The Geography, Economy and Society of Indian Diasporas
Stephen F. Dale

Introduction
Mercantile diasporas, settlements of merchants beyond or outside of their principal homeland,
can be classified in a number of ways, but when examining diasporas of Asian merchants twogeneral types stand out. One type of diaspora comprised mercantile communities whose homeland
was neither an agrarian nor a manufacturing center but which prospered commercially due to theirgeographic location and/or religious or social composition, which gave its merchants the incentive,means or opportunity to conduct trade over a wide geographic area. Such merchants usually soldnatural and manufactured products obtained from outside their homelands. Soghdians, Central
Asian Iranians, who flourished from the six to eighth centuries of the Common Era represent one
such case. Armenians, Eastern or Orthodox Christians, who dominated foreign trade of both
Safavid Iran (1501-1722) and also the Ottoman Empire (1326-1923) in the seventeenth century,and later and established settlements from China to Europe, constitutes a second example. Arab
Muslims of Hadhramaut in southern Arabia, who traded and settled throughout the Indian Ocean
for centuries prior to European arrival in the area, formed a third diaspora of this type.1
A second general type of diaspora featured indigenous merchants from one of the two great
Asian civilizations: China and India, who sold products from their own country or region. These
countries or civilizations possessed vibrant agrarian economies and substantial populations that
stimulated the development of textiles, ceramics, metallurgy and other manufactured products thateventually, along with certain agricultural products, became staple items in international trade. At
various times merchants from both civilizations formed diaspora communities in neighboring
regions that traded in agricultural and manufactured products from their homelands, although they
did not necessarily limit themselves to the sale of indigenous goods. Indians especially formed
multiple mercantile diasporas in West, Central, East and Southeast Asia from the earliest recorded
times through the period of European colonial dominance.
China and India represent interesting and contrasting economic and cultural centers thatgenerated merchant diasporas from among their indigenous populations, but these countries orregions also had very different histories due to fundamental political differences between these two1

Éienne de la Vaissière, Soghdian Traders (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Frantz Grenet, “Les marchands sogdiens dans lemers du Sud à l’époque pré-islamique,” Cahiers d’Asie Centrale, 1996a, pp. 65-84; Sebouh David Aslanian, From
the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2011); Ulrike Freitag and William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Hadhrami Traders,
Scholars and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s-1960s (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1997) and Ahmed Ibrahim
Abushouk and Hassan Ahmed Ibrahim, The Hadhrami Diaspora in Southeast Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2009).

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Stephen F. Dale

regions.2 Here the focus will be on India, but with the Chinese experience constantly in the
background. The most obvious factors driving the spread of Indian mercantile diasporas were:the enormous reservoir of fertile agricultural land, the early growth of major urban centers and theconsequent social division of labor and the production of valuable agrarian and manufactured
products to serve a large and diverse population. In addition, as with China, the regions on India’s
sea and land frontiers remained less economically developed and socially differentiated throughout
most of India’s recorded history. These territories include Southeast Asia, more usefully known
here as Indo-China, Central Asia, including the western region known as Mawarannahr orTransoxiana and the eastern zone, including the Mongolian steppe and the region previously
designated as Moghulistan or Chinese Turkistan and now as the Xinjiang region of China andfinally parts of West Asia, most particularly, Afghanistan and Iran.
The history of Indian mercantile diasporas could fill many volumes, because there is ample
evidence of Indian merchants from different regions of the subcontinent moving well beyond the
traditional boundaries of the South Asian subcontinent – the land frontiers marked by the Suleiman
Mountains and the Indus river in the west and Burma in the northeast, as well as India’s longcoastlines, extending from the Indus estuary and Gujarat to the Malabar coast in the west and from
Bengal to Tamilnad in the east. Indeed, it is worth recalling that during many early centuries of
the Common Era, large parts of Southeast Asia, Central and West Asia represented the greater
Indian cultural zone, a region of economic and cultural influence facilitated by overland andoceanic trade routes that were well known by the Common era and probably widely used several
centuries earlier. In the earliest periods before and after the beginning of the Common Era, records
of Indians in these peripheral regions are largely restricted to political and religious traces, such as
the foundation of Indianized states in Southeast Asia and the settlement of Buddhist missionaries
and scholars in Southeast Asia, Afghanistan and Central Asia. Yet the presence of Brahman priests
and Buddhists monks in Southeast Asia and Buddhist monks in Afghanistan and Central Asia wasalmost certainly coincident with Indian trade with these regions. Indeed, there is no reason tothink of Hindu and Buddhist priests and missionaries and merchants necessarily as distinct groups
of individuals. Yet it is impossible to ascertain when the movement of Indian merchants andreligious specialists first led to the establishment of significant Indian mercantile diasporas in theseneighboring regions.
Two groups of sources attest to the trade of Indian merchants in Central Asia and Southeast
Asia and China in the early Common Era. First, fragmentary letters of Sogdian merchants
discovered by Aurel Stein and others in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century document
the vibrant commercial connections between northwestern India and Central Asia and Chinese
diplomatic records of exchanges between India, Southeast Asia and China offer glimpses of
trading activities. The Sogdian letters illustrate the vitality of trade that these ethnically Persian
2

Chinese merchants do not appear to have participated in the sea trade prior to the Sung (Song) Dynasty. See
Mark Edward Lewis, China’s Cosmopolitan Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 162;
Derek Heng, Sino-Malay Trade and Diplomacy in the Tenth to Fourteenth Centuries (Athens, Ohio: Ohio
University Press, 2009).

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The Geography, Economy and Society of Indian Diasporasmerchants conducted between India and Central Asia and they occasionally mention the presenceof Indian merchant communities in the Xinjiang region.3 One of these documents dated to theseventh century CE alludes to the Indian merchants in the northeast of the Taklamakan desert.4
Chinese sources document Indian diplomatic missions to China between the fourth and early sixth
centuries CE, as well as other missions from Magadha in north central India and from unnamed
southern Indian courts, which arrived in China in the seventh and eighth centuries. It is likely that
all of these were in part commercial missions.5 By the early seventh century CE the Tangdynasty (618-907) had been established, vastly increasing the volume of international trade, partly
stimulated by the early Tang emperors support for Buddhism. Indians eventually settled in
substantial numbers at the Tang court in Chang’an (modern Xian), and while specific merchants
are not mentioned in Chinese sources, Chinese are known to have coveted Indian cottons andBuddhist artifacts.6
Almost nothing is known about the actual organization of particular Indian mercantile
diasporas prior to the eleventh century of the Common Era, but after that date substantial
information becomes available for Indian mercantile diasporas, whose members were natives ofdifferent Indian regions that settled in two neighboring areas: Southeast Asia and territories to
India’s north and northwest, including Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran and even Russia. Two ofthese diasporas will be discussed here: South Indian, largely Tamil-speaking Hindu bankers andmerchants, who principally conducted business and settled in Southeast Asia, and northern andnorthwestern Indians, largely individuals of the large Hindu caste group known as Khattris, mostof whom came from the Punjab and traded in Afghanistan, Mawarannahr, Iran and Russia.

Tamil Merchants in Southeast Asia
The earliest Tamil merchants who traded overseas are associated with the Chola Empire, apowerful southeast Indian state, whose period of rule from the late ninth to the mid-fourteenth
century is notable for Indian commercial and political connections with Southeast Asia, extending
even to China. The Cholas, who at various times ruled large areas of Southeastern India, as wellas Sumatra and Malaysia, constituted one of the regional kingdoms whose agrarian wealth andcontrol of important trade routes within India and abroad, generated a vibrant agrarian andmercantile economy. Chola merchant guilds were organized into semi-autonomous urban
communities known as nagara, whose merchants traded throughout southern and central India andSoutheast Asia. These guilds possessed an institutional financial structure in their temples, which
far more than simple places of worship, functioned as formal banking centers, where merchants
could both deposit and borrow funds. Two of these guilds are known from medieval inscriptions,
the Ayyavole and Manigramam, and their trading connections extended from West Asia to3

Vaissère, Sogdian Traders, p. 76.
Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Trade and Diplomacy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), p. 161.
5
Hans Bielenstein, Diplomacy and Trade in the Chinese World (Leiden: Brill, 2005), p. 77.
6
Edward Schaeffer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 122.
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Stephen F. Dale

Southeast Asia. In the latter region particularly, the name of the Manigramam and other guilds
are recorded in Tamil language inscriptions found in southern Thailand and in a 1088 CE
inscription on Sumatra, a Chola feudatory at that time. A group of South Indian merchants, mostprobably Tamils, financed and endowed a Hindu temple at the principal Chinese international port,
Quanzhou in the twelfth century CE.7 Other Hindu merchants from India’s southwest or Malabar
Coast established a Vaishnavite temple at Pagan in Burma in the thirteenth century. The wealthand lavish patronage Ayyavole merchants lavished on Chola religious and political leaders is
attested to by a 1055 CE South Indian inscription, which celebrates their ethics, vast trading
connections, wealth, military power and piety.8 The inscription indicates, among many otherinteresting religious, political and geographic and economic information, that these Tamilmerchants also traded with Parsa or Iran.
Famed throughout the world, adorned with many good qualities…born to be wanderers overmany countries…and by water and land routes penetrating into the regions of the six
continents, with superior elephants, well-bred horses, large sapphires, moonstones, pearls,
rubies, diamonds, lapis lazuli, onyx, topaz, carbuncles, coral, emeralds and various sucharticles; cardamoms, cloves, sandal camphor, musk, saffron and other perfumes and drugs; byselling which wholesale, or hawking about on their shoulders, preventing the loss by customs
duties, they fill up the emperor’s treasury of gold, his treasury of jewels and his armoury of
weapons.9
The fact that most commercial terms in Southeast Asian languages dating from thepre-European era were Indian or Chinese in origin, reinforces the economic as well as the cultural
identity of Southeast Asia as Indo-China, a region that was within Indian and Chinese economic
and cultural spheres of influence. More than anything else the region was a market for Indianand Chinese textiles. As Anthony Reid has noted: “Situated between the world’s two major
sources of fine cloth – India for cottons and China for silks – Southeast Asia became
internationally known as a consumer rather than a producer of textiles.10 The Portuguese and later
other European merchants intruded into this trade, as is shown by the English seizure of a
Portuguese ship in 1602 carrying textiles from the southeast Indian coast to Malacca.11 As more
information about trade in this region became available when Europeans began documenting
commerce in the region, the size and commercial significance of the Indian diasporas there became
apparent. Thus when Portuguese arrived in the region in the early sixteenth century they foundmajor settlements of Indian merchants, principally Chettiars, Tamil-speaking Hindus, as well as
7

Kenneth R. Hall, “Ports of Trade, Maritime Diasporas, and Networks of Trade and Cultural Integration,” Journalof the Economic and Social History of the Orient 53, no. 1-2 (2010), pp. 109-45.
8Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund, A History of India (London: Routledge, 3rd ed., 1998), pp. 118-20.
9Ibid., p. 119.
10
Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680, I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988),
p. 90.
11
Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680, II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 28.

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Indian Muslims from Gujerat. The richest and most important Indians were mercantile Hindu
castes, whose individuals were natives of southeast Indian ports such as Pulicat. Most of these
men are described as bankers or moneylenders, but many of them were also merchants – just as
were Khattri Hindus from the Punjab discussed below. All of these Indian merchants who traded insoutheast Asia, whether South Indian Hindus or Gujarati Muslims, were known for theircommercial acumen in both calculation and accounts.12
The mercantile descendants of these wealthy, influential Tamils mentioned in early European
accounts of the region were the Chettiars of the colonial era, a caste group primarily known, as
were earlier Hindu merchants, as moneylenders or bankers. Modern anthropological studies of
the Chettiars offer detailed insight into the social characteristics of this caste and its economic
organization, traits, which are recognizable from the fragmentary earlier inscriptions. In the
British colonial era, Chettiar sub-castes were identified with particular temple complexes, which
served them simultaneously as ritual and banking centers. These colonial era Chettiars are
known to have made tithe-like contributions to their temples, which served members of thecommunity as banking institutions, lending funds below market interest rates in the manner ofreligious or charitable endowments in Islamic societies known as waqfs.13 Satellite temples in
Singapore and Penang, which staged lavish festivals, testify to the size and economic significanceof these diaspora communities, whose firms were typically organized around the joint family, as
was the case with Hindu merchants elsewhere, such as the Punjabi Khattris discussed below.
Chettiars, therefore, constituted a financial and or mercantile diaspora of Indians in Southeast
Asia, who maintained a presence and influence in that region over the course of many centuries.
The mainly European observers who alluded to the settlement and economic significance of
Chettiars in this region do not explain why these Indians were successful, but, as in the case of the
Punjabi Khattris, one has to point first of all to the fact that the Chettiar homeland was a wealthy
agricultural region that generated an enormous agricultural surplus, which supported a large
complex and socially differentiated society, stimulating local cloth and metal production.
Indigenous bankers and merchants were able to accumulate substantial amounts of capital throughlocal sales and business activities, and that capital plus their carefully trained financial expertise
enabled them to prosper, whether in India or Southeast Asia. Young Chettiar boys, like theirskilled compatriots in Rajasthan and the Punjab, were carefully trained, as an early twentiethcentury description makes clear. As an Indian scholar has observed:
When a male child is born in a Nattukottai Chetti’s family a certain sum is usually set aside toaccumulate at compound interest and form a fund for the boy’s education. As soon as he isten or twelve he begins to equip himself for the ancestral profession. He not only learns
accounting and the theory of banking but he has to apply his knowledge practically as an

12

Ibid., pp. 111-115.
See for example Murat Çizakça, “Cash Waqfs of Bursa 1555-1823,” Journal of the Economic and Social Historyof the Orient 38, no. 3 (1995), pp. 313-54.

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apprentice in his father’s office.14
The Chettiars, therefore, like their famous Marwari counterparts in Rajasthan, who served theMughals and later the English as financiers, constituted family firms of sophisticated financial andmercantile specialists whose ready capital and financial skills gave them an enormous advantage
over less sophisticated merchants. Like other Indian traders and bankers/moneylenders, they also
operated in territories less economically developed and socially differentiated than many Indiansocieties.

Punjabi Khattris in Afghanistan, Mawarannahr, Iran, and Russia
Any attempt at a complete history of Indian financial and mercantile diasporas would at thevery least have to include studies of merchants from the Bengal region and Gujarat, which wereboth important economic zones in South Asia. However, for the purposes of comparison here, asingle overland diaspora has been chosen, in this case the foreign commercial communities ofanother large Hindu caste group, the Khattris, natives of the Punjab and adjacent regions innorthwestern India, who during the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, exerted
perhaps even greater economic influence than the Chettiars not only in Southeast Asia, but in
Afghanistan, Central Asia and Iran, eventually even reaching Moscow. As in the case of Indian
economic relations with Southeast Asia, India’s enormous productive capacity made it a dominanteconomic power in the northwest as well as the southeast, and the principal source of India’s
economic dominance in the northwestern region was initially the same as in Southeast Asia, that is
Indian textiles. After all, northwestern India, including parts of the Punjab, had been the wealthiest
province of the Iranian Achaemenid Empire (550-330 BCE), and the economic relation of thisregion to Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia remained the same in later centuries. It is reasonable
to suggest that India enjoyed a balance of trade surplus in the Achaemenid period and later, just as
it demonstrably did with these relatively sparsely populated regions in the sixteenth, seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries.15 India was, in fact, the dominant economic power throughout the entire
Indian Ocean region and its merchants were successful along its northwestern periphery for thesame reasons they flourished in Southeast Asia: valuable goods, substantial capital resources andsophisticated financial commercial skills.
Just as Indian merchants from South India almost certainly traded in Southeast Asia from theearliest years of the Common Era, so too it is probable that Indians from the Punjab and thenorthwestern regions of South Asia traded with Afghanistan, Central Asia and Iran just as early.
As indicated above, the movement of Indian Buddhists into Mawarannahr from the first century
14
Hans Dieter Evers, “Chettiar Moneylenders in Southeast Asia,” in Denys Lombard and Jean Aubin ed.,Marchands et homes d’affairs asiatiques (Paris: Éditions de l’École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1988), p.
205.
15
For these later centuries see Stephen F. Dale, The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 113-130.

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CE onwards occurred along well-established trade routes, whether plied by Iranians, Sogdians orIndians themselves. Kabul and eastern Afghanistan were often included in Indian kingdoms fromthe period of the Mauryas (324-183 BCE) to the Hindu Shahis of Kabul in the ninth and tenthcenturies CE. During the reign of the Kushan monarchs from the first to the third centuries CE, a
kingdom that extended from Xinjiang through Mawarannahr down across Afghanistan to the northIndian heartland, Indian merchants would have found it relatively easy to trade throughout
Central Asia, Afghanistan and eastern Iran. The great period of Buddhist expansion into Central
Asia and China took place during the Kushan era. As is the case with Indian merchants inSoutheast Asia, however, it was in the centuries of what is commonly called the early modern
period that probabilities yield to documented certainties. Records show that during the relatively
stable era of Mughal rule in India (1526-1739/1857) and Safavid rule in Iran (1501-1722),
thousands of Indian bankers and merchants traveled to and resided semi-permanently in
Mawarannahr, Afghanistan and and Iran. From Iran they later moved into Russian territory at
Astrakhan and traveled up the Volga to Moscow, where they resided in the Kitae Gorod, the“Chinese city,” where most foreign merchants lived.
The size of the Indian diaspora in Iran was such that a twentieth century historian of thecountry, Mehdi Keyvani, wrote that the presence of Indian “moneychangers” in several major
Iranian cities during the Safavid era was “an astonishing and unexplained episode of Iranian
economic history.”16 In fact, thousands of Indian bankers/moneylenders and merchants resided in
Iran by the early to mid-seventeenth century, with smaller numbers living in Afghanistan, Central
Asia and Russia. Punjabi Khattris, Pushtuns or Afghans and Marwaris from Rajasthan were theprincipal merchant groups from the Mughal territories of South Asia who traded in these regions.
While Chettiars, Gujeratis and others, who traded with Southeast Asia, could travel seasonallywith the monsoon winds that carried them relatively easily to their destinations or home to India,
Indian merchants in the west could reach Afghanistan and Central Asia on camel caravans fromlate spring to early fall via the Khyber and Bolan passes and travel onwards to Iran. Afghan
powindahs, Afghan nomadic or semi-nomadic clans who possessed camels and regularly moved
between South Asia and Afghanistan and Central Asia provided the overland “shipping” for atleast part of the journey through the dangerous northwest passes and Afghan territories. 17
Alternatively, merchants could reach Iran or the Persian Gulf by ship directly from Gujerat or bysailing down the Indus to the sea. An English merchant writing in 1662 commented that “themerchants engaged in the trade [from Surat in Gujerat] to Gombroon [Bandar ‘Abbas] in the
Persian Gulf] were mostly Indians,”18 although he does not identify them further.
The majority of the Indians who comprised the large community of merchants in Iran appear
to have come from Multan or traveled west via the city, located in Central Pakistan on the Indus
River, near the relatively easily traversed Bolan Pass. Situated at the crossroads of the river and16

Mehdi Kevani, Artisans and Guild Life in the Later Safavid Period (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1982), p. 228.
For a discussion of what the Russian scholar, A.K. Khazanov has called “mediatory trade” see his book Nomads
and the Outside World, Julia Crookenden trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 209.
18
William Foster ed., The English Factories in India, 1661-1664 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), p. 214.
17

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overland trade routes, Multan had been a major entrepôt during the era of the Delhi Sultanate(1206-1526); Zia al-Din Barani reported in the fourteenth century that Multanis controlled asignificant portion of Muslim India’s long distance trade. 19 Russian, French and German
merchants trading in seventeenth century Iran, and particularly those who lived in the Safavid
capital Isfahan, identified most of the Indian merchants who lived in the country and capital city as
Multanis. The city of Multan was important not only as a transit point, that is an entrepôt, but it
was also a major textile-manufacturing center, as it was located in a cotton cultivation area of theSind region. More cotton textiles were undoubtedly produced in Lahore and Gujerat, but Multan,
along with Gujerati cities, were probably the principal export centers for Indian cottons shipped to
Iran.
The majority of these Multani merchants were almost certainly Khattris, a ritually middle
level Hindu caste group, concentrated in the Punjab and northwestern India. Some merchants aredefinitely known by their sub-caste names to have been Khattris, and in the early nineteenth
century a British official reported that Khattris could still be found throughout Afghanistan and as
far west as the Russian Caspian port of Astrakhan, functioning as “bankers, merchants, goldsmiths
and sellers of grain.”20 The few Muslim Multanis whose names are mentioned were probably
Afghans, most likely Luharnis, the so-called Powindahs mentioned above, who traded themselves
as well as providing camel caravans for other merchants. In addition, a number of other Hindu aswell as Jain merchants, and some Indian Muslims, also traded in Iran, Afghanistan and southern
Russia in the eighteenth century. The Hindus and Jains, including Hindu Agarwals and Jain
Oswals, were usually subsumed under the general geographical identity as Marwaris, originally
natives of the Marwar region of Rajasthan.21
While the Multani merchant diaspora in Afghanistan, Central Asia Iran and Russia, wasdispersed over a wide area, most of them lived and worked in Isfahan, the capital of Iran in theseventeenth century. Different observers estimated that 10,000 Indian merchants lived in Iranwithout leaving.22 The German physician Kaempfer speaking of the years 1684-85 estimated that
10,000 Multanis lived just in Isfahan23 – a major diaspora! 10,000 may be a formulaic number fora large but uncounted number, but at the least it suggests that substantial numbers of Khattris andsmaller numbers of other Indians lived and worked in Iran and especially in Isfahan during the
Safavid era. Many of these individuals may have come from Indian families long settled in
Afghanistan, where Indian mercantile castes continued to live and supply capital and commercial
goods until the late twentieth century. In Afghanistan Hindu merchants/moneylenders lived intowns and villages during the Mughal-Safavid era and well into the late twentieth century. In
19Stephen Frederic Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), pp. 56-57.
20
Mounstuart Elphinstone, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul and its Dependencies in Persia, Tartary andIndia, repr. (Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck-u Verlagsanstatt, 1969), p. 317.
21
Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade 1600-1750, p. 59.
22
One source for this figure was an Indian merchant residing in Astrakhan in 1647. See K.A. Antonova, ed. et al,
Russko-indiiskie otnosheniia v XVII veke (Moscow: Nauka, 1958), p. 85.
23
Engelbert Kaempfer, Am Hofe des persischen Grosskönigs 1684-1685 (Tübingen and Basel: Walter Hinz, 1977),
p. 204.

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Afghanistan particularly, whose inhabitants were often tribal, with relatively little occupational
differentiation, Indian commercial castes provided many of these inhabitants with goods andcapital. Often these Hindus were the only merchants in towns and villages.
The Indian mercantile diaspora in Isfahan constituted a formidable economic presence. The
community’s size and influence in Iran reflected the disparate nature of the geographies,
populations and economies of these two regions. Iran was a largely dry, partly desert country
with a population no greater than ten million compared to more than 100 million people in India in
1600. Its economy was also relatively modest compared to different economic zones of India.
It had a small agrarian base, which did not generate the agricultural surpluses or stimulate the kindof industrial production that had long flourished in India. Its merchant class, by all evidence, also
possessed little of the capital that Indians from many regions accumulated. In the Mughal/Safavid
centuries the country ran a persistent balance of payments deficit with the Indian subcontinent.
Foreign observers who visited Isfahan, the city Shah ‘Abbas Safavi I (1588-1629) made the
Iranian capital in the late sixteenth or during the first years of the seventeenth century, often
commented on the presence of Indian merchants or moneylenders/bankers in the city. Many ofthese foreigners depicted the Indians just as Europeans frequently portrayed Jewish merchants andbankers in Europe, that is, as repulsive, usurious moneylenders, individuals who distorted normal
economic relationships while siphoning scarce specie from the country. Jean (later Sir John)
Chardin, the French Huguenot jeweler depicted Indians in this way, even while acknowledging
they dominated commerce between Iran and India.24 Apparent commercial jealousy led many
Europeans to criticize Indian commercial practices in Isfahan, as seems to have been the case of
the Englishman Edward Pettus who, writing in 1618, well before Chardin, reported that Indianssold cloth of all kinds and at all prices, which “this Countrey cannot bee without, excepte thepeople should goe naked,” complaining that “they vende moste of the Linene they bring to Spahan[Isfahan] after a most base pedlinge…carrying it [Indian cloth] up and down on their shoulders.”25
The latter phrase echoes one in the 1055 South Indian inscription of the Ayyavole merchants cited
above, which after celebrating the widespread trading networks and the wealth these merchantsbrought to Chola monarchs, describes these merchants “hawking [goods] about on theirshoulders.”
In fact, it is likely that many Indians who lived and conducted business in Isfahan both lentmoney and also sold cloth and other goods. Russian data show that many Hindu Astrakhanmerchants engaged in both activities; indeed cloth sales would have generated profits that could be
used in money lending. The commercial success of Indian merchants in Isfahan and the primaryreason so many were settled in the Safavid capital and elsewhere in Iran was due first of all to thefact that Indians produced better cloth at cheaper prices. As Chardin himself observed about thecontrast between Iranians and Indians:

24(Sir) John (Jean) Chardin, Travels in Persia 1673-1677 (Mineola, N.Y,: Dover Books, repr, 1988), pp. 280-81.
“An English View of Persian Trade in 1618: Reports from the Merchants Edward Pettus and Thomas Barker,”
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 19, no. 2 (1976), p. 192.
25

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They [Iranians] make Calico cloth very reasonable, but they make none fine, because they
have it cheaper of the Indies than they can make it [and] they understand also the painting ofLinnen, but not so well as the Indians, because they buy in the Indies the finest painted
Linnen so cheap, that they would get nothing by improving themselves in that manufacture.26
Low costs and superior quality of their cloth gave Indians a great advantage in the Iranianmarket, but Chardin believed that contrasts between Hindu and Perso-Islamic culture also
contributed to Indian merchants’ success. In discussing the commercial culture of Iranians heremarked that they had “not a Genius naturally bent on Traffick,” by which he meant that because
Islam forbade usury, pious individuals restricted their commercial activities, and instead ofcomplementing their sales by lending money they invested their profits in property: houses,
bazaars and caravansarais. Chardin was aware that Muslims knew of many ways to conceal
interest forbidden by the Quran, one of these was simply to omit it from contracts, a practice which
Hanafi law explicitly allowed.27 He also knew that some Muslims were far more willing to lendmoney at usurious rates than others, despite religious prohibitions on such practice. Yet, Chardin
believed that many Iranian merchants did not feel comfortable investing their funds more
profitably than by purchasing property.
While Chardin knew very well that not all Iranian Muslim merchants were as religiously
circumspect as he sometimes suggested, it is undeniable that Indian commercial culture contrasted
dramatically with the outlook of Iranian Muslims. Neither Punjabi Khattris nor Tamil Chettiars
suffered from religious prohibitions against either commerce or their money lending. In fact,
these Hindus exhibited quite the opposite attitude toward commerce and finance. As the training of
Chettiar boys suggests, since ancient times, Indian mercantile castes had developed a commercial
ethos that legitimized their commercial life. In the case of certain Marwaris in modern times,
commerce was sanctified rather than religiously condemned, as is indicated by the fact that suchtools of their commercial trade as pens, ink and most of all account books were worshipped ashousehold incarnations of Hindu deities.28 Thus the symbiotic association of commerce andreligion that characterized Tamil merchants’ ethos was true of other Indian merchant castes as well,although the Khattris are not known to have used temples as banks in the manner of the South
Indian Hindus.
The economic and cultural factors, which explain the development of an Indian commercial
diaspora in Iran, generally holds true for Indian mercantile settlements in neighboring Mawarannar
and Russia in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Both regions were relatively
underdeveloped when compared with South Asia. Mawarannahr had long been, like Iran, an Indian
economic colony. Like Iran it simply did not have the agricultural capacity and consequently the
population to generate the kind of surplus capital and production that had long characterized India.
As indicated above, Indian merchants had probably traded in Mawarannahr and Xinjiang well
26

Chardin, Travels in Persia 1673-77, pp. 278-79.
Noel J. Coulson, A History of Islamic Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, repr. 2006), p. 100
28
D.K. Taknet, Industrial Entrepreneurship of the Shekawati Marwaris (Jaipur: Taknet, 1986), p. 46
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The Geography, Economy and Society of Indian Diasporas

before the Common Era, and in the Mughal centuries, Indian commercial diasporas were
established in many Central Asian cities. During the Mughal period some Indians had evenshifted from exporting Indian manufactured cotton cloth in favor of producing the cloth locally inSamarkand and elsewhere.
Russia was a somewhat different case. Indian merchants are not known to have traded or
settled there prior to the Russian conquest of Astrakhan in 1556, after which some individual
traders began moving north from their commercial bases in Iran. Otherwise Russia offered someof the same opportunities to Indian merchants, as did Iran and Central Asia. While its territory
was vastly greater and its government distinctly different than anything Indians had seen before in
Afghanistan, Iran or Central Asia, Russia was a primitive, under populated and economically
undeveloped country at the time Indian merchants entered the country. Russia’s agrarian andmanufacturing sectors were impoverished, when compared with India in the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries, and its merchants were noticeably unsophisticated and poorly capitalized
when compared with their Indian counterparts. As a result of all these factors Indian merchants had
no difficulty establishing a thriving mercantile settlement in Astrakhan, many of whose members
traded in Iranian more than in Indian goods. One Indian merchant named Sutur, reported in a
1648 petition, that he had lived in Astrakhan and paid customs duties there for twenty-five years.29

Conclusion
This paper does not do more than provide a brief introduction to two Indian mercantile
diasporas: the Tamils in Southeast Asia and China and the Khattris in Afghanistan, Iran,
Mawarannahr and Russia. Information about these two diasporas varies greatly, but thesecommunities have several characteristics in common. First, they represent the kind of diasporasthat originated in relatively wealthy territories that generated economic development and social
differentiation. Well before the Common Era, South Asia had become a major economic andcultural center, overshadowing in wealth and socio-economic sophistication the territories on its
periphery in Southeast, West, and Central Asia and even Russia. The combination of coveted
natural and manufactured products, superbly trained and skilled merchants and moneylenders andbankers, sometimes aided by expansionist Indian states, encouraged the growth of multiple Indian
diasporas, which also shared similar social characteristics as extended family firms.
Many of these diasporas also continued to thrive, even during the European colonial era. To
take but one example, during the mid to late eighteenth century many Multani merchants shifted
the focus of their activities further south along the Indus to Shikarpur and Multan, settled andintermarried with local Hindu castes, and generated more diaspora settlements as Shikarpuris, firstin the towns previously frequented by Multanis, and by the mid-twentieth century, throughout
Eurasia.30 Many other Indian caste groups with sophisticated financial and mercantile skills have29

Antonova, Russko-indiiskie otnosheniia, I, no. 36, 1648, pp. 88-89.
See Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000).
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Stephen F. Daleflourished as diaspora communities in recent times. One only has to visit hotels and motels in the
United States, for example, to appreciate the reach of the Patel diaspora in North America.31

31

See the film Mississippi Masala for a dramatized “taste” of this caste’s activities.

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