Social Life in Ancient India: Studies in Vatsyayana's Kamasutra c8.s2.1

c8.s2.1

At the time that Vātsyāyana wrote, India was carrying on an abundant trade, by land and by sea with China on the one hand and the Roman orient on the other. According to a Chinese book *Funantu-suh-tokuan* written in the third century A.C., Kuntien or Kaundinya founded an Indian Colony in Indo-China about B.C. 58, and it soon grew up into a great centre of foreign trade in that quarter. By way of this Brahmanic colony planted in Indo-China, the Indians carried on an ever-increasing maritime trade with China in the approved Chinese method of sending so-called embassies and making an exchange of presents. We read again and again in the Chinese annals of numerous Indian envoys who presented tribute by way of Jihnan (modern Annam and Tonquin).³ With Asia Minor and the near West, India had been intimately connected for a long time as we see from Aśoka's inscriptions; and the settlement of the Kuṣāṇas as a great Indian ruling power in the north-western marches of the country, led to the opening out of trade-routes to the east and the west, and it placed India in a position of vantage with regard to the trade with the civilised world, with the dominions of the "Son of Heaven" on the one hand and the empire of the Caesars on the other. When in the second century A.C., not very long before Vātsyāyana, a great Kuṣāṇa emperor adopted the magnificent title of *Mahārāja-Rājātirāja-Devaputra-Kaisara Kaniṣka*—"The great King, the King of Kings the Son of Heaven, the Caesar Kaniṣka", we see that in him there was a fusion of the three great civilisations of the time—the Indian, the Chinese and the Roman.¹ The currency of the Kuṣāṇas shows an equally international character and seems to be designed to facilitate the trade of these dominions with the rest of the world; the coins show a strange and wonderful combination of Greek, Zoroastrian and Indian designs and icons; some of them have Jupiter on one side and Buddha on the other; they have legends in Greek, Iranian or Indian vernaculars and in varied scripts, Greek, Brāhmī or Kharoṣṭhī. There cannot be any doubt that these coins were intended for currency inside as well as outside and they afforded facility of exchange to the Indian merchants trading with the near West. Vātsyāyana also knew coins of copper, silver and gold. He speaks of a *kārṣāpaṇa* of small value and of the *niṣka* or coin of gold; besides, he refers to the art of examining *rūpyas* or coins as one of the sixty-four *kalās*. Moreover, he uses the word *hiraṇya* to mean money in general including perhaps, gold and silver coins.¹