THE BUDDHIST ANNALS furnish another illuminative nugget related to the system of Saarthas. Accordingly, there were Saarthas organized explicitly for the purposes of pilgrimage. These were typically known as Sanghas, and the leader was variously titled as Sanghapati, Sanghavai or Sanghavi. The last name, Sanghavi, Sanghvi, Singhvi is still a well-known surname in Rajasthan and Gujarat. For centuries, the Sanghvi surname was ubiquitous in Sindh, now in Pakistan.
Overall, the Saartha was a walking and talking Bharatavarsha that represented all aspects of its profound spiritual culture and Samskara through the citizens who carried it with them.
While the Saartha was fundamentally a commercial endeavor, it was infused with an all-encompassing scope. To glean just a few glimpses of this scope, we can consider an awesome cross section of society which joined a Saartha either full-time or as wayfarers. This includes the following classes of people:
Tirthayatris or pilgrims
People visiting relatives in faraway places
Random travelers, adventurers and fortune hunters
Purohitas, Vidwans, Parivrajakas etc.
Poets and scholars who had embarked on a Sarasvata-Digvijaya by visiting famous cities renowned as centres of culture. These centers dotted the whole landscape of Bharatavarsha spread across such diverse places as Banavasi, Balligave, Kanchi, Ayodhya, Varanasi, Prayaga, Kanyakubja, Avanti, Ujjayini, Mahishmati, Kashmir, etc).
Nata-Vita-Gayaka-Nartaka-Vandhi-Magadhas, artists, artisans, clowns, jugglers, spies, messengers etc.
Last but not least, students wishing to pursue advanced studies at famous educational hubs like Takshashila, Nalanda, Odantapuri, Vikramashila, Jaggadala etc. No Saartha charged money for students. In turn, these students taught lessons to their interested fellow-travelers and the entire Saartha looked upon them with great respect and reverence.
Clearly, this profound portrait of the Saartha system is also a great reflection of the innate culture of nobility of the Indian people of that era.
From one perspective, it is difficult to visualize a “whole” Saartha because it was actually its countless parts that made it whole. It was a flexible and highly fluid system which had a central organization that gave the Saartha its splendid integrity.
From another perspective, a Saartha was also a vast, living proof of the social and cultural unity and indivisibility of ancient India, reflected through trade and commerce.
Among other things, perhaps the most significant benefit that we derive from an extensive study of this system of mobile economy is the enormous amount of lived details that help us in puncturing various mischievous narratives which are still circulating about ancient India and the Hindu society.
The foremost element of this mischief is the mass of deliberate falsehoods regarding the Hindu social system and especially what the British perfidiously branded as the “caste system.”
In fact, an honest study of the Saartha system reveals the exact opposite picture. For example, it conclusively shows that people from all Varnas, professions and classes and philosophical sects mingled with one another in great harmony.
To emphasize another point, depending on its size, a Saartha could be multistate or pan-Indian. Thus, people travelling in it hailed from various parts of India and after the initial introductions, they ate together, they shared their mutual joys and sorrows, poems and songs of their own region, and exchanged valuable information about the uniqueness, greatness and specialties of their native village, town or city. From this and other viewpoints, a Saartha was also akin to the news media of that era. Thus, mere common sense shows us the truth that there was free intermingling of people hailing from different Varnas.
The primary sources especially, Jain and Buddhist sources contain encyclopedic details not only about the overall Saartha system but about specific and minute details of the daily life of our ancestors spanning several centuries. Even more importantly, we also have a huge wealth of Greek, Chinese and Arabic primary sources that supply valuable information about India’s caravans, their functioning and their mutual interactions. And when we collate these foreign accounts with our own, the overall portrait that emerges is entirely consistent, uniform, truthful and ennobling.
To be continued
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