The mouse merchant money in ancient india

ARSHIA SATTAR THE STORY OF INDIAN BUSINESS THE MOUSE MERCHANT Money in Ancient India Foreword by Gu rcha n Da s Contents Dedication Foreword by Gurcharan Das Translator’s Note Introduction Section I: Clever Wives The Story of Kirtisena Upakosha and Her Suitors The Unfaithful Wife Section II: Courtesans How a Courtesan Should Handle Money The Gentleman’s Life The Courtesan Who Fell in Love The Courtesan’s Tricks Section III: Gamblers The Gambler’s Lament The Dice Game The Gambler and the Gods Section IV: Poverty Charudatta’s Lament How to Seek a Fortune: Part One How to Seek a Fortune: Part Two The Image of Poverty Section V: Thieves The Merchant and the Bandits The Man Who Outsmarted Himself The Miser and His Kheer The Merchant and the Dry Tank Section VI: What a Merchant Needs for His Business to Succeed The Mouse Merchant The Mice That Ate Iron Ayodhya King Vikrama and the Mendicant Section VII: The Sanudasa Cycle The Travels of Sanudasa the Merchant Copyright Acknowledgements Follow Penguin Copyright For my father, Hameed Sattar, who taught me how to count cash Foreword MOST CULTURES HAVE looked down on the making of money This isn’t surprising as moneymaking emerged from within settled agricultural communities whose material life was relentlessly cyclical Any change in the seasons of planting and harvesting threatened survival Hence, people tended to be conservative, and suspicious of change and of anyone different, especially an outsider The merchant was especially distrusted because his life entailed something new—travel, risk-taking and innovation People marvelled at the novelty of his life, combined with envy at his ability to grow rich beyond measure without producing anything tangible or having to toil under the sun Not surprisingly, his wealth was not matched by social acceptance until recent times No wonder the merchant has been a subversive figure in history Set against this background, Arshia Sattar’s marvellous book is like a fresh breeze She has translated Sanskrit stories from ancient and medieval India, which offer a nice corrective to the universal prejudice against the merchant They present a profoundly human and usually sympathetic picture of his trade Our merchant heroes are sometimes gullible, sometimes greedy; at moments ingenious, but dim-witted at others; and hopelessly in love with courtesans but also loyal to their wives There are honest and dishonest merchants; extravagant and ascetic ones Above all, the merchant is a full-blooded person with agency; not the stereotype of prejudice to whom even the great William Shakespeare succumbed in The Merchant of Venice Most of these stories unabashedly celebrate money ‘To have money is to have life,’ proclaims Sanudasa, when he discovers the pearls he had hidden in the topknot of his hair before he was shipwrecked In the Panchatantra, there is a remarkable conversation among four brahmin friends in which the unanimous conclusion emerges: ‘Let the sole aim be, of men of sense to make money.’ In another account from the same text, even the corpse seems to prefer death to poverty ‘A man is better dead than poor,’ is the corpse’s silent answer to a destitute, weary man Further on, the text teaches us that wealth ‘can be acquired in six ways, as follows: by begging, serving kings, farming, teaching, moneylending and trade’ After reviewing the pros and cons of each alternative, it is concluded that trade is best suited for the acquisition of wealth because it provides the maximum autonomy to an individual Despite this uninhibited praise for money and trade, India’s society was also agricultural and conservative, but it found a rightful place for the trader within the hierarchy of caste and wealth While it accepted the vaishya as ‘twice-born’ and of high caste, it placed him in the third station in the social pecking order, behind the brahmin (the ‘priest’) and the kshatriya (the ‘landowner’, ‘warrior’) Pre-modern India was also one of the greatest storytelling cultures of the world and its stories naturally reflect its values Arshia Sattar has chosen stories related to artha (‘wealth’ or ‘material well-being’), which is one of the four classical aims of the Hindu life Not only her stories reveal Indian society’s attitude to the merchant but also the merchant’s attitude to money While entertaining us with the romance of the merchant’s seafaring life, the stories offer great wisdom about money The goal of artha, however, quickly hit a wall, against another imperative of life, dharma (‘moral well-being’), the moral dimension of business and political life Should one unscrupulously pursue wealth and power, or does real success come from ethical conduct? Mostly, the classical goal of dharma seems to trump artha in the stories—there is a right and a wrong way to make money But there are other downsides to artha One of these, as the Panchatantra points out, is what is today called the problem of ‘work–life balance’: A man preoccupied by the need for wealth Gives up values, forsakes his family, Abandons his mother and the land of birth, Leaves his own place disadvantageous, And quickly goes to foreign place; What else? There are always trade-offs in life While you can make lots of money travelling far and wide, you must be prepared to give up the mundane pleasures of domesticity The stories bring out other ambiguities of the human condition—there are no easy answers A tradition that celebrates artha—‘money is a good thing and everybody wants it,’ as Arshia Sattar puts it—also had to cope with another ideal Early on in the development of Indian society, from the time of the Upanishads, Buddhism and Jainism, there emerged an ascetic streak The sannyasi (the ‘renouncer’) became a dramatic hero in saffron robes, who posed a challenge to the traditional, secular order and its thinking about the good life He created ambivalence about money, in particular, and it has continued to the present day The brahmin, in any case, had always been in two minds about money, but he could not speak out against it as he depended on the wealthy patrons The kshatriya had also mainly valued action in war and aristocratic idleness in peace, and scorned the life of daily toil In recent times, Marxist influences in India have added to the ambivalence With its antipathy to private property, Marxism tried to convince us that the bourgeois trader was an exploiter These prejudices came together in the post-Independence generation of Jawaharlal Nehru, who combined the high brahminical with the English upper-class Fabian scorn for money, and institutionalized the most rigid socialist controls over business between 1950 and 1990—a period also known as the ‘Licence Raj’ Only after the reforms of 1991 did India begin to lose its hypocritical attitude, and two decades later, it seems to have returned to its ancient uninhibited attitude to wealth and the celebration of artha as a legitimate goal of life Business schools have mushroomed across the land, and many of the stories that Arshia Sattar has translated could form the basis of entertaining, edifying case material for instruction in classrooms The Story of Indian Business The relationship between commerce and social status is an old question that has been debated ever since commerce first emerged in human history when there was an agricultural surplus It is also related to the ethical question of the right way to business, for those whose wealth was righteously acquired were rewarded with reputation and status It is questions like these that engage the authors of our unique multi-volume history of Indian business The Mouse Merchant is the fifth volume in Penguin’s The Story of Indian Business series The series seeks to mine great ideas in business and economics that have shaped commerce on the Indian subcontinent, while entertaining us with the romance of the high seas and adventure in the bazaar Leading contemporary scholars closely examine historical texts, inscriptions and records, and interpret them in a lively, sharp and authoritative manner for the intelligent reader who may have no prior background in the field Each volume offers an enduring perspective on business enterprise in the past, avoiding the pitfall of simplistically cataloguing a set of lessons for today The value of the exercise, if we are successful, will be to promote a longer-term sensibility in the reader, which can help to understand the material bases for our present human condition and think sensibly about our economic future Taken together, the series as a whole celebrates the ideal captured in the Sanskrit word artha The series began with Tom Trautmann’s sparkling interpretation for our times of the renowned treatise on the science of wealth, Arthashastra, which was authored over 2000 years ago and is considered the world’s first manual on political economy Kanakalatha Mukund took us south in the next volume, Merchants of Tamilakam, to the beguiling world of trade between south India and Rome—where the Roman senator and writer Pliny the Elder called India ‘the sink of the world’s precious metal’—and into the lives of Tamil merchants, which she drew from the epics Silappadikaram and Manimekalai and other historical materials, to the end of the Chola Empire Next, we jumped centuries to Tirthankar Roy’s radiant account of the East India Company, which taught us, among other things, how much the modern multinational corporation is a child of a company that is reviled even today in India We hopped again to the late eighteenth century during the decline of Surat and the rise of Bombay, where the distinguished Lakshmi Subramanian recounted the ups and downs in the adventurous lives of three great merchants: Trawadi Arjunji Nathji, Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy and Premchand Roychand Following these first five books is a veritable feast Three more books will cover the ancient and early medieval periods: Gregory Schopen will present the Business Model of Early Buddhist Monasticism based on the Mulasarvastivada Vinaya; Himanshu Prabha Ray will take us into the maritime trading world of the western Indian Ocean, along the Kanara and Gujarat coasts, using the Gujarati translation of the Sanskrit work Lekhapaddhati Donald Davis will raise contemporary issues in the area of commercial and business law based on medieval commentaries on the voluminous Dharmasastras by authors such as Vacaspati Mishra and Candeshvara Then, Scott Levi takes us from the early modern period to the modern one with the over 500-yearold saga of Multani traders in caravans through central Asia, rooted in the works of Zia al-Din Barani’s Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier The celebrated Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Muzaffar Alam will next transport us into the world of sultans, shopkeepers and portfolio capitalists in Mughal India, while Ishan Chakrabarti traces the ethically individualistic world of Banarasidas, a Jain merchant in Mughal times, via his diary, Ardhakathanaka ... questions like these that engage the authors of our unique multi-volume history of Indian business The Mouse Merchant is the fifth volume in Penguin’s The Story of Indian Business series The series... interesting to speculate on the religious/sectarian underpinnings of these stories For example, in The Merchant and the Dry Tank’, the merchant in the version included in this book remains unnamed... the anything-is-possible extremities of mythology They are depicted as they are In the context of this book, the wife of the merchant provides an interesting counterpoint to the other woman in