Multan was a centre for Indian commercial interactions with Central Asia long before the ‘Multanis’ first made their way into the historical record, during the Delhi Sultanate era. From the middle of the 16th century, the Multanis not only mediated India’s vibrant trade with Central Asia, they established settlements in key locations beyond the Hindu Kush and laid the foundation for an extensive commercial network that would endure even into the 20th century.

A circulating population of tens of thousands of Multanis, and then Shikarpuris, moved merchandise, wealth and information between north-western India and distant markets of Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran and Russia, eventually reaching even as far as Moscow and St Petersburg.

From their time as young apprentices, agents of these (Multani and Shikarpuri) family firms were instructed in complicated legal codes, accounting techniques, various methods to calculate interest, and other skills that they would need to utilise the commercial technologies available to them and maximize their profit potential.

Going places The agents would then be loaned a large amount of capital, usually in the form of cotton textiles, before they would travel by caravan to a distant market. On arriving at these markets, the agents would settle into a caravanserai, commonly one owned by other Indians associated with their family firm. As they gradually sold their merchandise, the agents would reinvest the cash retrieved in other profitable activities, most notably short-term, high-interest money-lending ventures.

Following this model, agents could realise a 200 to 300 per cent annual increase in their total wealth. After several years — the Multanis’ average tenure abroad was seven or eight years — the agents would return home and settle their accounts with their creditors, the principal partners of their family firms.

This system offered sufficient flexibility for Indian firms to take measured risks, abandon deteriorating markets for better opportunities elsewhere, and safely move large amounts of capital across dangerous regions.

Indian merchants provided a variety of commercial services that earned them their hosts’ appreciation and protection. At the same time, their unfamiliar religious practices and shrewd business acumen provoked ire among their neighbours. Central Asians quite often disliked the Indians, who occasionally suffered as victims of crimes and even persecution. The most extreme example of animosity towards Indian merchants took place in Iran during the second quarter of the 18th century, first by the Ghilzai Afghans who occupied the Safavid capital of Isfahan, and then throughout the country during the brutal reign of Nadir Shah.

After Nadir Shah’s assassination in 1747, many Multani firms were positively inclined to accept the patronage of Ahmad Shah Durrani, and relocate to the safe haven of Shikarpur, in Sind. From the late 18th century, Shikarpuris replaced Multanis as the dominant Indian commercial community in both Afghanistan and Central Asia.

In the long history of the Indian communities in Central Asia, there were considerable variations in the conditions under which they lived. Regardless, Indian merchants remained active in Central Asia even throughout the Russian Imperial era (1865-1918). However, already during the 1870s the Russian colonial administration implemented a series of policies designed to undermine the Indians’ business interests in Central Asia.

By the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, the once great network of thousands of merchants linking Indian markets with those in Central Asia had dwindled to just a handful of individuals.

A Eurasian network Each year, several thousand agents of Indian family firms left behind their wives and children in Multan, and then Shikarpur, and travelled by caravan to distant Eurasian locations where they would spend years of their lives.

The merchants favoured locations that offered the best opportunities for conducting trans-regional trade, or other lucrative ventures. Cities such as Kabul, Qandahar, Bukhara, Bandar Abbas, Isfahan and Astrakhan were home to Indian populations that ranged from a few hundred individuals to more than ten thousand in Isfahan. Indian traders also maintained sizeable communities in dozens of somewhat smaller regional cities across Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran, and up the Caucasus into Russia, and they could be found in countless villages spread across the countryside as well.

Of course, the population figures for Indian merchants inhabiting specific locations fluctuated, occasionally abruptly. Nevertheless, taking all of these communities into account, a figure of 35,000 seems a conservative estimate for the number of Indian agents of these family firms spread across Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran and Russia at any given time between the seventeenth and twentieth century. As one might expect, there were a number of important transitions that these communities experienced during the more than three centuries of their existence.

Afghanistan Throughout the early modern era, and even until the partition of India in 1947, Multani and Shikarpuri merchants were present in virtually all of the cities and villages of Afghanistan.

Because of its substantial population, political stature and location along the most important of the trade routes connecting India with Central Asia, Kabul was the principal centre for Indian commercial activity in Afghanistan. The dominant role of Hindu merchants in Kabul was well established already in the 1620s, when the English diplomat Thomas Herbert reported that ‘Bannians’ constituted the majority of the city’s population and that, other than two ‘castles’, caravanserais represented the most significant structures in the city.

Several decades later, in the 1660s, Thévenot also observed a substantial population of Hindu ‘Banians’ in the district of ‘Caboulistan’. He noted that their ‘chief charity’ was contributing to the region’s commercial infrastructure, specifically by digging wells and maintaining rest stops along the trade routes ‘for the convenience of travellers’. The position of Indian merchants in Kabul continued over the years.

In the 1830s, Alexander Burnes also found that some eight ‘great houses of agency’ (Shikarpuri firms) had three hundred subsidiary families stationed in Kabul, and they dominated the region’s trade. Other centres of Indian commercial activity in Afghanistan included Qandahar, another major political centre located on important trade routes connecting India with Persia.

In Qandahar, a substantial population of Hindu merchants resided in their own quarter of the city well into the twentieth century. In Herat, near the end of the eighteenth century, George Forster encountered one hundred Multanis who occupied two caravanserais and profited by conducting ‘a brisk commerce and extending a long chain of credit’.

MEET THE AUTHOR

Scott C Levi teaches Central Asian history at Ohio State University. He has authored The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade, 1550-1900. He has edited India and Central Asia: Commerce and Culture, 1500–1800 and co-edited Islamic Central Asia: An Anthology of Sources

Extracted from the chapter ‘The life and death of a diaspora’. With permission from Penguin Random House

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