India and the Silk Roads

Title: India and the Silk Roads – The History of a Trading World

Author: Jagjeet Lally

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2021 (First)

ISBN: 9789354227240

Pages: 415

 

India and China were the powerhouses of ancient trade. China exported porcelain and silk and India traded in jewelry, textiles and spices. The trade routes carrying these commodities from the east to the west came to be called the Silk Road as an eponymous tribute to the most glamorous item on the camels’ back. With the discovery of a direct sea route from Europe which was emerging into a superpower after the Renaissance lessened the importance of land routes.  With the reemergence of China as the manufacturing hub of Asia in this century, it is actively trying to reestablish the silk route trade using modern means of transportation such as railways and ports connecting interior hubs in the continent. This book is an incomplete effort to relate India to the Silk Roads. Even though the book boasts a grandiose title, the period of analysis is hardly 150 years from 1750 to 1900 and that too, limited in geographical extent to Pakistan’s Punjab province. Jagjeet Lally is a lecturer in the history of early modern and modern India at University College, London where he is also a co-director of a centre for south Asian study.

 

The author briefly analyses the items of trade that ran through the difficult mountain passes of the Karakoram and Hindu Kush ranges and the scorched desert roads of the Gobi and central Asian deserts. Four commodities were especially important in terms of volume, value, commercial, cultural and political significance: horses, cotton cloth, indigo dye and raw silk yarn. Lally argues that the decline in Silk Road trade in the wake of the discovery of direct sea route to Asia, which transferred the east-west trade to the sea lanes, was not so straightforward. Historians are now starting to appreciate that the discovery was both trade-diverting and trade-creating so that the increase in maritime trade resulted for the most part from the expansion of shipping traffic through enhancement in trade and production activities. The overland trade suffered some decline and it remained marginal rather than experiencing complete extinction.

 

The book’s observation window opens with the decline of Mughal power in India and Perso-Afghan domination of the country’s northwest regions brought home first by Nadir Shah’s invasion and plunder and followed closely by Ahmed Shah Durrani’s invasion and plunder. The late-Mughal India’s need for horses was in the range of tens of thousands because they required replacement every seven to ten years. Mansabdari system required nobles to maintain a specified number of horsemen and footmen. Cavalrymen were the highest paid and highest esteemed. Even though the Durrani period saw the collapse of Indian political and economic ambitions, this author makes his view from the Afghan side towards which the looted treasures of India flowed. Lally claims that in the medium and longer term, the impact of Durrani expansion was to invigorate the economy of western Punjab. He also makes a startling claim that the decline of Mughal dynasty was caused by climate-change induced desiccation – a global cooling which set in by the mid-seventeenth century. These political changes created a society which worshipped money. Alliances of convenience, rather than principles, were forged in northwest India and Afghanistan. Men who were accused of brigandage might the next year be organizing long distance commercial exchange. Men who offered themselves in the campaign season might join fellow mercenaries in the pursuit of political power.

 

Gujarat and Bengal were the prominent textile centres for ocean trade, while Punjab catered to central Asian caravan routes. Silk yarn was sourced from elsewhere and woven in Punjab. Multan was a great centre of weaving. Two types of technological changes affected Punjab’s textile industry. Mechanizing of manufacture reduced the cost of English textiles. The transportation revolution in railway, steam ships and telecom enabled the cost reduction to be passed on to the consumers. These changes made English cotton more competitive. Punjab’s industry was upset and displacement of labour from certain aspects of the production process helped it face up to the challenge. Indigo farmers underwent a similar jolt when artificial aniline dyes substituted indigo in 1897. Luckily for the Punjabi farmers, canal-irrigated lands proliferated at around this time and the agriculturalists turned their attention to wheat, sugar cane and cotton. Expansion of the Romanov and Qing empires into central Asia restricted Punjab’s commerce to those areas. Historians now emphasize that the 1750s to 1840s was a moment of reconfiguration amidst the encroachment of empires.

 

This book paints the Afghan and Punjabi merchants in a glorifying light while Indian traders are disparagingly referred as banias who are riven by caste rivalries. Lally cleverly pushes in the lower versus upper caste dichotomy into the narrative as in a formulaic way to explain the degeneracy of Hindu society. The book mentions that slave trade was prominent in the northwest but keeps silent on the traders and slave runners. Each Islamic invasion of India produced thousands of slaves who fetched good prices for the owners in the slave markets of the Muslim world. Even Guru Nanak was once captured by Pashtuns for sale into slavery. The author admits that slave trade was a component of the caravan commerce that flourished into the nineteenth century (p.140), but he is reluctant to disclose the identity of the organizers of this heinous trade. The Rohilla Afghans’ origin is traceable to horse and slave trade. Such a prominent trade is neglected in the book with the author’s deliberate reluctance to expose the Afghans as slave-traders.

 

This book accuses the British government in India to have intruded into the societal and commercial space of the Afghans and Punjabi Muslims. Till the advent of the British, different trading communities paid different duties and rates according to their status (p.63). This is the author’s euphemistic way of telling that Muslim traders paid taxes at a rate half of that of their Hindu counterparts. The British equated the rate for all communities which make the author resent the decision! Moreover, ‘the East India Company freed the trade and eliminated perquisites and privileges’ which is satirized as the ‘Permanent Settlement of market places’. The northwest was a lawless region and nothing the government did could make it more so. The state privileged certain groups and elite men in them, sanctioning them to rule on its behalf. The result was a highly personalized form of governance. This was what existed in those regions. The Pashtuns’ continued hostility to the British was alarming. Lally claims that this was due to careless policy such as the increase in salt tax, ignorance and despoiling of the Pashtuns’ sacred geography of shrines in the process of surveying the physical geography of the Indo-Afghan region (p.192). Probably the author is not aware of the sacred tower of the Brihadeeshwara Temple at Thanjavur which was used as a node in the Great Trigonometric Survey of India which required several instruments to be hurled to the top of the tower. But nobody thought it despoiling. This book then goes on to praise Wahhabism as it ‘helped Islamic societies assertively confront European colonial regimes across the world’.

 

This book sports ‘India’ in its title only for commercial purposes while its real sympathies and focus of interest is Afghanistan and Pakistani Punjab. The utmost disdain and hostility of the author to Indian societies – both past and present – is mind-boggling. Hindu traders were a successful group in the central Asian trade, but they were targeted and persecuted on religious lines. The author accuses the victims of provoking the predators. He argues that Hindus and Hindu temples were noticeable and hardened the sense of separation as against Muslim Afghans (p.105). Does he mean that the Hindus have no right to be what they were? That they have no right to build a temple in a Muslim land? Lally then targets the Sikhs at the receiving end of his fury. Sikh misldars (Sikh rulers of states called misls) and their officials charged a number of duties and the burden was heavier on merchants from outside Punjab (p.111). He makes it sound like the Sikhs were the only administration that overtaxed commerce. Any hardships to the Afghans would make the author cry! Most parts of the book look like a research paper and sounds like empty jargon. It lacks a focus as well as a sense of direction. At the end of the text, readers would be at a loss to find out the purpose of the book. The diction is dry and totally unappealing. Altogether, it can presumed that the author has wasted a good opportunity to enlighten the readers.

 

The book is recommended only to serious readers.

 

Rating: 2 Star