Indian Shipping/Book 1/Part 2/Chapter 10

We have now set forth at some length the available evidences bearing on the history of the shipping, sea-borne trade, and maritime activity of India from the earliest times down to the period of the Musalman conquests in Northern India. We have considered the kind of maritime activity and commerce which India had in the long and ancient period before the Mauryan in the light of the evidences from both literary works and archaeological finds, and are quite prepared for the remarkable outburst of naval activity and growth of foreign intercourse which has been established beyond doubt or dispute to be the characteristic of the Mauryan period. We have next seen how the impetus given to the development of India's international life under the Mauryan Empire in the days of Chandra Gupta and Asoka survived that empire itself and continued to gain in force and volume amid the vicissitudes of her domestic politics. Dynasty after dynasty succeeded to the position of paramount power in the land, but the course of commerce ran smooth through all these changes. The opening centuries of the Christian era, which saw the political unity of India divided by the Kushans ​of the north and the Andhras of the south, with the Vindhyas as their mutual boundary, were also, as we have seen, the period of a remarkable growth of foreign commerce, especially with Rome, that was shared equally by the north and the south. This is shown, on the one hand, unmistakably by the books of Roman writers with their remarkably accurate details regarding Indian exports and imports, ports, and harbours, and, on the other hand, by the unimpeachable testimony of many finds of Roman coins both in Northern and Southern India.

A consideration of the kind of things which India sent abroad in exchange for the things she imported and a glance at the list of Indian exports and imports, such as that given in that most interesting work on Oriental commerce, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, will reveal certain peculiar features regarding the economical system of ancient India, to which has been traced the proverbial "wealth of Ind" by many scholars. As remarked by Major J. B. Keith, in a recent article in the Asiatic Quarterly Review (July, 1910), "the old prosperity of India was based on the sound principle, which is, that after clothing and feeding your own people, then of your surplus abundance give to the stranger." For it will appear that the chief items of Indian export were the "renowned art industrial fabrics, and exports were not multi​plied on the reprehensible practice of depleting a country of its food-stuffs." The result was the development of an external trade to which we owe, on the one hand, the great cities like Baalbek and Palmyra in the desert, and, on the other hand, "those great monuments of art which India was enabled to erect after clothing and feeding her own people." And of the many satrapies of Darius India was also, as we have seen, the only one which could afford to pay her tribute in gold to him. Finally, we should not miss the point of Pliny's famous complaint about allowing India to find a market for her superfluous manufactured luxuries in Rome and thereby suck out her wealth and drain her of gold.

It may also be noted in passing that it was her wonderful achievements in applied chemistry more than her skill in handicraft which enabled India to command for more than a thousand years (from Pliny to Tavernier) the markets of the East as well as the West, and secured to her an easy and universally recognized pre-eminence among the nations of the world in exports and manufactures. Some of the Indian discoveries in chemical arts and manufactures are indicated as early as the 6th century a.d. by Varahamihira in the Vrihat-Sańhitā. Thus he mentions several preparations of cements or powders called Vajralepa, "cements strong as the thunderbolt," for ​which there was ample use in the temple architecture of the times, whose remains still testify to the adamantine strength of these metal or rock cements. Varāhamihira also alludes to the experts in machinery and the professional experts in the composition of dyes and cosmetics, and even artificial imitations of natural flower-scents which bulked so largely in the Indian exports to Rome. Broadly speaking, there were three great discoveries in applied chemistry to which India owed her capture of the world markets, viz. (1) the preparation of fast dyes for textile fabrics by the treatment of natural dyes like manjishtha with alum and other chemicals; (2) the extraction of the principle of indigotin from the indigo plant by a process "which, however crude, is essentially an anticipation of modern chemical methods"; and (3) the tempering of steel "in a manner worthy of advanced metallurgy, a process to which the mediaeval world owed its Damascus swords.^[1]

Besides the Roman trade, and the trade with the West generally, there was also developed along with it a trade with the East. The West alone could not absorb the entire maritime activity of India, which found another vent in a regular traffic in the Eastern waters between Bengal and Ceylon, Kalinga, ​and Suvarṇabhūmi, and a complete navigation, in fact, of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. This Eastern maritime enterprise reached its climax in the age of the Gupta emperors, when India once more, as in the days of Chandra Gupta and Asoka, asserted herself as a dominant factor in Asiatic politics, and even showed symptoms of a colonizing activity that culminated in the civilization of Java, Sumatra, and Cambodia, and laid the foundation of a Greater India. Towards the later days of the Gupta Empire, Indian maritime activity in the Eastern waters had a vastly extended field, embracing within its sphere not only Farther India and the islands of the Indian Archipelago, but also China, with which a regular and ceaseless traffic by way of the sea was established and long continued. Lastly, we find the sphere of this Eastern naval activity widening still further during the days of Harshavardhana and Pulakeshi, the Chalukyas and the Cholas, till Japan in the farthest East is brought within the range of Indian influence, and becomes the objective of Indian missionary and colonizing activity.