TRAVEL IS PLEASURE, PROFIT OR BOTH depending on an individual’s temperament and outlook towards life itself. It’s quite astonishing and tragic how quickly technology erases the past. The first-ever commercial flight flew in 1914 from St. Petersburg to Tampa, Florida. The trajectory of that journey has brought us to a stage where we take international air travel for granted.
Almost since the dawn of human civilization, the only modes of travel were land and sea. And in spite of all the advances in air travel, its predecessors have still endured as the primary mediums of travel.
When we think of roads today, the immediate picture that comes to mind is the awesome network of national highways, and these roads are almost exclusively associated with high-speed automobile travel.
Likewise, water-borne travel has been transformed in an unprecedented fashion, thanks again to technology.
Thus, it is quite hard to fathom a pre-technological era in which the things we take for granted today were not even in the realm of imagination.
The attempt in this essay series is to offer just the faintest outline of such an era of land-and-sea travel in ancient and classical Bharatavarsha. To do that, we need to literally recreate its physical features at least in our mind.
Here’s a rough picture of that Bharatavarsha.
When we think of ancient roads or routes which our conquerors, rulers, pilgrims, monks, wanderers, adventurers and merchants travelled on, we will have to momentarily forget about our modern roads and highways passing through lush fields or buildings or factories or water bodies on both sides, bypassing villages, towns and cities.
Ancient India was a vast, static assemblage of numerous large cities but the majority of the people lived in villages. Most of the country was covered with dense jungles through which the roads passed. These roads were often infested with wild animals and held out other unpredictable natural dangers. The evil icing on this cake was the vilest of all dangers: human beings disguised as bandits, robbers, and dacoits. Robbery is perhaps the oldest profession in the world second only to politics. There’s a reason the term “robber baron” was coined.
All these factors made it almost impossible for a person to travel alone in that era. This was also the germinator of the system of ancient India’s awesome mobile economic network. In fact, it was also one of the most powerful economic engines of ancient and classical India: Saartha. Or caravan.
Before we examine its actual definition, the term Saartha can also be split as Sa+Artha. And right there, in the term Artha, we have money, or economics.
The subject is truly vast, chequered, exciting and infused with a breathtaking amount of detail. A good deal of research already exists but it is yet to fully blossom with the gravity and respect that it merits. Therefore, all I can do in this essay series is to present only a sampling so that we can get a flavor of the subject.
SAARTHA IS ONE OF BHARATAVARSHA’S greatest gifts to world civilization. As far as ancient India is concerned, it formed one of the central pillars of our national economy. It was literally a mobile economic universe by and in itself and there was nothing like it anywhere in the world in that era, and the system functioned like a well-oiled machine for nearly two thousand years until repeated Islamic invasions eventually made it extinct.
Perhaps the most profound facet of Saartha was the fact that it was the mobile carrier of Sanatana Dharma and culture to foreign nations including all of Central Asia and Syria and Turkey on this side and Burma and China on that side.
A small example will suffice to illustrate this. As early as the 2nd century BCE, when the Chinese ambassador Chang-Kien travelled to Vahlika or Balhika or Bactria, he was surprised to see a thriving market of Chinese bamboo there. When he enquired, he was told that the bamboos were originally from the Yunnan Province and that they were the finest in the world. “But how did they arrive there in such large numbers?” he asked. The answer: caravans from Bharatavarsha first brought them from Yunnan to Assam and from there, they were transported to Bactria through the Grand Route.
Interestingly, the Mahabharata describes Vahlika as a city that produced the finest breeds of mules and that people of this trading city dealt extensively in Chinese silk, pashminas, jewels, perfumes, and other luxury items.
For centuries, Balhika or Bactria was the proverbial melting pot of four ancient nations: Bharatavarsha, Persia, the Scythian region and China. In every sense, it was a truly international market where merchants hailing from this vast geographical expanse traded their goods and gave rest to their animals and exchanged culture with one another.
Our story begins at the southern gate of the Balhika city. This gate directly led to mainland India.
To be continued
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