material goods but ideas as well. Clement of Alexandria (150–218 C.E.) accused many of his fellow Mediterranean philosophers of stealing “their philosophy from the barbarians [Indians].”

The philosopher Plontinus (204–270 C.E.), a major follower of Plato and arguably the most influential thinker on the early Christian Church, accompanied the Roman emperor during the wars against Persia so that he could study Indian philosophy. He credited Indian thought with having an important influence on the development of his own philosophy. Rome’s taste for Indian luxuries was so great that Indian manufacturers could not satisfy the demand and in turn established a lively trade with Southeast Asia where they bought goods to sell to Roman merchants. However, with the decline of the Roman Empire during the Gupta Empire, the European demand for Indian goods dramatically declined for nearly a thousand years.BuddhismWith the support of Emperor Ashoka (ruled c. 273-232 B.C.E), who convened the first Buddhist council in Patilaputra in 247 B.C.E., Buddhist missionaries ventured out from India to spread their faith to the northwest, southeast, and northeast. Soon Buddhist ascetics were known widely in Persia and Bactria. In Turkistan, Buddhism met other religious traditions such as Christianity, Zoroastrianism, andManicheanism.By the first century B.C.E. Theravada Buddhists were actively spreading their message in Southeast Asia. Both Buddhist and Brahmin missionaries popularized their faiths in parts of present day Indonesia, Burma (presently Myanmar), Cambodia, and then later in Siam (presently Thailand). Indian cultural exports helped shape Southeast Asian civilizations. Many of the new states in the region adopted the Indian idea of kingship embodied in the Ashokan ideal of chakravartin (see Background Essay 4, “Governance and the State Throughout Indian History,” by Craig Baxter).

The great and continuing popularity of the Indian epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in Thailand, Cambodia, and Indonesia also attest to the profound influence of Indian civilization. Buddhist architecture at Borobudur in Java, Indonesia, and the Hindu temples at Angkor Wat in Cambodia are among the greatest monuments these two Indian religions have inspired anywhere in the world.After the first century C.E., Mahayana converts in Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan were gradually turning these areas into Buddhist societies. Once installed in China, Chinese pilgrims traveled the Silk Roads and sea routes to India to study Buddhism and Indian culture firsthand. In the fourth century C.E. the Chinese monk Fa Xian noted on his journey to India that the central Asian city of Kashgar in the Tarim Basin was home to 2,000 Theravada monks and that Mahayana monks were even more numerous there. The dialogue between a Buddhist teacher and King Menander of a neighboring Indo-Greek state symbolizes the appeal Buddhism had for powerful rulers as well as for the middle classes, women, and workers. After the founding of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt in 331-23 B.C.E., many Buddhist monks lived in Egypt, especially in the capital at Alexandria.Buddhist cave sanctuaries at Ajanta and the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain cave temples and monasteries at Ellora were also replicated abroad.

By the time of the northern Wei Dynasty in China (460–465 C.E.), artists and artisans were constructing Buddhist caves at Yungang. Clearly these excavations were modeled on Ajanta. In several of the caves there are small representations of Hindu gods as well as of major figures of the Buddhist tradition. The style and approach of these excavated cave temples is unmistakably Indian in origin and testifies to the probable presence of Indian craftsmen working in north China.Similar worship and living spaces were constructed at many places along the Silk Road all the way to southern Korea at Kyongiu. These cave sanctuaries, along with the impressive number of images of the Buddha and Hindu gods that appear in Southeast Asia, further indicate the strong attraction of Indian artistic and architectural forms during the first seven centuries of the Common Era. By the eleventh century, Tibetans had accepted Buddhism as their major religion, adapted to local culture, and carried on as Lamaism. About this time Indian Buddhism also became a major force in neighboring Nepal.

Exchanges after the Guptas: “Southernization” During the period 200–600 C.E. Indian civilization was preeminent in Eurasia. Especially during the Gupta Empire (320–550 C.E.), a creative burst of literature, art, philosophy, and science provided India with attractive exports to send across Afro-Eurasia. Long before the Guptas, Indian philosophers had postulated that the world is made of atoms. An inscription found on an Ashoka Rock Pillar, carved about 256 B.C.E., had introduced the world’s first use of place numbers. By Gupta times the use of zero was well known in the subcontinent and in 873 C.E. the Muslim scholar Muhammad Ibn Musa al-Khwarazmi introduced the concept to mathematicians in Baghdad. By thethirteenth century this seminal mathematical idea had spread all the way to Europe.Cotton production was India’s major industry. Biblical passages refer to the high quality of Indian textiles. In the Latin Bible, Job is quoted as saying “that wisdom is even more enduring that the ‘dyed colors of India.” By 200 B.C.E., Romans were using the Sanskrit word for cotton (Latin, carbasina; Sanskrit, karpasa).

In the fifth century C.E. an Indonesian mission carried textiles from India to China. Indian Ocean traders knew that Indian cotton was so fine that it could be “drawn through a signet ring.”[i] Both the coarse and fine Indian manufactured cotton products found ready markets in Rome, China, Egypt, Africa, and Southeast Asia.Even after the decline of the Gupta Empire and the disruption caused by the migration of Huns into the northern Indian plain, India’s long tradition of ocean trade continued. The coastal kingdoms of Gujarat on the west and Bengal on the east, as well as several southern states, dominated Indian trading. By the early tenth century the Cholas were able to oust the Pallavas from their strongholds in southern India and consolidate a large southern kingdom of their own.

One hundred years later (1016 C.E.) the Cholas had subjugated the Malabar coast as well as most of what is now Tamil Nadu, giving them virtual control over all of southern India and its prosperous trade. At the time the Chola navy was the largest in the Indian Ocean and Chola merchants were second only to the Muslims in the region.Indian merchants continued to export precious stones, spices, iron, and animals; however, cotton cloth, finely woven and beautifully block printed, was their biggest export. We might even suggest that India during this era was “clothing the world.” Up until the sixteenth century Indian craftsmen and women produced the bulk of cotton cloth, and Arab and Indian traders dominated the cotton trade across the entire hemisphere. In the seventeenth century, European merchants found they could sell Indian textiles at a great profit at home.Muslim traders and travelers were largely responsible for carrying many of India’s original mathematical and scientific contributions to China and to the West (see Background Essay 5, “Math, Science, and Technology in India: From the Ancient to the Recent Past,” by Roddam Narasimha). Additionally, Indian jewelry, shipbuilding, and steel making were superior to any in the world. When the European “crusaders” invaded West Asia after 1095, they wielded steel swords manufactured in India. World historian Linda Shaffer has recently argued that India’s contributions to China and the West were so profound that the period between 300 and 800 C.E. could well be called “southernization.”[ii]

The Indian Ocean and Silk Roads trade facilitated the introduction ofmany new agricultural products into the Mediterranean and Europe. As early as the eighth century, Muslim traders began to introduce numerous new crops into these areas, most of which came from India. For the first time, cultivators in West Asia and the Mediterranean began to grow hard wheat, rice, sugarcane, and new varieties of sorghum. Farmers also began to plant new fruit crops from India such as bananas, oranges, lemons, mangos, watermelon, and coconut palms. New Indian vegetables introduced to the West included spinach, artichoke, and eggplant. Since the earlier agricultural system in these areas was based on a single winter crop, farmers could now grow summer crops as well. The impact of a new two-crop and even hree crop system led to new irrigation systems, changes in land tenure and taxation, and a significant increase in food production that in turn supported a growing population and the rise of new cities in the West. [iii]

The impact of Indian products on the West is evident in the familiar terms we use for these items and their Indian linguistic origins. The word “sugar” is derived from the Sanskrit term sharkara, “camphor” from the Sanskrit root word karpuram, and “tin” comes from the more technical term for its mineral, “cassiterite,” which can be traced to the Sanskrit term kasthira.Trade Under the Sultanate and MughalsThe trade advantages enjoyed by the Chola, Gujarati, and Bengali cotton manufacturers dramatically ended after 1200 when Muslim Turkish invaders from Afghanistan swept into northern India and established the sultanate of Delhi. In the following two centuries the new Turkish dynasties took over the Gujarati and Bengali trade and controlled much of the textile manufacturing as well.

However, in 1401 Gujarat declared independence from the sultanate and expanded its trade with the West. By the mid-fifteenth century, Ahmedabad, its capital city, was widely known as the “Venice of India.” [iv] The Gujarati trading castes called banias, riding the winds of Indian ocean trade, amassed such great riches that they were envied by both Indians and foreigners.From 1400 to 1750 Indian coastal cities, strung like a necklace from Gujarat in the northwest around the southern tip of India all the way to Bengal in the northeast, played a central role in the Eurasian trading system. By 1750 India’s population stood at 200 million and produced about a fourth of the world’s manufactures. Besides dominating the shipping lanes, Indian traders traveled by land along the Silk Roads as well as across the subcontinent. Caravans of up to 40,000 pack animals linked the port cities and brought manufactured goods from the hinterlands.

World historians Andre Gunder Frank and Kenneth Pomeranz have established that until 1800 India maintained a massively favorable balance of trade with most of the world, especially with Europe. [v] Indian products were traded to the north, west, and east: cotton textiles, indigo, silk cloth, iron and steel products, housewares, glass, rice, wheat, spices, incense, shawls, blankets, paper, and saltpeter. Europe and West Asia paid for this vast trade imbalance with gold but mostly silver, much of it dug by slaves from Spanish mines in Peru and Mexico.Colonialism and ImperialismDuring the height of Mughal rule (1526–1707 C.E.) artisans and entrepreneurs made India what one economic historian has called the “industrial workshop of the world”:

Indian economic and financial organization and techniques of production were far more advanced than in Europe. Only in the seventeenth century did European traders attempt to take over some cotton mills and begin to retail cloth in European cities. By the end of the century Indian luxury cloth was so prized by Europeans that France prohibited the import of chintz to protect its own textile industry. In spite of this ban, French consumers continued to buy Indian cloth. Few European producers could master the Indian art of mordant dyeing which created cloth of intense colors. [vi]

The enormous manufacturing and trade balance advantages that India had enjoyed for some 2,500 years were slowly wiped out as a result of British colonial control of the subcontinent. In 1750, with the start of significant British presence in the north, India at the end of Mughal power was still producing about one-fourth of the world’s manufactured goods. It was not until the nineteenth century that British manufacturers could cheaply produce cotton cloth that equaled Indian quality. By using Indian-grown cotton to make cloth by machine at home, they finally ended India’s superiority. With increasing political control, the British were even able to force Indian consumers to buy inferior British fabrics. By 1850, with the establishment of British control over political and economic life, India’s share of world manufacturing had sunk to a mere 8.6 percent of world production. At the time of India’s independence from England, India was producing only 1.5 percent of world manufactures. Clearly colonialism had “underdeveloped” India as an economic giant...

By the last decade of the twentieth century, India had transformed its economy into a free market system and was an active participant in the global system. As a nuclear power, India has moved to preeminence in South Asia. Home to the third largest supply of scientific and technical manpower after the U.S. and Russia, India now ranks among the world’s six largest industrial nations. .....Notes

i K.N. Chaudhuri. Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 49.

ii Lynda Shaffer. “Southernization.” Journal of World History 5:1 (1994).

iii Andrew Watson. Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques. Colorado: Westview Press, 1997.

iv Stanley Wolpert. A New History of India. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 119.

v Andre Gunder Frank. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998; Kenneth Pomeranz. The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

vi John Irwin and K. Brett. The Origins of Chintz. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1970. 3-4.

vii Quote by Mahatma Gandhi in Through Indian Eyes. Eds. Donald Johnson, Jean Johnson, and Leon Clark. New York: Cite Publications, 1999. 280.