Radha Kumud Mukhopadhyay

“ Through ages India thus occupied a unique position in the commercial world as the main supplier of the world's luxuries. As a consequence she throughout had the balance of trade clearly in her favour, a balance which could only be settled by the export of treasure from European and other countries that were commercially indebted to her. For India desired nothing which foreigners could give her but the precious metals. ”

“ There are a few very fine representations of old Indian ships and boats among the far-famed paintings of the Buddhist cave-temples at Ajantā, whither the devotees of Buddhism, nineteen centuries or more ago, retreated from the distracting cares of the world to give themselves up to contemplation. ”

“ For it is a commonplace of history, and quite stands to reason, that no commerce can spring up, and much less thrive, especially in early times, unless it is fostered by a national shipping. Accordingly, the direct proofs that are available regarding Indian shipping and naval activity will have precedence over the indirect ones, and they will include illustrations of the typical ships and boats that are represented in old Indian art, in sculpture and painting, and on coins. ”

“ The evidences used have been both literary and monumental. For the collection of literary evidences I have had to be at great pains in ransacking the vast field of Sanskrit literature as well as Pali (especially the Jātakas) throughout which they are scattered, and then in piecing the evidences together. The Sanskrit texts, as well as the Pali, I have studied both in the original and in translations. ”

“ The great and almost impregnable barriers on the north are pierced by mountain-passes which have been throughout used as the pathways of commerce and communication with the external world. Towards the south the ocean from its very nature proved a far more effective and fatal barrier to the cultivation of foreign relations, till the rapid development of national shipping triumphed over that obstacle and converted the ocean itself into a great highway of international intercourse and commerce. ”

“ There for centuries the wild ravine and the basaltic rocks were the scene of an application of labour, skill, perseverance, and endurance that went to the excavation of these painted palaces, standing to this day as monuments of a boldness of conception and a defiance of difficulty as possible, we believe, to the modern as to the ancient Indian character. ”

“ Vijaya landed in Ceylon "on the day that the successor of former Buddhas reclined in the arbour of the two delightful Sal-trees to attain Nirvāṇa," approaching the island from southwards, and became the founder of the "Great Dynasty." Vijaya then sent a present of precious stones to the king of Pandya, and caused to be brought a princess whom he took to wife, and also seven hundred women attendants whom his followers married. ”

“ When it is remembered that about 80 per cent. of the gold raised throughout the world is from alluvial washings, and when this fact is considered in connection with the reflection that wide tracts in Australia and America, formerly richly productive, are now deserted, being covered with exhausted tailings, it can be conceived how these regions in India—and there are very many of them—which are known to be auriferous, may, in the lapse of time, after yielding large supplies of gold, have become too exhausted to be of much present consideration. ”

“ It is remarkable that when Mahmud of Ghazni invaded India, a fleet was collected on the Indus to oppose his, consisting of the same number of vessels. We learn from the Ayeen Akbari that the inhabitants of this part of India still continue to carry on all their communication with each other by water; the inhabitants of the Circar of Tatta alone (in Sindh) have not less than 40,000 vessels of various construction. ”

“ Then, also, the two great civilizing forces of the world that next arose did not fail to touch India and contribute to her making, viz. the Islamic culture and civilization, and the European, which, following in the wake of foreign invasions and commerce, has continued to influence Indian thought and life to this day. India, therefore, is a favoured country where all the diversities of human culture have met to build up an extraordinarily rich and synthetic culture. Thus intercourse is as much a characteristic of the history of India as isolation. ”

“ The Kushan Period in the north and the Andhra Period in the south, extending roughly from the 2nd century B.C. to the 3rd century A.D.—This was the period when Roman influence on India was at its height; in fact, the whole of the southern peninsula under the Andhra dynasty was in direct communication with Rome, while the conquests in Northern India tended still further to open up trade with the Roman Empire, so that Roman gold poured into all parts of India in payment for her silks, spices, gems, and dye-stuffs. ”

“ Her supply of gold she obtained not as did Europe from America in the 16th century by conquest or rapine, but by the more natural and peaceful method of commerce, "by the exchange of such of her productions as among the Indians were superfluities but were at the same time not only highly prized by the nations of Western Asia, Egypt, and Europe, but were obtainable from no other quarter except India, or from the farther East by means of the Indian trade." ”

“ It is hardly necessary to point out that pearls could not have been procured without the aid of adventurous mariners and boats that could breast the ocean wave and brave the perils of the deep. According to Varāhamihira, Garuḍa Purāṇa, and Bhoja, pearl-fishing was carried on in the whole of the Indian Ocean as far as the Persian Gulf, and its chief centres were off the coasts of Ceylon, Pāralaukika, Saurāshṭra, Tāmraparṇī, Pārasava, Kauvera, Pāndyavāṭaka, and Haimadesha. According to Agastya, the chief centres of Indian pearl-fishing were in the neighbourhood of Ceylon, Arabia, and Persia. ”

“ They are derived from old Indian art—from Indian sculpture and painting—and also from Indian coins. These evidences, though meagre in comparison with the available literary evidences, native and foreign alike, have, however, a compensating directness and freshness, nay, the permanence which Art confers, creating things of beauty that remain a joy for ever. ”

“ Besides Sanskrit and Pali, I have been able to gather some very valuable evidences from old Tamil literature with the help of a book by the late Mr. Kanakasabhai Pillay, now unfortunately out of print, called The Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years Ago. I have had also to consider and use all the evidences bearing on my subject that are contained in classical literature, made accessible to Indian students by the translations of McCrindle. Old Bengali literature, too, has been laid under contribution in connection with the account of Bengali maritime activity. ”

“ The colonization of Java was completed, and the great temple of Borobudur remained a standing monument of the hold which Buddhism had on that island. The field of Indian maritime enterprise was extended as far as Japan, which is testified to by Japanese tradition and official annals made accessible through the efforts of Japanese scholars like Dr. Taka-kusu. The record of I-Tsing, the famous Chinese traveller, contains many interesting details regarding Indian maritime activity in the Eastern waters and intercourse with China in the latter half of the 7th century. ”

“ The well-known story of the churning of the ocean, in the Mahābhārata, in the boldness of its conception is not without a significance. In the Droṇa Parva there is a passage alluding to shipwrecked sailors who "are safe if they get to an island." [8] In the same Parva there is another passage in which there is a reference to a "tempest-tossed and damaged vessel in a wide ocean." [9] In the Karṇa Parva we find the soldiers of the Kauravas bewildered like the merchants "whose ships have come to grief in the midst of the unfathomable deep." ”

“ And if we study that history carefully from the earliest times we shall easily recognize that contact or intercourse with other countries has been a no less potent factor in its making than isolation. It has been well said that none of the greatest movements in the world which have influenced the history of mankind have failed to touch India and contribute to the development and richness of her extraordinarily varied culture and civilization. ”

“ India thus began her sea-borne trade with the very beginning of recorded time, and the trade of the Ṛig-Veda was very probably carried on with countries on the west like Chaldaea, Babylon, and Egypt. I do not feel myself competent to deal with this subject of India's prehistoric trade relations; Egyptologists or Assyriologists alone can do full justice to it. ”

“ I have come across other representations of ships and boats in Indian sculpture and painting. In the course of a journey I made through Orissa and South India I noticed among the sculptures of the Temple of Jagannath at Puri a fine, well-preserved representation of a royal barge shown in relief on stone, of which I got a sketch made. ”

“ Sea-going merchants, availing themselves of the monsoons, were in the habit, at the beginning of the 7th (and perhaps at the end of the 8th) century B.C., of trading from ports on the southwest coast of India (Sovira at first, afterwards Supparaka and Bharukaccha) to Babylon, then a great mercantile emporium. (2) These merchants were mostly Dravidians, not Aryans. Such Indian names of the goods imported as were adopted in the West (Solomon's ivory, apes, and peacocks, for instance, and the word "rice") were adaptations not of Sanskrit or Pali, but of Tamil words. ”

“ The vitality and individuality of Indian civilization were already fully developed during the spacious times of Gupta imperialism, which about the end of the 7th century even transplanted itself to the farther East, aiding in the civilization of Java, Cambodia, Siam, China, and even Japan. ”

“ In truth, the whole of India, in spite of assertions to the contrary made by some geographers, is easily perceived to be a single country endowed with a sharply defined individuality, and beneath her truly manifold and bewildering variety there is a fundamental geographical unity, a complete territorial synthesis. ”

“ It seems probable that Aryan merchants from the mouth of the Indus must have accompanied the Phoenicians and Solomon's servants in their voyages down the Malabar coast towards Ophir (wherever Ophir may have been) or at least have taken part in the trade. ... It appears certain from notices contained in the Vedas that the Aryans of the age of Solomon practised foreign trade in ocean-going vessels, but it remains uncertain to what parts their ships sailed. ”

“ The Indian artist has used Raphael's treatment for Raphael's reason; preferring, by reduced and conventional indication of the inanimate and merely accessory vessels, to find space for expression, intelligible to his public, of the elephants and horses and their riders necessary to his story."
Vijaya Sińha, according to legend, went (B.C. 543) to Ceylon with a large following. The Rakshasis or female demons inhabiting it captivated them by their charms; but Vijaya, warned in a dream, escaped on a wonderful horse. He collected an army, gave each soldier a magic verse (mantra) , and returned. ”

“ Above all comprehension and beyond all human insight is that mysterious impulse which gave birth to the momentous movement of Aryan migration and expansion, so big with consequences, and by far the most important event in the world's history. ”

“ And so do we find, as a matter of fact, in various foreign works abundant allusions to India's commerce, arts, and manufactures, indicating the glorious position she once occupied and for long maintained as the Queen of the Eastern Seas. ”

“ These sculptured types of a 6th or 7th century Indian ship—and it is the characteristic of Indian art to represent conventional forms or types rather than individual things—carry our mind back to the beginning of the 5th century A.D., when a similar vessel also touched the shores of Java after a more than three months' continuous sail from Ceylon with 200 passengers on board including the famous Chinese pilgrim Fa-Hien. ”

“ Herodotus also speaks of the inclusion of a part of India as the twentieth satrapy of the Emperor Darius, [27] a fact which in the opinion of scholars accounts for the traces of Persian influence [28] on old Indian art, architecture, and administrative methods. Among Indian products Herodotus noted the wool which certain wild trees bear instead of fruit, "that in beauty and quality excels that of sheep," [29] of which Indians make their clothing. ”

“ She cultivated trade relations not only with the countries of Asia, but also with the whole of the then known world, including the countries under the dominion of the Roman Empire, and both the East and the West became the theatre of Indian commercial activity and gave scope to her naval energy and throbbing international life. ”

“ In the days of Solomon (about 1015 B.C.) there could be supplied from India alone the ivory, garments, armour, spices, and peacocks which found customers in ancient Syria. In the Book of I Kings it is stated [17] how the ships of Solomon came to Ophir and fetched from thence gold, plenty of almug trees, precious stones, and the like. In the Book of Ezekiel, which dwells on the commerce of Tyre, there are mentioned commodities which are undoubtedly of Indian origin. ”

“ It will thus be seen that instead of the rigid isolation apparently decreed to her by nature, we find a remarkably active intercourse with foreign countries established by the efforts of man, and a conquest achieved over the natural environment. ”