WE HAVE A SIMILAR LIST of trade routes in western and southern India in the ancient times. The route between Punjab (including Sindh, now in Pakistan) and Gujarat passed through Malwa. The route to Delhi, Ajmer and Ahmedabad passed through central Rajasthan. This particular route was also the natural road from Rajasthan to Dakshinapatha and was the most prolonged and active theatre of countless campaigns of conquest launched by Muslim kings into southern India starting with Ala-ud-din Khalji.
When we come to Ujjayini, we notice a mindboggling road network that led to and from it. In the space of this essay series, we can mention only two.
One branch of the highway passing through the west coast port cities of Bharuch and Supparaka (today, Sopara), reached Mathura via Ujjayini. Another branch cut through the densely forested environs of Vidisha, proceeded to the Betwa river valley and reached Kaushambi.
And now, when we reach South India, the first thing that strikes us, once again, is the intimate geographical knowledge of Bharatavarsha that our ancients possessed. The commercial routes and trading centers in Dakshinapatha followed the course of rivers. This is something that we notice even to this day.
For many centuries, one of the busiest routes was a direct passage that connected Manmad (Maharashtra) and Machilipatnam. Other major routes were between Kanchipuram and Pune, Gomantaka-Nagapattinam-Thanjavur, and Kozhikode-Rameshwaram. Another ancient route that has largely remained intact till date began at Warangal, passed through Vijayawada, and terminated at the mouth of the Bay of Bengal. The interested reader might wish to examine the route details of today’s National Highway 16.
From the ancient times, all the aforementioned routes leading to and within Dakshinapatha offered a dizzying network of crisscross connectivity between all major rivers of south India such as Godavari, Kaveri, Bhima, Krishna, Tungabhadra, and Pennar.
For uncountable centuries, Ujjayini was akin in centrality, importance and prestige, to the Greenwich Mean Time, which was evolved as a global time standard because colonial Britain was the world’s economic leader back then.
THIS PARTIAL SURVEY of the commercial geography of ancient Bharatavarsha sets the backdrop for further exploration. Another distinctive feature of these routes was the fact that they linked most of the ancient capital cities with one another. In other words, politics was intimately linked with economics via geography.
Thus, when these capitals changed due to war, famine, drastic changes in economic activity, religious upheavals, change in the course of the rivers, or due to the whims and fancies of rulers, old trading routes were abandoned or new routes were built.
This overall panorama of trading routes in ancient Bharatavarsha clearly offers hard evidence to the historical fact that Saarthas plied on all these routes.
THE WORD SAARTHA can be derived as follows: Arthena Sahitaha saarthaha; tadidam saartham.
In practice, a Saartha was an organization of merchants who invested equal amount of capital and carried on trade with various markets by travelling in caravans. In fact, the starting of a Saartha was an extremely important, prestigious and auspicious event in the business community of ancient and early medieval India.
A daring and adventurous businessman would typically announce his intent to start a Saartha and outlined its financial and other objectives to the community. If they were convinced of the plan, other interested businessmen would pool in their own capital and begin the endeavor after preparing an elaborate charter containing rules and regulations governing the Saartha.
Establishing and organizing a Saartha was the only method of carrying on trade and commerce with distant lands. A Saartha’s scope also included international trade. From a limited perspective, it can be said that the Saartha was the first system of MNCs to originate from Bharatavarsha.
An individual Saartha could comprise as less as five hundred wagons or carts and as many as five or even seven thousand! In such city-sized Saarthas, if the head of the Saartha was, for example, in Varanasi, its tail would be in say, Indore! This is the reason I gave a fairly detailed picture of commercial geography of that period in the previous parts of this series.
We will look at some main features and components of a typical Saartha in the next instalment of this series.
To be continued
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