Vol. 12 · pages 31–35

10 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES Royal purchases were fixed by a Royal valuer who would “also assess the merchants for the duty of a twentieth, presumably ad valorem, on each consignment of native merchandise, and of a tenth ad valorem plus a sample, on each consignment imported from overseas Finally, he would have to assess merchants for their specific commutation of the “rajaksaya” viz. one article per month sold to the king at a certain discount”’ Later on however prices came to be fixed: for Manu says that the king on every 5th or 9th day fixed the rates for the purchase and sale of marketable commodities. The introduction of money in India whether it was borrowed or invented at home is a matter of great controversy : but whatever may be said on this, it is true that the use of money in India was early known for “the whole of the Buddhist literature testifies to the fact that the ancient systems of simple barter as well as of reckoning value of cows, or rice measures had for the most part been replaced by the use of metal currency, carrying well understood and generally accepted exchange value”. Currency counted of coins but was not regulated by Royal authority. There was gold coinage for the most part and “all marketable commodities and services had a value expressible in terms of cash”. Banking was not very highly developed—there was no taboo on loaning of money and according to Gautama interest was sought in six different ways.1 With such high type of economic development it is but natural that there should be commercial expansion of colonization by the Early Hindoos. Historians however have been very reluctant to accept the fact : they have either judging the present by the present rule upon the entire Hindoo population as incapable people or have exerted their utmost ingenuity to discount any evidence that antagonises with their preconceived bias. Isolation of India has been a trump card with them and they use it as often as they can. Environmental conditions do delimit the activity 1 The information on the early Economic Organization of India has been borrowed from the article in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Researches for 1901, p. 859 by Caroline Foley Rhys Davids M. A.

11COMMERCIAL RELATIONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST of a people subject to it but it could be foolish to say with Hirder “that history is geography set in motion.” We might hold to the truth in the statement that geographic conditions have condemned India to her lot and yet condemn the hyperbole in it We may agree, if we like, with Montesquieu when he ascribes the “fixity” of oriental manners, customs and religion to its warm climate. We may believe in Buckle when he holds nature’s overpowering mountains and forests in all their stupefying greatness as are to be found in India responsible for the abnormal workings of imagination and superstition or we may follow the scientific geographer when he asserts that India has been condemned to isolation on account of her geographic location : isolated from China by the Himalaya mountains and from Persia and Afghanistan by the Hindu Kush mountains. She has a long waterfront but the eastern and the western ghats that fringe the coast from within and cut off the call of the ever beaconing sea to maritime activity. All these allegations perhaps have a modicum of truth in them: but it would be a mistake to make strong arguments out of them. Barriers, no matter how strong, are never insuperable to man. He has tried everywhere to control them and has succeeded in his effort. Hemmed in from all sides, the early Indians burst asunder all impediments natural or otherwise and launched into the Indian ocean at a very early date. The Indian ocean has much in common with the mediterranean. Mr. Zimnurn argues that “land locked on all sides . . . . . . . . . the mediterranean seems in summer as gentle as an inland lake . . . . . . It is in fact double-natured . . . . . . . a lake when the Gods are kind, and the ocean when they are spiteful.” 1 The Indian ocean which is but the enlarged mediterranean sea with its southern coast removed is neither a ocean nor a lake but is according to Ratzel only half an ocean. The inclosed character of its northern part deprives it of the hydrospheric and atmospheric peculiarities of a true ocean 1 The Great Common Wealth, p. 20.

12 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES and the winds and currents ran over it in an unorganized way owing to the close by lands. The North-east and Southeast monsoons soon enabled the merchants to drag forth in the mid-ocean instead of hugging to the coast. “From the dawn of history the northern Indian ocean was a thoroughfare. Alexander the Great’s rediscovery of the old sea route to the orient sounds like a modern event in relation to the gray ages behind it. Along this thoroughfare Indian colonists, traders and priests carried the elements of Indian civilization to the easternmost Sunda isles; and oriental wares, sciences and religions moved westward to the margin of Europe and Africa. The Indian ocean produced a civilization of its own, with which it coloured a vast semi-circle of land reaching from Java to Abyssinia, and more faintly, owing to the wider divergence of race, the further stretch from Abyssinia to Mozambique.” 1 The Hindus became the dominant commercial nation of the Indian ocean long before the great development of Arabian sea power, and later shared the trade of the East African coast with the merchants of Oman and Yemen. Today they form a considerable mercantile class in the ports of Mascat, Aden, Zanzibar, Pemba and Natal.” 2 With this preliminary disquisition about the natural resources and the economic development of India we will trace her commercial intercourse from very early times with other countries of ancient civilization. To begin with Egypt. At the outset it would be better to premise that the evidence of a commercial intercourse between India and other countries at the dim dawn of history is very flimsy and is embedded either in tradition or in articles excavated from early ruins: The evidence however ripens into positiveness with the advance of time. Situated in the most rarely endowed location in the world the Egyptians were economically independent of the rest of the people—and it is even said that they prided economic self-sufficiency to such an extent that they tabooed foreign intercourse; but this is carrying things too far and though we have no positive records to disprove the statement, the foreign articles found in the process of excavation form a strong proof against it. 1 Ellen Churchill Semple—“ Influences of Geographic Environment”, p. 309. 2 Ibid, p. 268.

13COMMERCIAL RELATIONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST It is a matter of great controversy whether or not the Egyptians had direct trade with India. Hypercriticism has ranged on both sides. Herodotus says that Sesostris whom the Gardiner Wilkin son identifies with Ramses II fleeted out a strong fleet and sailed beyond the straits into the Indian ocean conquering all the coastal countries while his land forces carried their sword as far as the Ganges. 1 Long before the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, India had commercial intercourse with her and the port of Philoteras was the emporium of that early trade : “Whether they (the Egyptians) had a direct communication with India at the same early epoch, or were supplied through Arabia with the merchandise of that country, it is not possible now to determine: but even an indirect trade was capable of opening to them a source of immense of wealth; and that the productions of India did actually reach Egypt we have positive testimony from the tombs of Thebes” 2 and “the productions of India already came to Egypt at the early period of Joseph’s arrival in the country is evident from the spices which the Ishmaclities were carrying to sell there : and the amethysts, hacmatile, lapislazuti, and other objects found at Thebes at the time of the Third Thothmus and succeeding pharaohs argue that the intercourse was constantly kept up.” 3 Culture in all times follows the wake of Commerce. This is more true of ancient times than of the modern. The caravans of the olden times were not only the carriers of wares but also of civilization : they dissiminated and universalized it. This commercial intercourse with India greatly affected the architecture of Egypt so much so that “James Fergusson (History of Architecture I, 142-3) notes that the great monolith at Axum is of Indian inspiration; “the idea Egyptian, but the details Indian. An Indian ninestoried pagoda, translated in Egyptian in the first century of the Christian era !” He notes its likeness to such Indian temples as Bodh-Gaya, and says, it represents “that curious marriage of Indian with Egyptian art which we would 1 cf. William Robertson “Disquisition on India” ,(1812) p. 6. 2 Gardinaer Wilkinson, “ The Ancient Egyptians”, Vol. I. p. 161. 3 Gardiner Wilkinson, “ The Ancient Egyptions”, Vol. I. p. 250.

14 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES expect to find in the spot where the two people came in contact, and enlisted architecture to symbolize their commercial union.”1 It will not be out of place to note the relation of the Dravidians, the earliest inhabitants of India though by no means aborigines with the people of western Asia. Mr. Gustav Oppert says, “It is established now, beyond any doubt, through the decipherment of the Cunciform inscription, that the Turanian Empires had advanced to a high degree of culture. This civilization, though tainted with strange materialism proved itself nevertheless able to develop to a high degree of perfection certain branches of arts and science. To these Turanians who differed much among each other in idiom belong also to the Dravidians of India of our days, who in those times occupied Ariana and Persia. In Europe, these Turanians appear to be represented by the Esthonians, and in many places of western and central Asia, they formed the substratum of the population, while they supplied in China the ground work of the civilization of the celestial empire.” These Turanians “had founded empires throughout the old world. The home of the Turanians is assumed to have been the country round Lake Aral. Thence they spread over the greatest part of Asia, reigned there paramount for at least 1500 years.” The Egyptians, the Assyrians the Akkadians, the Sumerians, the Phoenicians are all branches of the same Turanian race. “About 250 years after the Egyptian empire had been established i.e. 2500 B. C, and after the Akkadian dynasty had reigned for a long period in Babylon the Aryans invaded Chaldea, and pressing at the same time on the Kannanites of the Persian Gulf and the Dravidians in Persia, drove the former towards the North-west and the latter to the Southeast to India”. The Aryans when they invaded India met with a stubborn resistance from these Dravidians. For “they did not go beyond the frontiers of the Punjab till the fifteenth century before Christ”. 2 Next in importance and chronology 1 “The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea” , Translated and annotated by W.H. Scoff, p. 66-67. 2 cf. Gustav oppent, “On the Ancient Commerce of India” in “The Madras Journal of literature and Science” 1878, pp. 189, 90, 91; for parallels between Malbarian and Egyptian customs cf “Primitive Civilizations” by E. J. Simcox Vol. I. pp. 183, 550, 554, 569, 570, 574, Vol. II. p. 473.