The mouse merchant : money in ancient India

166 Pages·2013·0.62 MB·English

by  Arshia Sattar (Foreword by Gurcharan Das)

ARSHIA SATTAR
THE STORY OF INDIAN BUSINESS
THE MOUSE MERCHANT
Money in Ancient India
Foreword by
Gurcharan Das
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 do 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 do 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