The Colas c30.24

c30.24

Towards the ninth century a.d. the countries of Southern Asia had developed an extensive maritime and commercial activity, and attained a prosperity unequalled in history.⁶² The Tang empire in China, Śrī Vijaya under the powerful line of the Śailēndras, and the Abbasid Khalifat at Baghdad were the chief states outside India that flourished on this trade. The political troubles in China in the latter part of the ninth century interrupted the established trade relations for a time. China became unsafe for the foreign traders who now retired to the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, whither the Chinese ships had to go for the purchase of foreign goods. This was the beginning of the Chinese navigation of the high seas. In the twelfth century, Cantonese sea-going junks went as far west as Quilon on the Malabar Coast.⁶³ Siraf on the eastern coast of the Persian Gulf⁶⁴ was the chief emporium in the West in the period. 'Here', says Ibn Hawqal, a contemporary Arab writer, 'there is not any husbandry or cultivation of the ground; and they bring water from a distance. There are not any trees immediately about Siraf; and the inhabitants devote their whole time to commerce and merchandise.'⁶⁵ Such was the importance of the trade of Siraf, that, despite the disadvantages of its situation and climate, the town was covered with very fine edifices and was very populous. The sailors and merchants of the entire Indian Ocean, Chinese, Javanese, Malay and Indian, came frequently to Siraf for exchanging their products. Siraf then was a cosmopolitan city, and its chief merchants, when they received strangers as guests, took scrupulous care to conform to their manners and customs. After mentioning the existence in India of a caste of which the members never ate off the same plate or at the same table, Abu Zayd tells us: ‘when these sectaries resort to Siraf and one of the principal merchants invites them to a repast in his house, at which about 100 persons assist, it is necessary that the host causes to be placed before each one of these sectaries a plate in which he eats and which is exclusively reserved for him.’⁶⁶ The use of separate plates for eating was, of course, not confined to any single caste or sect, as Abu Zayd thought, but was the universal rule in India. The statement is valuable as evidence of the trade and social relations maintained by Indians with the rest of the world in the ninth and tenth centuries.