A quick glance at the map of the Indian subcontinent will show us that its topography would have presented any long-distance trader living before the age of steam with a great advantage and a great disadvantage at the same time. The immediately visible geographical advantage of the region was its long coastline, situated conveniently in the middle of the sea route between southeast Asia and west Asia. Both these regions belonged in ancient maritime commercial networks. The Arabian Sea, Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea supplied merchandise from India’s Konkan and Malabar coasts with access to west Asian, Mediterranean, European, and north African markets, and the Bay of Bengal likewise supplied the produce of Bengal and Coromandel with access to markets in Burma, Cambodia, Sumatra, Java, and China.
On the other hand, the cost of bulk transportation over land was ordinarily very high. If data compiled in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are any indication, the cost of moving cargo per ton/mile by carts was two to three times that of boats, and by bullock caravans two to three times that of carts. These differences were the result of the time taken to move goods as well as the varieties of risk and depreciation that applied to these modes of transportation. In major trade routes that traversed the Himalayan passes, caravan costs became astronomical given the limited capacity of the pack animals and the high risk of their death. Bullock carts were suitable for transporting goods over a few miles, and unsuitable for long-distance transportation. Even for limited transit, carts were rarely used in central and southern uplands (see Map 7.1). Boats could not move over long distances outside the Ganges and Indus basins, because few rivers other than the Himalayan snowmelt ones were navigable. In the Bengal delta, which had a dense network of navigable rivers, river morphology changed so much from one area to another that boat construction and navigational knowledge tended to be locally rooted. The situation was not conducive for mass transportation systems to develop. In deltaic Bengal and the lower reaches of the Ganges and the Indus, where relatively placid and deepwater channels could be found, inland navigation was limited by seasonal fluctuations in water level and by mud, eddies, sudden appearance of sandbanks, and pirate attacks (Roy 2011a).
Map 7.1 Geographical zones of India
A relatively easy access to the oceans from the seaboard, and a relatively difficult access from the interior to the seaboard, gave ancient commerce a distinctive character. Organized trading and banking developed along two axes – the seaboard and the imperial cities. Merchants and bankers on the seaboard lived on maritime trade; those in the interior depended directly or indirectly on the land revenue system and to a limited extent overland trade. Income from maritime trade provided much- needed revenue to the seaboard states, but was in itself not enough to sustain large armies and bureaucracies. Strong political hubs were usually located inland, inside states that made use of the revenues to be had from the riparian plains.
Exceptions to this picture were present. Perhaps the most important case of a large state that seemed to bridge the land and the sea was the south Indian Chola at the turn of the second millennium
CE, who operated from one of the largest and geographically most accessible deltas in the peninsula,
that of the River Kaveri. Similar examples would be hard to find elsewhere. The Ganges delta, by comparison, was larger in size but far less accessible from inland as well as from the sea. How well the Chola achieved the integration is also a debatable issue.
In respect of the direction and composition of commodity trade, the seaboard clusters looked mainly outward whereas the inland clusters looked mainly towards local consumption. The two worlds came into contact all the time. Major caravan routes crisscrossed the Deccan plateau, and moved along the river valleys of the peninsula. Still, the costs of carriage being as high as described above, caravan trade could not conceivably have had enough capacity to carry the produce of the interior agrarian societies on a large scale. Instead, the goods that it was profitable to carry were the relatively highly priced low-bulk commodities. The most important of such tradable goods were fine textiles, spices, silks, pearls, diamonds, fine ceramics, gold, and other precious stones such as lapis lazuli.
The seaboard commercial clusters accessed these high-value, low-bulk goods. But they also accessed a variety of goods from the immediate vicinity. Despite the vast length of the seafront, ports did not grow up randomly. In fact, ancient Indian ports almost without exception situated themselves on estuaries that sheltered them from the violence of the monsoon on the one hand, and secured them an easy way to procure raw material, foods, and traded goods by rivers from within the delta on the other hand. The physical link between the sea and the land was achieved by means of rivers. Cambay/Khambat on the River Mahi, Surat on the Tapi, Broach/Bharuch/Bharukacchha/Barigaza on the Narmada, Arikamedu on the Ponnaiyar, Tamralipti/Tamluk on the Rupnarayan, Saptagram/Satgaon on the Saraswati, Masulipatnam in the Krishna delta, Hooghly on the Bhagirathi, Balasore/Baleshwar with easy access to Budibalang and Subarnarekha, Sonargaon on the Shitalakhya, Old Goa on the Mandovi, the Malabar ports Muziris (exact site still debated) and Kollam/Quilon on the inland waterways – all of these sites were within easy reach simultaneously of the sea and of the inland via the rivers on which they were situated. The fundamental distance between the landed and the maritime business worlds remained intact, because the rivers that these hubs were situated on were not ordinarily navigable beyond a few miles, even though the river valley often supplied an easy land route for caravan traffic. The long-term fortunes of these sites depended upon local geographical factors. They declined or were abandoned because the rivers that they lived on silted up or changed course. Commercial fortunes, in this way, depended on the unstable environment of the larger region.
Reflecting the same kind of dependence, the monsoon wind imposed pronounced seasonality upon trade, the functioning of the ports, and the rhythm of transportation. Even the most considerable ports had the character of a seasonal fairground, doing brisk business in the winter months followed by a long period of lull. Cesar Frederick saw this phenomenon in Betore, the most important point of Portuguese trade in lower Bengal about 1565, where “a village [was] constructed every year” and burnt down after the trading season.4 The same thing happened to Chaul, another considerable port on the Konkan. Harbors had a makeshift character. Ship and boat construction came in a bewildering variety along the coast, for evidently the shipwrights had to solve local issues. For example, ship design needed to adapt to the monsoon winds rather than ocean currents. The preoccupation with adaptation to local constraints led Indian shipping to pay less attention to long-distance voyages and the challenges that such voyages entailed. Therefore, even as intra-Asian trade provided enough profitable opportunities to the traders located on the seaboard, the Indian trading system was technologically ill equipped to venture beyond the Arabian Sea or the Bay of Bengal. The knowledge of how to build large ships did exist, but it was not commercially employed. Voyages that might take months rather than weeks were not the priority for traders or shipwrights.
powerful states in India tended to form hundreds of miles away from the coast. Few maintained anything more than a very tenuous and indirect link with the littoral or the littoral kingdoms. In their turn, the Maurya and Satavahana empires (c. 320 BCE to c. 100 CE), the Gupta empire (c. 250–550),
the Kusans (200–0 BCE), even the much later Delhi sultanate (1206–1526), Mughal (1526-c. 1750),
and Vijayanagar empires (1336–1565) were in effect landlocked. Their capital cities were located months, or even a whole year’s journey, away from the nearest seaport. It has been said above that the state that did manage to break this cleavage to some extent was that of the Chola (850–1280), who developed on the southeastern coast of India, where the deltas were wider, more easily accessible from inland, and had plentiful fertile land.
Even though inland states were far away from the littoral, as they enlarged they did try to take control of the coast or build more secure contacts with the coastal world of commerce. States that lived mainly on land taxes still had an interest in road building to open up military supply routes. From time to time, empires also secured large chunks of overland routes, and connected them to the sea. Before the Common Era, the Satavahana empire achieved this integration to feed the Indo-Roman trade from Coromandel. The Kusans at the turn of the Common Era secured overland traffic between the upper Indus plains and central Asia. The Gupta empire in west central India secured traffic between the political center in Ujjain and the Gujarat littoral. The Chola in the twelfth century achieved an unusual extent of land and sea integration.
This picture of two distinct trading clusters, one ocean going and another land based, with not enough contact or exchange between them, was thus susceptible to attempts by the interior world to create a militarily and politically stable access to the sea. Success in this respect began to take shape from the thirteenth century onward with the slow spread of Islam southward and eastward.