Ala-ud-din’s economic policies were comprehensive. In addition to the price of grains, he also sought to control the prices of all essential commodities, such as ‘piece goods, garments, sugar, vegetables, fruits, animal oil, and lamp oil,’ states Barani. The prices of slaves and concubines (essential commodities in that age!) were also fixed by the sultan. Even in the case of ‘articles … of the most trifling value … the sultan took the greatest trouble to fix their prices and to settle the profit of vendors.’ These were not mere paper regulations, but were rigorously enforced. And the sultan kept himself regularly informed about the market conditions through the reports of three independent sources—the superintendent of the market, reporters, and spies—and he took prompt remedial measures whenever required to restore market stability. Merchants who used short-weights were punished with ‘blows and by cutting off flesh [of an equal weight] from the haunches of those who gave short weight.’
To enforce his market regulations, Ala-ud-din held the families of the major suppliers of goods in the market as hostages, and held out the threat of severe punishment to those who violated government regulations. But this was only one side of the sultan’s policy. His was a carrot-and-stick policy, by which, on the one side, he coerced traders to abide by his market regulations, and, on the other side, encouraged and supported fair traders by honouring them with robes of honour, and by granting them loans from the royal treasury for financing their business. An equally creditable aspect of Ala-ud-din’s trade regulations was that they were as much beneficial to the common people as to the state, as they created stable market conditions and kept the prices of essential commodities low. Ala-ud-din was an autocrat, but a benevolent autocrat. Unfortunately, his market regulations ‘came to an end on his death, for his son … was not able to maintain even a thousandth part of them,’ comments Barani.
THE ECONOMIC POLICIES of Krishnadeva of Vijayanagar was the exact opposite of the policies of Ala-ud-din—the raja’s objective was to stimulate economic activity, while the sultan’s objective was to control it—but in both cases their policies were beneficial to the king as well as to the people.
Of all the Indian kings of the early middle ages, Krishnadeva’s economic policies were the most liberal. ‘A king should improve the harbours of his country and encourage its commerce, so that horses, elephants, precious gems, sandalwood, pearls, and other articles are freely imported into the country,’ he advises in Amukta-malyada, his poetic work. ‘He should arrange that foreign sailors who land in his country on account of storm, illness, and exhaustion are looked after in a manner suitable to their nationality … [He should] make the merchants of distant foreign countries who import elephants and good horses be attached to him by providing them with daily audience and presents, and by allowing decent profits. Then those articles will never go to his enemies….’
This liberal import policy however applied only to the items that the state itself did not produce. In other items the protection of local producers and traders was a high priority for Vijayanagar kings, and they usually imposed high taxes on the goods brought from outside the state. This was the common practice of most Indian kingdoms.
Import taxes were usually collected at the frontiers of kingdoms. For instance, at a river crossing near Multan, ‘the goods and baggage of all who pass are subjected to a rigorous examination,’ reports Battuta. ‘Their custom at the time of our arrival was [for government officers] to take a quarter of everything brought in by merchants, and exact a duty of seven dinars for every horse.’ These were quite high rates. Further, in addition to import duties, medieval Indian states also collected octroi at the gates of towns.
The range of commercial taxes in medieval Indian kingdoms was indeed very broad. Indian kings usually imposed tax on all trade and economically productive activities in the state, however trivial, because, from the point of view of kings, the very existence of those activities depended on the protection that the state provided to them through the maintenance of law and order.
However, despite the wide range of commercial taxes collected by Indian states, these taxes were relatively fewer than the other taxes collected by medieval Indian states. And the rates of commercial taxes were usually lower than the rates of agricultural taxes. In Vijayanagar, for instance, agricultural tax was between one-third and one-sixth of the produce, but customs duty was only between 2.5 and 5 per cent of the sale price. But even at such low rates, commercial taxes yielded high revenue for the state, next only to the revenue from agricultural taxes.
Kings were generally protective towards traders, because it was very much in their interests to do so. But practices in this varied considerably from kingdom to kingdom. And sometimes kings acted like brigands or pirates. For instance, in Kerala, according to Battuta, it was ‘a custom of theirs that every ship that passes by a [port] town must drop anchor there and give a present to the [local] ruler … If anyone omits to do this, they sail out in pursuit of him, bring him into the port by force, double the tax on him, and prevent him from proceeding on his journey for as long as they wish.’ Kerala kings apparently considered the coastal seas as their territorial waters.
SUCH PIRATICAL CONDUCT by kings was however rare. Usually the relationship between kings and traders was mutually supportive, and mutually beneficial. This was reflected in the fact that the most flourishing markets in kingdoms were generally in royal capitals. ‘By the palace of the king there are four bazaars, situated opposite one another …,’ reports Razzak about Vijayanagar. ‘At the head of each bazaar there is a lofty arcade and magnificent gallery … The bazaars are very broad and long … The tradesmen of each separate guild or craft have their shops close to one another. Jewellers sell their rubies and pearls and diamonds and emeralds openly in the bazaar.’ The largest market in medieval India was, as was to be expected, in Delhi, which Battuta considered the largest market in the world. Apart from these permanent markets, large temporary trade fairs were usually organised in towns and major villages during temple festivals.
A major item of trans-regional trade in medieval India was salt, the main source of which was the Sambhar Salt Lake in Rajasthan. Several metals of commercial value were also mined in India. Of these, the most important item was iron, which was quarried in several places in the extensive region stretching from the southern Gangetic Valley to almost the very tip of India. Indian iron had a good overseas market in medieval times, as it was considered ideal for making swords. Copper was another notable metal mined in India, mainly in Rajasthan. But gold and silver were scarce in India, and only very small quantities of them were mined there. Diamonds were mined in the Deccan. And pearl fishery was a major industry on the southern Tamil Nadu coast.
In medieval times there was also some inter-regional and international trade in a few items manufactured in India, particularly in cloth. A variety of fabrics were woven in India at this time—in cotton, silk, and wool—and some of the special regional textile products were of very high quality and were marketed across India, and also exported. Gold and silver embroidery was a speciality of Gujarat; shawls and carpets of Kashmir.
MEDIEVAL INDIA HAD, for that age, fairly good transportation and communication facilities, with its main roads running east-west across the breadth of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, and north-south from the Gangetic Valley to deep into peninsular India. These roads had halting stations at regular intervals, where there were caravanserais and shops, as well as porters, horses, horse-carriages, bullock-carts and palanquins for hire. There was also an efficient long distance postal system in India at this time, with runners and horsemen posted at regular intervals along the main roads to carry mail. This facility was primarily for government use, but presumably it, or a similar service, was also available to traders.
These services however linked only the major political and commercial centres of India, and did not cover the interior regions of the subcontinent, where roads were rare, and communication facilities poor or nonexistent. Because of
this, carts were seldom used to transport goods in India, except for short haul. The common mode of transport of goods in medieval India was to carry them on bullocks, which travelled in huge caravans, often consisting of thousands of bulls—Battuta mentions a caravan of 3000 bulls carrying 30,000 maunds of grain; other reporters mention caravans of 10,000 and even 20,000 bulls.
In Kerala most of the bulk goods were transported in boats on the backwaters or rivers; alternately men carried the goods on their heads. Animals were seldom used for transporting goods in Kerala—‘There are no beasts of burden in this land,’ states Barbosa. In North India, the Ganga-Yamuna river system was extensively used for transporting goods by boat, which was relatively cheaper and safer than road transport, and boats and guards were available for hire by traders at jetties along these rivers. There was also some amount of coastal shipping in India at this time.
Apart from the poor network of roads in the interior regions of India, there were several other hazards for the transport of goods in India in medieval times. Travel routes in several regions of India passed through dense forests inhabited by brigands, so traders usually travelled in groups and under the protection of hired guards. Wars and rebellions, which were perennial in medieval India, also disrupted trade. Venetian trader Caesar Frederic, for instance, was once held up in Vijayanagar for seven whole months, for the roads in the region were at this time, following the defeat of Vijayanagar in the battle of Talikota, infested by bandits.
Another major impediment to the free flow of trade in medieval India was the confusing diversity of currencies, weights and measures in use in different parts of the country. These often varied from region to region, and from kingdom to kingdom, sometimes even in the different parts of the same kingdom, or from king to king. Coins of the same name, as well as weights and measures of the same name, often had different values in different places and in different times. Vijayanagar had several mints, one at each provincial capital, which would have made it very difficult to maintain uniform standard in its coins. Adding to the confusion of all this was the free circulation of foreign coins in India, particularly the coins of Portugal, Italy, and the Middle Eastern kingdoms. Comments Caesar Frederick, a mid-sixteenth century Italian trade prospector in India: ‘The money we take this day would not serve the next.’
All this impeded the smooth transaction of business in the subcontinent. What prevented Indian trade from collapsing altogether in this monetary chaos was the presence of money changers in all major markets, who would, for a commission, give local coins in exchange for the coins of different Indian kingdoms and of foreign lands. Besides, the barter system was still extensively used in India for small transactions, with grain as the medium of exchange. According to Battuta, the common people in Bengal and Maldives used cowrie as money.
AN IMPORTANT ELEMENT in the Indian economy of the early medieval period was the participation of Indians in the brisk maritime trade in the Indian Ocean, particularly in the trade with South-east Asia and China. ‘The curiosities of Chin (China) and Machin (Canton) and the beautiful products of Hind and Sind, laden on large ships … sailing like mountains … are always arriving there (at Mabar: Coromandel Coast) … which is so situated as to be the key of Hind,’ writes Wassaf.
The major players in the Indian Ocean trade at this time were Indians, Arabs, Chinese and South-East Asians. Of these, Arabs were the most active and successful traders, and their dominant presence in the Arabian Sea eventually obliged Indian traders to gradually retreat from there, though they still maintained a residual presence in a few Middle Eastern trade centres, like Aden. Indians thereafter largely confined themselves to trade with South-east Asia and China; Indian traders, particularly Chettis of the Tamil country, had at this time a notable presence in places like Malacca.
Arab traders had been active in the Indian Ocean long before the founding of Islam, but now, energised by their new faith, they surged ahead, and went on to dominate the sea trade in the entire region. This was the result of peaceful though fierce competition; virtually no military action was involved in it. And, as Arab trade in the region expanded, Arab settlements in India’s coastal towns increased in number and size, and they generally enjoyed great prosperity. Arab traders in Cambay in Gujarat were very affluent, and lived in grand mansions, Battuta noted. And he found numerous mosques along the coast of Kerala, which indicated the presence of a large number of Arabs and local Muslims there, and their general prosperity.
Peninsular Indian kings, sultans as well as rajas, generally patronised Arab traders, as these traders contributed to the prosperity of their kingdoms, and because the kings were dependant on Arabs for the regular supply of horses, a perennial military requirement of most Indian kings. Arab traders enjoyed virtual autonomy in Kerala, as the local rulers there allowed them to live there under their own laws, and to have their own governors to regulate their lives and to punish their criminals, without any reference to the raja. According to Barbosa, fresh batches of Arab merchants arrived in Kerala periodically, and they were favoured by the local raja by assigning to each of them attendants like bodyguards, accountants and brokers, to help them in their local transactions. Many of these merchants settled in Kerala, married local women, and they and their descendants, called Mapilas, in time became a notable element in the local population.
Arabs dominated the Arabian Sea trade for several centuries, till the early sixteenth century, when the Portuguese wrested control from them. The Portuguese had arrived on the scene at the close of the fifteenth century, and soon they became absolute masters of the seas around India, because of their superior naval capabilities. Presently they built their fortified settlements on the eastern and western coasts of peninsular India, with Goa as their chief centre, and thus entrenched themselves on land in India, to backup their dominant naval presence in the Indian seas.
The Portuguese then considered the Indian Ocean as their sovereign territory, and controlled all the traffic there by laying down the rule that the ships of all other nations sailing there, particularly in the Arabian Sea, should do so only by calling at a Portuguese port in the region, to pay duty on their cargo and to obtain a pass for their safe journey. And they decreed that no ship plying in the Arabian Sea should carry certain items, especially spices and ammunitions, which they considered as their monopoly. They also required that merchantmen should sail in small convoys, and under the escort of Portuguese warships. This hegemony of the Portuguese in the Indian seas lasted for about a century, but they were eventually, in the early decades of the seventeenth century, displaced by other European powers, particularly the British.
BY THE SIXTEENTH century the port cities of peninsular India emerged as the most prominent foreign trade centres in the subcontinent, displacing the cities in north-western India which had dominated this trade for many centuries. This change was because foreign trade, which had been mostly by land route previously, was now mostly by sea route, and the peninsular ports were ideally situated to serve both eastern and western sea traders.
There is a good amount of information about the trade activities in peninsular India at this time, because the region was then visited by very many foreign traders and travellers, and several of them maintained records of what they observed. In particular, the Kerala coast, which was studded with several natural harbours, was abuzz with commercial activity at this time. Kozhikode (Calicut, in north Kerala) and Kollam (Quilon, in south Kerala), according to Battuta, were among the best ports he had seen anywhere in the world, and were equal to Alexandria. ‘It has fine bazaars, and its merchants … are immensely wealthy,’ writes Battuta about Kollam. ‘A single merchant will buy a vessel with all that is in it and load it with goods from his own house. There is a colony of Muslim merchants there; the cathedral mosque there is a magnificent building. This city is the nearest of the Mulaybar (Malabar: Kerala) towns to China, and it is to it that most of the merchants [from China] come.’ Kollam was the main centre for the transhipment of
East Asian goods to the West, and of European goods to the East.
This trade prominence of Kollam was rivalled by Kozhikode, but the town seems to have gained importance only around the fourteenth century, for Marco Polo, who visited Kerala in the thirteenth century, does not mention it at all. But by the next century the town emerged into great prominence, and became renowned as the City of Spices. Battuta, who was in Kerala in the mid-fourteenth century, found the town flourishing. ‘Qaliqut,’ he writes, ‘is one of the chief ports in Mulaybar and one of the largest harbours in the world. It is visited by men from China, Sumatra, Ceylon, the Maldives, Yemen and Fars (Persia), and in it gather merchants from all quarters.’
Razzak also is all praise for the prosperity of Kozhikode, and its good government. The city, he reports, ‘brings together merchants of every city and every country … It is the practice at other ports, that if any vessel be consigned to any particular port, and unfortunately by the decree of the Almighty it is driven to any other [port] than that to which it is destined, the people plunder it, on the plea that it is sent [to them] by the winds. But at Kozhikode every vessel, wherever it comes from, and whichever way it arrives, is treated like any other, and no sort of trouble is experienced by it.’
The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate Page 51