Private Traders in Medieval India

Title: Private Traders in Medieval India: British and Indian

Author: Jagadish Narayan Sarkar

Publisher: Bibliophil Kolkata, 2015 (First)

ISBN: 9789380477060

Pages: 304

Maritime trade of European commercial establishments after Columbus’ discovery of America paved the way for the emergence of colonialism. In India, the British were comparatively late to enter the trading ring, behind the Portuguese and the Dutch. However, like the proverbial hare and the tortoise, the British outrun the other European powers in the race for territorial sovereignty in this subcontinent. The English East India Company’s transformation from an overseas trading firm to the ruler of the land took place in 150 years from the death of Emperor Akbar. This impressive success story is, surprisingly, not accompanied by an efficient trading policy or stunning military might. On both these fronts, they availed the services of Indians as soldiers to fight the company’s battles and as financiers to bankroll its trade deals. On the policy front too, the company’s stand was shaky, as most of its employees indulged in private trade at their employer’s expense. Such avaricious deals transcended the hierarchical delineations as people on all levels tried their hand to make a quick profit. This book seeks to make an analytical study of the origin, nature, scope and impact of the private trading activities of the English and the measures of the company and its factors abroad for their regulation and suppression. This was first published as a monograph at the Indian History Congress in its Silver Jubilee session at Pune in 1963. This was thoroughly revised and enlarged by adding a section on private trade in Mughal India and outside, dealing with the activities of the Indian ruling classes and officials as well as the business circles. Jagadish Narayan Sarkar was a member of Bihar Educational Service for thirty years and later served Jadavpur University as professor. The Indian History Congress elected him as president in 1976. A prolific contributor to journals in English and Bengali, Dr. Sarkar is the author of numerous scholarly and widely acclaimed books.

The recruits to the East India Company belonged to lower gentry or merchants’ families. They were intelligent, moderately educated and competent. Even with this, their salaries were not proportionately high for the risks involved in a foreign land. Having to endure the blistering climate in India was no mean task, but the prevalence of contagious tropical diseases which often proved fatal was enhanced by poor sanitation as a result of lack of hygienic awareness and scarce financial means. There was always a very high likelihood of returning home in a coffin or worse still, ending up in a grave in the tropics. Naturally, the people were disposed to make some quick money other than salaries which they can repatriate comparatively easily. Private trade was the solution they hit upon in which the goods the company monopolized were clandestinely traded by the clerks and officers, sometimes in the company’s own ships and at times with its own cash. Collusion between the venal officials and seamen of transporting vessels made it impossible for appraisers to tell the legitimate cargo of the company and private merchandise apart. Stern measures were instituted by the company, but the fact that they had had to be issued frequently indicates that those were not very effective.  Some of the rules were later relaxed in order to bring the trade above board, but profiteering went on as usual. The private traders illegally made use of firmans and parwanas issued by local rulers to the company to claim waiver of customs duty for their private consignments. This made their goods more competitive than native traders’. The company was in difficulty here too, since the private traders either bought up produce so that the company’s ships had not much to load, or inundated the markets with cheaper ware which made the official warehouses bristle with unsold goods.

Private trade was a common feature of Mughal administration as well. Court officials, port supervisors, provincial governors, princes of the royal household and even Emperor Aurangzeb himself employed trade with overseas markets to make extra money. This was euphemistically called sauda-i-khas (private trade) as against sauda-i-am (trade in open market). The Mughal practice of farming out taxation of provinces and commercial centres to the highest bidder added to the problem. Aurangzeb was only following in the footsteps of his father Shah Jahan who indulged in trade while serving as governor of Gujarat. The major articles of commerce in those days were spices, cotton goods, tea, silk, sugar, copper, iron, lead, tin, coffee, salt-petre, indigo, opium and diamonds. The aristocrats maintained monopoly of a few items including salt-petre as it was the chief ingredient in making gunpowder and exercised intimidating tactics to make the ordinary traders do as dictated. The Bengal governors made a monopoly on staples and salt. This nudged the prices ever higher, causing distress to common people. Unfair means and rampant corruption made the situation unbearable for the populace.

Indians formed the backbone of English trading networks before 1757. The Europeans couldn’t manage on their own the intricate links between middlemen and producers of the country. Subsequently, they exercised much influence in the presidency towns of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. After Plassey, the administration of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa came in British hands and the experience of 150 years was quite sufficient for them to discard the local assistants as a whole. The trading communities bore the brunt of this rejection. The Parsis, Gujaratis, Bohras and the Moplahs controlled the trade on the West coast while Chettis and groups of Muslim traders dominated commerce on the East.

The book envelopes the time period from the beginning of seventeenth century to late-eighteenth century. The language is terse and not easily amenable to pleasurable reading. The string of footnotes on each page distracts the reader. A lot of typographical errors are seen in the text. The bibliography is impressive and comprehensively covers the period under discussion. The book includes an exhaustive index too.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star

Partisans of Allah

Title: Partisans of Allah – Jihad in South Asia

Author: Ayesha Jalal

Publisher: Permanent Black, 2008 (First)

ISBN: 9788178242316

Pages: 373

Many parts of the world we live in are awash in jihadi violence where a group of ultra-orthodox Muslims kill people of their own religion as well as others. The concept of jihad is sanctified by the Koran and enjoined as a duty of every Muslim believer. But what exactly is jihad? The gory pattern we see enacted in the Middle East is a violent one in which its perpetrators believe it to be their religious obligation to kill non-believers and Muslims themselves who don’t subscribe to their brand of orthodoxy. Apologists of Islam denounce the terrorists on the basis of religious precepts enshrined in the Koran. They maintain that there are two kinds of jihad, the greater one (jihad al-akbar) which focuses on the moral uplift of the individual and the lesser one (jihad al-asghar) which sanctions violence in rare, specified instances. Unfortunately, the voice of the pacifists is submerged in the din of carnage orchestrated by jihadis who nurture hopes of usurping worldly power as part of the package. This book dwells on the religious significance of jihad, its origins in South Asia in the eighteenth century, its growth in the intervening period and the takeover of Pakistan by extremist outfits in the 2000s. Ayesha Jalal is the grandniece of the renowned Pakistani fictionist Saadat Hasan Manto and is the Mary Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University. She is the author of many books on Islamic history and the dogmatic underpinnings of jihad.

The literal meaning of ‘jihad’ is the ‘striving for a worthy and ennobling cause’, which has over the years turned into holy war against non-Muslims. Even though apologists studiously argue that jihad as killing people (qittal) is not approved in Islam’s holy traditions, the sad fact is that pious Muslims in all ages looked upon it as a sacred duty. Even in the first century of Islam, the Kharajite sect defined jihad as legitimate violence against the enemies of Islam (p.8). Muslim legists defined jihad as armed struggle to legitimize the wars of conquest fought by the Umayyad (661 – 750 CE) and Abbasid (750 – 1258 CE) caliphs. All these cases of religious violence make the readers wonder whether it is indeed sanctioned in scriptures as claimed by the terrorists. Otherwise, why do people living in widely varying topographies as Indonesia and Egypt and in as diverse a time spanning fourteen centuries stumble upon the same idea of jihad as violence to subjugate people of other religions? Jalal bends over backwards to justify jihad to mollify modern sensibilities. This appears as nothing more than the butcher’s assistant caressing the animal to be slaughtered while the butcher sharpens his knife. She claims that the concept of a ‘dharma yuddha’ (just war) in Hinduism and similar constructs in Judeo-Christian tradition is akin to jihad. But the acknowledged point remains that although all Muslims are not terrorists, all terrorists are Muslims.

That jihad, probably in its less violent incarnation, is supported by a leading intellectual of his times such as Mohammed Iqbal is galling for us. The poet and philosopher who is also the spiritual founder of Pakistan penned a poem titled ‘jihad’ in which he impelled his compatriots to rise up against British colonialism in a jihad. Unfortunately, most such jihads against the British invariably turned against hapless Hindus and Sikhs once the jihadis get to experience a taste of British weapons. Jalal extols the virtues of the Islamic system which grants followers of other religions the status of zimmis upon payment of a tax called jizya. This is claimed to be a ‘substantial improvement’ over slavery! The Hanafi code which consecrates this barbarity is termed ‘liberal’. Those unfortunate people ending up as zimmis silently suffer under the yoke of Islamic domination. They are not allowed to join the armed forces of the country, their testimony is discounted in a court of law, and are forever doomed to be second-rate citizens. Their voice is not allowed to rise outside their own homes. Jalal’s brazen upholding of Hanafi jurisprudence as ‘relatively broadminded’ is disgusting when she points out that it protects the property of non-Muslim people in an Islamic state, but goes on to add that their womenfolk would be treated as war booty just in the same way as jewels and money (p.34). Civilized society should pose here a moment to reflect on the moral corrosion in an Islamic society in which a western-educated author – that too, a woman – sanitizes such savage doctrines and repackage it as wisdom of the forefathers of Islam.

The book’s greatest significance is its crystal clear narration of the growth of jihadism in India. The Mughal Empire started disintegrating right at the death of the bigoted emperor Aurangzeb’s death. Hindu states of Marathas and Rajputs began to extract their revenge for centuries of oppression. A religious scholar, Shah Waliullah became incensed at this slight and exhorted his disciples to wage jihad against the infidels. He advised them to avoid the company of non-Muslims of devilish composition, proposed harsh measures against the Hindus and Shias, suggested banning of Holi and Muharram festivals and urged rulers to confiscate Hindu wealth. He tempted Ahmed Shah Abdali of Afghanistan to invade India and destroy its infidels. He assured god’s recompense to the invader in the hereafter, at the same time offering incalculable booty by pillaging his own countrymen. Waliullah was a proponent of Wahabism and believed steadfastly in its core principles. He had enthusiastic followers in India. Sayyid Ahmed Barelvi, Shah Ismail and 600 of his followers embarked on a jihad against Punjab’s Sikh kingdom in a bid to compel ‘Ranjit Singh to turn Muslim or cut off his head’ (p. 90). Both of them were killed in the battle at Balakote in 1831, but their tombs still continue to inspire suicide bombers operating in Afghanistan and Kashmir. The jihadi leaders preached strange ideologies. Sayyid Ahmed Barelvi insisted that any girl continuing unmarried for twelve days after attaining puberty would become the property of the mujahideen (jihadi fighters) (p.102). Maulana Ahmed Raza Khan gave out a ruling that presented with the choice of giving water to a thirsty infidel or a dog, a believer should make the offering to the dog (p.146).

The book exposes the true colours of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who passed off as a secular leader of the Indian National Congress but harboured notions of jihad. The author herself is surprised at his being mistaken as secular, whereas he was a proponent of Islamic universalism. As per this ideology, Muslims are part of an Ummah, which is a conglomeration of believers cutting across national boundaries. Azad’s logic was that Indian Muslims should take offense at the ill-treatment of his coreligionists in Egypt or in the Balkans. When India reeled in the aftermath of the First World War, Azad and his cronies advocated for an assault against the British for their unseating of the Sultan of Turkey! This solves another puzzle in Indian history. The Jalianwala Bagh massacre occurred in response to a popular uprising against the Rowlatt Act which curtailed freedom of expression. But why should the British impose such a draconian law in India after the war in which India wholeheartedly sided with them and Gandhi in fact participated in the war effort? The hidden reason was the revolutionary activities of the jihadis who plotted to subvert British power. Their underground operations forced the government to put forward harsh measures that ended in the brutal genocide at Jalianwala Bagh in which none of the jihadis were killed. They would shed blood only for religion. However, there were some among them who exhibited compassion and mercy to their brethren among other religions. Maulana Fazl-i-Haq Khairabadi was one such personality. Maulvi Chiragh Ali maintained that Islam was being judged by the standards of Sharia created by men rather than the ethical principles of Koran. Sharia had not been held sacred or unchangeable by enlightened Mohammedans in any age since its compilation in the fourth century of Hejira.

Ayesha Jalal’ style is not amenable to easy reading, but offers some elegant contemporary prose. A glossary given at the end is redundant as she clarifies each new term as and when it is first encountered. Detailed notes are compiled after the main text, but don’t include a bibliography. A good index also accompanies the text which covers the entire range of jihadis from Shah Waliullah in the eighteenth century to Hafiz Mohammed Saeed of the twenty-first.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Che Guevara

Title: Che Guevara – A Revolutionary Life

Author: Jon Lee Anderson

Publisher: Grove Press, 1997 (First)

ISBN: 9780802135582

Pages: 814

The end of cold war in the 1990s and the earth-shattering crash of communism in the Soviet Union threw leftist movements around the world into a tizzy. All their theory and its practical implementation was no more and they faced the unenviable and daunting task of facing the future without the support of an overarching and viable ideology. This problem was solved to some extent by resurrecting the legacy of a revolutionary hero who was killed in battle a quarter of a century ago. Che Guevara fit the bill perfectly. He was young when he died for his ideology, uncorrupted by any long tenure in power and upholding the principles of equality and freedom from exploitation. This provided a timeless appeal to the masses. Che’s portrait is now ubiquitous in leftist circles, but few know of the man behind that visage. Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (1928 – 1967) was born in Argentina and grew to be the face of communism and revolution across the globe. With painstaking research spanning many years and continents, Jon Lee Anderson tells the story of Che Guevara in this great book. Anderson is an American biographer, author and staff writer for ‘The New Yorker’. He has reported from many war zones in the world and currently resides in England.

Che Guevara was born in an aristocratic family in Argentina who later fell on bad times. His birth was marked by a fortuitous coincidence as in the same hour of Che’s birth, a striking dockworker in the town had died of gunshot wounds. Anderson provides an in-depth coverage of the revolutionary’s childhood. He was very much attached to his mother Celia, who shared many of his bold features and chronic asthma. Che was reckless and brimming with energy. Once he crossed a yawning chasm deftly balancing himself on a length of narrow beam laid across it. However, his teenage was not marked by any heroic deeds. He exhibited a paradoxical behavior of expressing radical-sounding declamations while displaying a complete apathy about political activism. Guevara’s home was a place where his mother brought all kinds of people and was ever ready to share the meals with them. As a result, Che turned out to be searching, nonconformist and with a yearning for adventure. After his medical school education, he explored the South American countryside on a motorcycle along with a friend. They visited many countries and it was Dr. Hugo Pesce, a leprologist in Lima who effected a change in Che’s attitude to life and society by drawing him closer to Marxism. For Che, politics was a mechanism for social change, and it was social change, not power itself, that he craved, unlike Castro. While staying in Mexico, he established liaison with Cuban rebels fighting the Batista regime under Fidel Castro. A mutual respect grew between the men and soon Che joined the guerilla force that embarked on a fight against the regime. Part 1 of the book neatly covers this episode in Che’s life.

Post-war Latin America was a fertile breeding ground of revolution with its deadly combination of large landowners, unpopular and bullying authorities, domination by the clergy, absence of effective laws and economic predominance of foreign corporate monopolies. To add to the potent mix, all of Latin America, except Brazil was culturally unified by the bond of Spanish – the lingua franca. Revolutionaries worked on a continental scale and the Cuban revolutionary struggle was helped and abetted by people of other nationalities. Anderson makes it abundantly clear that Fidel Castro and most of his revolutionary companions were not communists even long after the revolution was successfully hoisted on the shoulders of the Cuban people. During military action, Castro maintained a respectable distance from the Cuban Communist party and the open dalliance Che and his brother Raul made with the communists often turned his position awkward for all concerned. Che believed war as the ideal circumstance in which to achieve a socialist victory, or socialism was the natural order of mankind and guerilla war the chrysalis from which it would come about. The U.S. was also not too hostile to Castro’s revolutionary struggle. When the Batista regime used tanks and B-26 bombers it had acquired from the U.S. as part of its hemispheric defence program against the revolutionaries, they opposed it and temporarily froze further military assistance. After the revolution’s ouster of Batista and when Castro assumed the reins of power, the U.S. recognized the new government in Havana even before the USSR did so.

This book depicts the devastation that came about in Cuba after the revolution’s establishment of an autocratic system that spread its tentacles far and wide to tie the people down in all spheres of life. As a result of cozying up to the USSR and export of armed guerillas to other Latin American countries, the U.S. imposed crippling sanctions against Cuba which cut down the living standards of the people. During the early stages of Castro’s reign, the visiting Soviet technicians and advisors were dazzled at the glitzy gizmos and hearty outwardness visible in Havana’s streets. Slowly, as communism tightened its deathly stranglehold, all of it was gone and the Cubans came down to the level of the Soviets with interminable queues to obtain basic foodstuffs and strict censoring of media. Che instituted a Cleansing Commission to rid the country of the traitors to revolution. Hundreds were apprehended, subjected to summary trials lasting a few minutes and then executed by a firing squad. Fidel Castro ruled out elections for ever and named his brother Raul as his successor. His cronies chanted ‘Revolucion Si, Elecciones No’ (Revolution Yes, Elections No). All newspapers were either taken over by the state or closed down. Che envisaged vanguard role for the rebel army ignoring urban workers and traditional communist party organization. His forceful advocacy of rural guerilla warfare and agrarian revolution betrayed ‘deviant’ Maoist influence in Soviet eyes. Che Guevara turned out to be a liability to Castro in the end, who wanted to placate the Soviets in the Sino-Soviet divide in Communism that surfaced in the early 1960s.

Che’s stint in Cuba’s administration was not marked by any extraordinary talent or aptitude. He worked as the industries minister, but his authoritarian policies stood in the way of the country’s progress. He appeared to have become bored in Cuba as time went by and wanted fresh adventures somewhere else. His outspoken criticism against the Soviets made his position difficult for Castro. Though the author maintains that the duo never fell out with each other openly, Che’s decision to lead the guerilla movement in Congo after living six years in Cuba came as a relief to Castro. But Congo was not Cuba, where he received little support from the peasants and local fighters. Moreover, unlike Cuba in the Batista era, Congo didn’t have a leader of the caliber of Castro. After a few months of futile warfare, he moved to Bolivia which he planned to turn into a staging ground for the Argentine revolution. However, the problems Che faced in Congo followed him to Bolivia as well. But this time, the Bolivian army proved to be a tougher bet than the disorganized mercenary troops in Africa. Che was eventually cornered and he surrendered to his enemies. Anderson says that Che shouted to army soldiers when they trained their guns on him at the moment of capture, “Don’t shoot. I am Che Guevara. I am worth more to you alive than dead” (p.733). If true, this cowardice brings lasting ignominy on a guerilla leader who had sent hundreds of young fighters to the battlefield asking them not to come back alive defeated. Che was not averse to killing captured enemies or court-martialed comrades himself. Being a doctor by profession, he could perform the executions with clinical precision and with great skill as mentioned in his diary of one such episode, “The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for Eutimio so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a 0.32 pistol in the right side of the brain with exit orifice in the right temporal lobe. He gasped a little while and was dead” (p.237). What is sickening is Guevara’s casual indifference to human suffering because we see in the very next day’s noting in the diary about a very pretty girl who joined the guerillas as “She is a great admirer of the movement who seems to me to want to f*** more than anything else” (p.238). It is shocking that such a tough person meekly capitulated to his enemies and begged for his life!

The author brings out all the aspects of the great revolutionary’s life. The book is so huge that there is practically nothing left to write about Che Guevara on his life. The author is an American, but the book is written very objectively. All facets of Che’s life are examined, and there are indeed a few passages on his sexual life that may be a bit discomfiting to his fans. But Anderson does more than justice to his hero by clearly remarking that his sexual voracity lasted only till his marriage (he married twice) and he remained steadfastly faithful thereafter. Che Guevara was very strict in his private life and didn’t channel government funds for his or family’s private purposes. Once he asked his wife to take their ailing daughter to the hospital in a bus because his car was intended only for official travel. Che’s wife often had to borrow money secretly from his bodyguards as Che drew only a meager salary for his work as a minister which occupied him for almost twenty hours each day. Che Guevara was a revolutionary to the core who wanted absolute obedience and unstinted courage from his followers. He always referred to people, the workers as bits of machinery, as the worker ants in a vast revolutionary agro-industrial complex. He was addicted to violence as a means to bring about an egalitarian regime and spurned elections of any sort. He advocated hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, and transforming the revolutionaries into an effective, violent, seductive and cold killing machine (p.719). Even with all this darkness in his character, Anderson makes Che digestible to the reader who takes pity on him on his last moments.

The book is adorned with a great many photographs detailing the life of Che. The epithet ‘Che’ came about in Cuba according to the Argentine habit of using the word ‘Che’ – meaning ‘Hey You’ – as a form of salutation. The book includes a large appendix, comprehensive notes and a commendable index. The book is gargantuan with 814 pages and compounded by the small typeface. The author has made use of an immense collection of reference material, including a so far unpublished journal of Che’s second travel titled ‘Otra Vez’ (Once Again) which was edited and handed over by Aleida March, his widow in which she had deleted several sexually graphic passages in the interests of preserving the propriety of her late husband’s image.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star