India and South-East Asia
Money and the Market-Place
The majority of occasions on which monetary payments are mentioned in the
Jatakas involve religious or social payments. There are, however, about twenty
references to commodity purchases, suggesting that by the second century BC
market transactions were becoming normal. What was the relationship between
religion and the market in ancient India? A story from the Kshatrapa territory
in western India during the first century AD provides some evidence.
Rsabhadatta, the son-in-law of the Kshatrapa king Nahapana (c. AD 40-78),
recorded in two stone inscriptions at Nasik that he had given a cave to a
community of monks and bought a field for 4,000 karshapanas, so that the food from
it would feed the community. He also donated 2,000 karshapanas for their
benefit. The money was to be deposited with the guild of weavers in the city
of Govardhana, who would pay 1 per cent interest per month to buy clothes for
the monks. This story perhaps suggests that religion and money had a less
troubled relationship with one another in ancient India than in the Islamic or Christian worlds.
One of these inscriptions also records a payment of 3,000 head of cattle by
Rsabhadatta to the priests as the fee involved in his ritual purification after
battle. The survival of cattle payments is not surprising, as ancient Indian rulers
were enthusiastic in maintaining the antiquarian traditions recorded in the
Vedic texts. The term dakshina, still used in India for the fee paid to priests for
performing religious ceremonies, originally meant 'a cow on the left', that is, a cow set aside for the priest.
Both the accounts of buying and selling in the Jatakas and the complex
deposit and interest arrangement made by Rsabhadatta demonstrate that major
commercial transactions in ancient India could be conducted with money.
Trade also had an impact on developing the complexity of monetary practice.
For instance, the Cullaka-Setthi Jataka story illustrates the extent to which
money was considered to have penetrated all levels of society, and suggests the
range of activities that could involve monetary payments, together with various
sorts of payment in kind. It tells of a young man's rise from rags to riches. First
he found a dead mouse and sold it for a copper coin to a tavern to feed its cat.
He used the coin to buy molasses and sold sweetened water to flower pickers,
who paid him in flowers; then he sold the flowers and used the proceeds to
repeat the bargain until he had 8 karshapanas. His next venture was to gather
firewood, using children paid with molasses, selling the wood to a potter for 16
karshapanas and some pots. He then returned to selling water, this time to
grass mowers, taking payment in bundles of grass which he sold on for 1,000
karshapanas as fodder to a horse trader. His business activities were now on a grand
scale and he hired a carriage for 8 karshapanas and went to the port where he
used credit to buy the cargo of a newly arrived ship. When the usual merchants
arrived to buy the cargo, they had to buy it through the young man, who thereby raised 200,000 karshapanas.
This parable is reported in the Jatakas as told by the Buddha himself, and
shows clear approval of the actions of the young man: 'With the humblest start
and trifling capital, a shrewd and able man will rise to wealth.' There was,
however, a diversity of attitudes towards money and wealth in Buddhism. In its
earliest teachings to the monastic community, the Vinaya, Buddhist teaching
strongly condemned contact between any member of the community and gold
and silver above the value of a quarter karshapana.
As a result, it was the followers of another Indian religion who apparently
learnt from the Buddha's lesson. The Jains, followers of Mahavira, the Buddha's
contemporary, took on the role of India's bankers. From the twelfth century we
hear of the exploits of wealthy Jain bankers. As well as lending money, they
were also experts in exchange and played a similar role to that of the shroffs who
controlled money in the time of the Prinseps. In the fourteenth century the
Delhi Sultans relied on their Jain bankers to organize army pay in remote
regions. One Jain moneychanger, Thakkura Pheru, was employed as mint
master by three successive sultans, and a record of his valuations of all coins
current in northern India in 1318 has survived.
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