‘Based on research in the Russian colonial archives and the Office of the Bukharan Khushbegi, the Russian historian G. L. Dmitriev suggests that the majority of the Indians present in Turan in the colonial period were Bhatias, a merchant caste associated with Sind, especially the area around Multan, since the seventh century. In the nineteenth century, many Bhatia caste members were located in the northwest frontier town of Dera Ismail Khan and were known to have travelled to Kabul, Bukhara and even as far as Arabia. Their centralization in Dera Ismail Khan is most certainly related to that city’s position as the renowned winter headquarters of Powinda nomads and its convenient location on the west bank of the Indus river, approximately 100 kilometres northwest of Multan, near the Gumal Pass.’
Scott C Levi The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and Its Trade, 1550-1900.
Scott C Levi The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and Its Trade, 1550-1900.
A Civilisation Built on Commerce
Indian Merchants in Eurasia: From the Medieval Silk Roads to the Markets of Russia
Long before the European maritime empires remapped the world’s trade routes, Indian merchants were already woven into the economic fabric of Eurasia. From the bazaars of Bukhara to the caravanserais of Isfahan, from the wharves of Aden to the counting-houses of Astrakhan on the Volga delta, merchants from the Indian subcontinent—Hindu, Jain, Muslim and Sikh alike—operated one of the most far-flung commercial networks the pre-modern world had ever seen. This article traces the arc of that enterprise from its medieval foundations through to the profound disruptions of the nineteenth century, when colonial power, industrial capital and changing geopolitics transformed the world they had so patiently built.
The generic term “Bania” or “Banyan,” as European observers came to spell it, was applied by outsiders to almost any Hindu trading figure encountered across the Indian Ocean littoral and Inner Asia. It derived from the Sanskrit vāṇij, merchant, and in time became attached specifically to the Vaishya mercantile castes of western India. Yet the reality was always plural and diverse. The great trading communities that gave substance to Indian commerce overseas included the Gujarati Banias and Bhatias, the Punjabi Khatris of Multan, the Sindhi Lohanas and, later, the Shikarpuris: each with its own home territory, caste network, language and religious tradition, yet united by a common genius for the organisation of long-distance trade across inhospitable terrain and hostile political frontiers.
What made these merchants remarkable was not merely the distances they travelled but the institutional sophistication they developed to manage credit, risk and trust across cultures that spoke different languages and operated under different legal systems. The hundi—the indigenous bill of exchange—allowed a merchant in Multan to raise credit redeemable in Bukhara or Astrakhan without carrying silver across mountain passes and steppe. The family firm, structured around agnatic kin networks sustained by caste solidarity, provided a system of distributed agency that European joint-stock companies would only approximate much later. And the dharmic ethic of the merchant vocation—the insistence on a good reputation, on the sanctity of a commercial promise—supplied the moral infrastructure on which all else depended.
A Civilisation Built on Commerce
Indian Merchants in Eurasia: From the Medieval Silk Roads to the Markets of Russia
Long before the European maritime empires remapped the world’s trade routes, Indian merchants were already woven into the economic fabric of Eurasia. From the bazaars of Bukhara to the caravanserais of Isfahan, from the wharves of Aden to the counting-houses of Astrakhan on the Volga delta, merchants from the Indian subcontinent—Hindu, Jain, Muslim and Sikh alike—operated one of the most far-flung commercial networks the pre-modern world had ever seen. This article traces the arc of that enterprise from its medieval foundations through to the profound disruptions of the nineteenth century, when colonial power, industrial capital and changing geopolitics transformed the world they had so patiently built.
The generic term “Bania” or “Banyan,” as European observers came to spell it, was applied by outsiders to almost any Hindu trading figure encountered across the Indian Ocean littoral and Inner Asia. It derived from the Sanskrit vāṇij, merchant, and in time became attached specifically to the Vaishya mercantile castes of western India. Yet the reality was always plural and diverse. The great trading communities that gave substance to Indian commerce overseas included the Gujarati Banias and Bhatias, the Punjabi Khatris of Multan, the Sindhi Lohanas and, later, the Shikarpuris: each with its own home territory, caste network, language and religious tradition, yet united by a common genius for the organisation of long-distance trade across inhospitable terrain and hostile political frontiers.
What made these merchants remarkable was not merely the distances they travelled but the institutional sophistication they developed to manage credit, risk and trust across cultures that spoke different languages and operated under different legal systems. The hundi—the indigenous bill of exchange—allowed a merchant in Multan to raise credit redeemable in Bukhara or Astrakhan without carrying silver across mountain passes and steppe. The family firm, structured around agnatic kin networks sustained by caste solidarity, provided a system of distributed agency that European joint-stock companies would only approximate much later. And the dharmic ethic of the merchant vocation—the insistence on a good reputation, on the sanctity of a commercial promise—supplied the moral infrastructure on which all else depended.
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Ancient Roots, Medieval Expansion
Indian engagement with the wider Eurasian trading world is ancient indeed. The Periplus Maris Erythraei (Periplus of the Erythraean Sea), composed by an anonymous Graeco-Egyptian mariner around the first century CE, already records the presence of Banyan merchants at Socotra, in the Gulf of Aden, along the Red Sea coast and at the port of Barygaza (modern Bharuch in Gujarat). These merchants traded cotton textiles, indigo, spices and semi-precious stones for frankincense, silver and wine. The Indian Ocean, in short, had been an Indian lake in a commercial sense long before the medieval period opened. The structural expansion of Indian mercantile activity into the deeper Eurasian interior, however, belongs to the high medieval centuries following the consolidation of the great Islamic empires. The unification of the vast arc from Spain to Central Asia under Abbasid authority, and subsequently the emergence of the Ghaznavid, Seljuk and ultimately Mongol empires, created a corridor along which goods, money and merchants could move with new security and speed. Indian merchants were the indispensable intermediaries in this system. Gujarat and the spice-rich Malabar coast supplied the textiles, pepper, indigo and fine cottons that the Islamic world demanded; the merchants of Multan, Thatta and Cambay supplied the organisational intelligence to move those goods to their markets. The Cairo Geniza—the famous cache of medieval Jewish commercial correspondence preserved in an Egyptian synagogue—reveals, from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, a bustling triangular trade between Egypt, Arabia and India in which Indian traders were constant presences at Aden and along the Red Sea littoral. Merchants arriving from India at Aden paid tribute to the Sultan of Yemen in musk, camphor, ambergris and sandalwood, while Indian spice exports are recorded systematically in the geographical writings of Ibn Khurdadhbeh (850 CE), al-Ghafiqi (1150 CE) and numerous later Arab authorities. The Bhatia community—whose ancestral origins in the Bhatti Rajput clan of Jaisalmer connect them to the desert heartland of Rajasthan—were among the earliest Indian diaspora communities in Central Asia, alongside the Lohanas and the Khatris of Multan. By the fourteenth century, when migrations southward into Sindh accelerated, Bhatia merchants had established themselves in Thatta and along the Indus, ideally positioned to participate in the great overland caravans into Afghanistan and beyond. Their reach, according to the historian Scott Levi, ultimately “extended across Afghanistan, Central Asia, and eventually reached even beyond the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa. Thirteenth-century records identify the Multanis explicitly as money-lenders and wholesale textile dealers for the first time in the documentary record, though their commercial activities are almost certainly older. The city of Multan—the ancient Mulasthana or Mulastanapura, captured by Alexander the Great in 326 BCE and by Arab forces in the eighth century CE—stood at the junction of the Indus trade routes and the roads leading northward through the Khyber and Bolan passes into Central Asia. It was this geographical privilege that made Multani merchants the natural governors of the overland Indo-Central Asian trade for several centuries. The Multani Diaspora and the Silk Road Cities The earliest available documentary evidence of an established Indian merchant diaspora in Central Asia appears in the account of Anthony Jenkinson, an agent of the English Muscovy Company, who visited Bukhara in 1558–59. Jenkinson observed that it was common for Indian merchants to reside in Bukhara for several years at a time while conducting their trade—a pattern that strongly suggests these were not casual itinerant traders but settled “Multanis,” the resident commercial community that dominated the Indian diaspora across Central Asia and Persia. Legal records from Bukharan archives dating to 1559 and 1561 place several Multanis explicitly in the city’s commercial life, and a late sixteenth-century register of a Samarqand judge documents Multani commercial activities in detail. By the seventeenth century, the Indian merchant diaspora had spread to virtually every significant urban centre across the region. One Bukharan khan issued a decree referring to Hindu communities in Bukhara, Balkh, Badakhshan, Qunduz, Taliqan, Aybak, Ghuri, Baghlan, Shiberghaan, Termez, Samarqand, Nasaf, Kish, Shahr-i Sabz “and wherever else they may live.” The scale of the diaspora is striking. Several primary centres emerged at Isfahan, Bandar Abbas, Astrakhan, Kandahar, Kabul and Bukhara, each hosting communities of several hundred to several thousand Indian merchants. By the mid-seventeenth century the Indian community of Isfahan had grown to an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 souls, and Jean Chardin reported that more than 20,000 Multanis resided in Safavid Persia in the 1660s. At the same period, Central Asia was home to an estimated 8,000 Indian diaspora merchants, of whom roughly 500 lived in Bukhara alone. The total number of Indians involved in trade and moneylending ventures across Central Asia, Persia, Afghanistan, the Caucasus and Russia was probably in excess of 35,000. The term “Multani,” used loosely across the region, referred not to a single community but to the heterogeneous conglomeration of Indian merchants who participated in diaspora commerce as agents of numerous Multani firms. The vast majority were Hindu commercial castes, though the diaspora also included significant numbers of Muslim Multanis and smaller populations of Marwari Jains and, later, Sikh merchants. The Punjabi Khatri caste furnished the bulk of the Multani merchant class; their commercial dominance was such that the French jeweller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, travelling through Persia and Central Asia in the mid-seventeenth century, observed that Indian money-changers or shroffs “surpassed the Jews in their shrewdness”—a backhanded compliment that captures the profound respect and occasional resentment that Indian financial acumen inspired in European observers.
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Key Dates c. 1200s Multanis first documented as wholesale merchants in Punjab and Sindh. 1558–59 Anthony Jenkinson observes permanent Indian community in Bukhara. 1615 Russian archives first record Indian merchants at Astrakhan. 1660s Indian community in Isfahan peaks at c. 15,000 (Thévenot). 1720 Russian Senate orders protection and assistance for Indian traders at Astrakhan. 1736 Nadir Shah’s persecutions devastate Indian communities in Iran. c. 1750 Commercial centre migrates from Multan to Shikarpur in Sindh. 1837 Burnes describes Shikarpur as “first importance to the trade of Asia.” 1865–73 Russian conquest of Tashkent, Samarqand and Bukhara disrupts Indian commercial networks. 1869 Opening of Suez Canal; Sindhi merchants among the first to establish new commercial outposts. Key Communities Multanis & Khatris — Punjabi traders centred in Multan, dominating the overland routes into Central Asia and Persia from the 14th to 18th centuries. Shikarpuris — Sindhi successors who replaced Multan after its decline c. 1750, operating from Shikarpur to Bukhara, Kabul and Astrakhan. Gujarati Banias — Maritime merchants of Cambay and Surat, dominant from Aden to Malacca and along the East African coast . Bhatias — One of the earliest diaspora communities, from Rajasthan and Sindh, active in Central Asia, the Persian Gulf and East Africa. |
The mechanics of Multani commerce rested on a system of family-based firms that placed young agents—often younger brothers, nephews or cousins—at key nodes along the trade routes while a senior partner or father managed operations from Multan or, later, Shikarpur. These agents were bound by ties of kinship, caste loyalty and the inescapable power of reputation within a close-knit community. A merchant who defaulted on a commercial obligation found himself not merely ruined financially but socially ostracised, cut off from the network of trust that gave the whole system its vitality. This reputational economy operated across political frontiers and cultural barriers in ways that European mercantile institutions, dependent on legal enforcement, could never fully replicate.
The routes themselves were arduous. Caravans assembled at Multan and set out through the Khyber Pass to Kabul, thence to Kandahar or northward to Balkh and Samarqand. One route forked at Kandahar toward Herat and Isfahan; another continued to Bukhara. Contemporary chronicles document that traders from Multan made up the bulk of the expatriate Indian business community at every station along these roads. A seventeenth-century trader whose name Russian archives record as “Sutur” wrote to tsarist authorities in Astrakhan saying that he had received such favourable treatment that he had encouraged his brothers and twenty-five other Indian merchants to join him there—a vivid illustration of the chain-migration dynamic that built the diaspora step by step.
The routes themselves were arduous. Caravans assembled at Multan and set out through the Khyber Pass to Kabul, thence to Kandahar or northward to Balkh and Samarqand. One route forked at Kandahar toward Herat and Isfahan; another continued to Bukhara. Contemporary chronicles document that traders from Multan made up the bulk of the expatriate Indian business community at every station along these roads. A seventeenth-century trader whose name Russian archives record as “Sutur” wrote to tsarist authorities in Astrakhan saying that he had received such favourable treatment that he had encouraged his brothers and twenty-five other Indian merchants to join him there—a vivid illustration of the chain-migration dynamic that built the diaspora step by step.
The shift from Multani to Shikarpuri dominance in the late eighteenth century reflects the turbulence of the age. As Multan suffered repeated invasions—Nadir Shah’s devastating campaigns of the 1730s, the Afghan incursions and political instability of the subsequent decades—the centre of Multani commercial operations migrated wholesale to Shikarpur, a town in Upper Sindh some 250 kilometres to the southwest, positioned at the mouth of the Bolan Pass. By 1837, when the British officer Alexander Burnes visited Shikarpur on a commercial mission, he found it a town of thirty thousand souls, nine-tenths of them Hindu, predominantly of the Bania, Lohana and Bhatia communities. He was astonished by the reach of their network: “It will only be necessary to name the towns at which the Shikarpoor merchants have agents to judge of the unlimited influence which they can command.” Burnes called Shikarpur “a town of first importance to the Indus trade and it may be said, to that of Asia”—a judgement that captures the extraordinary commercial vitality of the Sindhi merchant tradition at its height.
Isfahan and the Persian Connection
Iran held a unique position in the Indian merchant’s commercial universe. Geographically, it formed the great bridge between the Indian subcontinent and both Central Asia to the north and the Ottoman and Mediterranean worlds to the west. Commercially, it offered access to Iranian silk—one of the most coveted luxury commodities in seventeenth-century global trade—as well as horses, dried fruits, rosewater and the sophisticated re-export trade through the Persian Gulf. Indian merchants, working from Bandar Abbas at the mouth of the Gulf and from Isfahan deep in the interior, were central players in all these exchanges.
The reign of Shah Abbas I (1588–1629) marked the zenith of Safavid commercial power and, correspondingly, of Indian commercial presence in Iran. Shah Abbas invested massively in road infrastructure, caravanserais and the development of Bandar Abbas as an international entrepôt. The result was a dramatic intensification of Indo-Persian trade. Contemporary records note that the Qandahar–Isfahan overland route alone saw between 12,000 and 14,000 loaded camels annually by 1614, each bearing Indian exports—cotton cloth, indigo, spices, saltpeter—westward into Persia. The English East India Company men Richard Steel and John Crowther, writing in 1614, observed that “merchants of India assemble at Lahore and invest a great part of their monies in commodities and join themselves in caravans to pass the mountains of Candahar into Persia, by which way is generally reported to pass twelve or fourteen thousand camels lading.” The estimated total value of this single route’s commerce came to between 1.4 and 1.8 million rupees annually.
Isfahan itself became the great metropolitan node of Indian commercial presence in the Persian world. By the 1660s, the French traveller Jean de Thévenot estimated the Indian community in Isfahan at 15,000 merchants. They occupied a dedicated caravanserai—the “Indian Court”—and maintained Hindu temples where, according to later visitors, the presiding deities included Rama, Lakshmi and Hanuman, their sacred stones brought all the way from the Ganges. Indian merchants working in Iran were primarily Hindu—often Khatris or members of Gujarati Bania communities—and they served simultaneously as textile dealers, commodity brokers, money-changers and moneylenders to Iranian merchants and local rulers alike. Their role as shroffs—professional assessors of coinage purity and exchange rates—made them indispensable to an economy that circulated dozens of different currencies.
The eighteenth century brought catastrophe to the Indian merchant communities of Iran. Nadir Shah’s campaigns from 1736 onwards were devastating. Contemporary accounts record that Nadir Shah slaughtered Hindu communities across Iran in 1736 in acts of particular ferocity, and his subsequent conquest of Mughal Delhi in 1739—from which he carried off the fabled Peacock Throne and an ocean of treasure—further destabilised the Indian commercial world. The assassination of Nadir Shah in 1747 allowed Indian traders to return gradually to Iran, but the commercial climate was never quite the same, and the shift of the diaspora’s centre of gravity from Isfahan toward Astrakhan and the Russian market reflected a broader reorientation of Indian commercial energies in the later eighteenth century.
Astrakhan: India on the Volga
Russian archives record the presence of Indian merchants in the tsarist realm from the year 1615, making Astrakhan—the Volga delta port that Russia had absorbed from the Tatars in 1556—one of the most northerly outposts of the Indian commercial diaspora anywhere in the world. The route was an extension of the Persian corridor: Indian merchants travelled overland or by sea to Iran, took ship across the Caspian from a northern Persian port and arrived at Astrakhan to trade in the Volga commercial network. From Astrakhan they could access not only the Russian market but, through agents employed in Kazan, Saratov and Moscow, the broader economic system of the tsarist empire. Tsarist regulations technically barred foreign merchants from trading beyond designated gateway cities, but Indian firms circumvented these restrictions by employing Russian, Tatar and Armenian agents as proxies.
By the early eighteenth century, a colony of some 200 to 400 Indian merchants had formed permanently in Astrakhan. They occupied a compound known as the Indeiski Dvor—the Indian Court—built in the Persian caravanserai manner, with a temple at its heart. The Prussian zoologist Peter Simon Pallas, visiting Astrakhan in the late eighteenth century, described how he “attended with pleasure at the idolatrous worship of the Indian merchants who reside together in the Indian court,” noting that the temple contained idols of Rama, Lakshmi and Hanuman alongside three black stones brought from the Ganges and regarded as sacred. The construction of a new building for the Indian Court in the early nineteenth century was financed by a wealthy Indian merchant named Sabra Mohandasov, who had taken Russian citizenship.
The English traveller John Bell, passing through Astrakhan in 1716, wrote vividly of the scene: “Astrakhan is carrying out great trade with Persia, Khiva, Bukhara and India. The merchants of these nations have a common yard here, where they live and sell their goods. In Astrakhan there are some Indian or Banyan people, who colour their foreheads with saffron juice or some other plant. They are very good people, simple and humane and almost exclusively eat fruit.” His observation about the vegetarian diet of the Hindu traders—and their visible tilaka—captures something of the exotic fascination that these merchants excited in their northern hosts.
The Russian authorities, for their part, recognised the commercial value of the Indian community and treated them with comparative generosity. Senate Regulations of 1720 ordered the Astrakhan Governor, Alexey Volyn, to provide the eastern merchants with all necessary assistance in their trade, to protect their property and “to show kindness and goodwill”, instructions that contrast sharply with the systematic harassment that Indian merchants often suffered from European colonial powers in the Indian Ocean world. Members of the Indian community paid only twelve roubles annually as rent for a shop in the Indian Court and were exempted from taxes and duties. By the early nineteenth century, nearly half the small shops in Astrakhan were owned by Indians, selling silk, cotton fabrics, furs, copper, leather, carpets, wool, precious stones, fruits, wine, frankincense, and gold and silver.
The Indian merchants of Astrakhan were primarily Marwaris, Sindhis and Punjabis—overwhelmingly Hindu, though with some Muslim Multanis among them. They traded in Astrakhan textiles, jewellery (particularly diamonds), and medicines. As moneylenders, they financed Tatar and Armenian traders who would then travel into smaller Russian towns on their behalf, a division of labour that maximised the range of Indian financial capital while managing the regulatory risks of direct trading beyond Astrakhan. Russian archives preserve the names of some of these pioneers in Russianised form—Ramdas Dzhasuev from Multan, Talaram Alimchandov from Sindh, Banda Kapur Chand from Punjab—reminders of real individuals who built a commercial life thousands of miles from home.
The decline of the Indian community at Astrakhan came gradually through the later nineteenth century. Russian imperial expansionism into Central Asia from the 1860s onwards, the imposition of harsh new restrictions on Indian businesses, and the disruption of traditional trade routes by the advance of Russian power into Bukhara and Khiva all eroded the conditions that had sustained Indian commercial presence in the region. The Russian archives bear witness to a long, slow withdrawal, but the community maintained a presence in Astrakhan into the later nineteenth century, a testament to the extraordinary tenacity of Indian commercial enterprise at the furthest reach of its Eurasian diaspora.
Iran held a unique position in the Indian merchant’s commercial universe. Geographically, it formed the great bridge between the Indian subcontinent and both Central Asia to the north and the Ottoman and Mediterranean worlds to the west. Commercially, it offered access to Iranian silk—one of the most coveted luxury commodities in seventeenth-century global trade—as well as horses, dried fruits, rosewater and the sophisticated re-export trade through the Persian Gulf. Indian merchants, working from Bandar Abbas at the mouth of the Gulf and from Isfahan deep in the interior, were central players in all these exchanges.
The reign of Shah Abbas I (1588–1629) marked the zenith of Safavid commercial power and, correspondingly, of Indian commercial presence in Iran. Shah Abbas invested massively in road infrastructure, caravanserais and the development of Bandar Abbas as an international entrepôt. The result was a dramatic intensification of Indo-Persian trade. Contemporary records note that the Qandahar–Isfahan overland route alone saw between 12,000 and 14,000 loaded camels annually by 1614, each bearing Indian exports—cotton cloth, indigo, spices, saltpeter—westward into Persia. The English East India Company men Richard Steel and John Crowther, writing in 1614, observed that “merchants of India assemble at Lahore and invest a great part of their monies in commodities and join themselves in caravans to pass the mountains of Candahar into Persia, by which way is generally reported to pass twelve or fourteen thousand camels lading.” The estimated total value of this single route’s commerce came to between 1.4 and 1.8 million rupees annually.
Isfahan itself became the great metropolitan node of Indian commercial presence in the Persian world. By the 1660s, the French traveller Jean de Thévenot estimated the Indian community in Isfahan at 15,000 merchants. They occupied a dedicated caravanserai—the “Indian Court”—and maintained Hindu temples where, according to later visitors, the presiding deities included Rama, Lakshmi and Hanuman, their sacred stones brought all the way from the Ganges. Indian merchants working in Iran were primarily Hindu—often Khatris or members of Gujarati Bania communities—and they served simultaneously as textile dealers, commodity brokers, money-changers and moneylenders to Iranian merchants and local rulers alike. Their role as shroffs—professional assessors of coinage purity and exchange rates—made them indispensable to an economy that circulated dozens of different currencies.
The eighteenth century brought catastrophe to the Indian merchant communities of Iran. Nadir Shah’s campaigns from 1736 onwards were devastating. Contemporary accounts record that Nadir Shah slaughtered Hindu communities across Iran in 1736 in acts of particular ferocity, and his subsequent conquest of Mughal Delhi in 1739—from which he carried off the fabled Peacock Throne and an ocean of treasure—further destabilised the Indian commercial world. The assassination of Nadir Shah in 1747 allowed Indian traders to return gradually to Iran, but the commercial climate was never quite the same, and the shift of the diaspora’s centre of gravity from Isfahan toward Astrakhan and the Russian market reflected a broader reorientation of Indian commercial energies in the later eighteenth century.
Astrakhan: India on the Volga
Russian archives record the presence of Indian merchants in the tsarist realm from the year 1615, making Astrakhan—the Volga delta port that Russia had absorbed from the Tatars in 1556—one of the most northerly outposts of the Indian commercial diaspora anywhere in the world. The route was an extension of the Persian corridor: Indian merchants travelled overland or by sea to Iran, took ship across the Caspian from a northern Persian port and arrived at Astrakhan to trade in the Volga commercial network. From Astrakhan they could access not only the Russian market but, through agents employed in Kazan, Saratov and Moscow, the broader economic system of the tsarist empire. Tsarist regulations technically barred foreign merchants from trading beyond designated gateway cities, but Indian firms circumvented these restrictions by employing Russian, Tatar and Armenian agents as proxies.
By the early eighteenth century, a colony of some 200 to 400 Indian merchants had formed permanently in Astrakhan. They occupied a compound known as the Indeiski Dvor—the Indian Court—built in the Persian caravanserai manner, with a temple at its heart. The Prussian zoologist Peter Simon Pallas, visiting Astrakhan in the late eighteenth century, described how he “attended with pleasure at the idolatrous worship of the Indian merchants who reside together in the Indian court,” noting that the temple contained idols of Rama, Lakshmi and Hanuman alongside three black stones brought from the Ganges and regarded as sacred. The construction of a new building for the Indian Court in the early nineteenth century was financed by a wealthy Indian merchant named Sabra Mohandasov, who had taken Russian citizenship.
The English traveller John Bell, passing through Astrakhan in 1716, wrote vividly of the scene: “Astrakhan is carrying out great trade with Persia, Khiva, Bukhara and India. The merchants of these nations have a common yard here, where they live and sell their goods. In Astrakhan there are some Indian or Banyan people, who colour their foreheads with saffron juice or some other plant. They are very good people, simple and humane and almost exclusively eat fruit.” His observation about the vegetarian diet of the Hindu traders—and their visible tilaka—captures something of the exotic fascination that these merchants excited in their northern hosts.
The Russian authorities, for their part, recognised the commercial value of the Indian community and treated them with comparative generosity. Senate Regulations of 1720 ordered the Astrakhan Governor, Alexey Volyn, to provide the eastern merchants with all necessary assistance in their trade, to protect their property and “to show kindness and goodwill”, instructions that contrast sharply with the systematic harassment that Indian merchants often suffered from European colonial powers in the Indian Ocean world. Members of the Indian community paid only twelve roubles annually as rent for a shop in the Indian Court and were exempted from taxes and duties. By the early nineteenth century, nearly half the small shops in Astrakhan were owned by Indians, selling silk, cotton fabrics, furs, copper, leather, carpets, wool, precious stones, fruits, wine, frankincense, and gold and silver.
The Indian merchants of Astrakhan were primarily Marwaris, Sindhis and Punjabis—overwhelmingly Hindu, though with some Muslim Multanis among them. They traded in Astrakhan textiles, jewellery (particularly diamonds), and medicines. As moneylenders, they financed Tatar and Armenian traders who would then travel into smaller Russian towns on their behalf, a division of labour that maximised the range of Indian financial capital while managing the regulatory risks of direct trading beyond Astrakhan. Russian archives preserve the names of some of these pioneers in Russianised form—Ramdas Dzhasuev from Multan, Talaram Alimchandov from Sindh, Banda Kapur Chand from Punjab—reminders of real individuals who built a commercial life thousands of miles from home.
The decline of the Indian community at Astrakhan came gradually through the later nineteenth century. Russian imperial expansionism into Central Asia from the 1860s onwards, the imposition of harsh new restrictions on Indian businesses, and the disruption of traditional trade routes by the advance of Russian power into Bukhara and Khiva all eroded the conditions that had sustained Indian commercial presence in the region. The Russian archives bear witness to a long, slow withdrawal, but the community maintained a presence in Astrakhan into the later nineteenth century, a testament to the extraordinary tenacity of Indian commercial enterprise at the furthest reach of its Eurasian diaspora.
Gujarat, the Indian Ocean and the Spice Routes
Parallel to the overland expansion of the Multani and Shikarpuri merchants into the Central Asian interior, the maritime world of the Indian Ocean was dominated by the merchants of Gujarat, whose home port of Cambay (Khambhat) was the commercial capital of the subcontinent’s most commercially sophisticated region. By the end of the fifteenth century, Gujarati sailors and traders were rivalling the Arabs as the dominant maritime force across the Indian Ocean, from the Red Sea to Malacca. The chronicler Tomé Pires, writing around 1515, captured their ubiquity with admiration that shades into something close to awe: “They sail many ships to all parts, to Aden, Ormuz, the kingdom of the Deccan, Goa, Bhatkal, all over Malabar, Ceylon, Bengal, Pegu, Siam… and Malacca, where they take quantities of merchandise, bringing other kinds back, thus making Cambay rich and important.”
The two great gateway nodes of the western Indian Ocean defined the structure of this trade. Aden, at the mouth of the Red Sea, was the Ottoman portal through which Indian goods flowed northward into Egypt and thence to the Mediterranean. Hormuz—and after its Portuguese capture in 1515, the substitute port of Bandar Abbas—was the Safavid gateway into the Persian Gulf and the overland routes of Iran. Indian Bania merchants worked both nodes simultaneously, financing trade caravans, operating as currency exchangers, managing the redistribution of Indian cottons, spices and indigo into the Islamic world and receiving in return silver bullion, horses and Persian luxury goods.
At Malacca, the great entrepôt at the narrowest point of the Strait connecting the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea, Gujarati merchants had established by 1500 a community of extraordinary scale and economic power. Pires recorded that there were “a thousand Gujarat merchants in Malacca, besides four or five thousand Gujarat seamen, who came and went,” and he coined the celebrated formulation: “Malacca cannot live without Cambay, nor Cambay without Malacca, if they are to be very rich and very prosperous.” The Gujarati commercial presence at Malacca was not merely one of several merchant communities but the structural backbone of the entire entrepôt economy.
The arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean after Vasco da Gama’s pioneering voyage of 1498 introduced a new and violent variable into this commercial equilibrium. Portuguese imperial strategy was explicitly predatory: their Estado da India sought to monopolise the spice trade by force, attacking Arab and Gujarati shipping, capturing strategic ports and requiring all Asian vessels to carry a Portuguese cartaz or pass on pain of confiscation. The fall of Malacca to the Portuguese in 1511 was a severe blow to the Gujarati commercial system. Yet Indian merchants, as the historian Edward Alpers has shown, proved remarkably adaptive. The suppression of Muslim-owned shipping actually created opportunities for Gujarati Bania merchants, who were not Muslim and could sometimes negotiate a modus vivendi with the Portuguese. When the Portuguese, guided by the logic of the Reconquista, banned Hindus from acting as agents for Portuguese officials in 1595, the policy failed immediately: Gujarati Banias were simply too crucial to the commercial life of Diu, Malacca and the East African ports for the ban to be enforced.
East Africa was a particularly important arena of Bhatia commercial activity. From Sofala in the south to Mogadishu in the north, a chain of Muslim Swahili city-states along the East African coast provided markets for Indian textiles, pottery and luxury goods, and exported ivory, gold, ambergris and enslaved persons northward to Arabia and India. Bhatia merchants participated in the commerce of Mombasa, Zanzibar and the coastal trade routes as financiers, commodity brokers and money-changers. Their deep engagement with East Africa predated the Portuguese by several centuries and survived Portuguese predation by continuing to supply the Indian textiles for which African demand remained insatiable.
Parallel to the overland expansion of the Multani and Shikarpuri merchants into the Central Asian interior, the maritime world of the Indian Ocean was dominated by the merchants of Gujarat, whose home port of Cambay (Khambhat) was the commercial capital of the subcontinent’s most commercially sophisticated region. By the end of the fifteenth century, Gujarati sailors and traders were rivalling the Arabs as the dominant maritime force across the Indian Ocean, from the Red Sea to Malacca. The chronicler Tomé Pires, writing around 1515, captured their ubiquity with admiration that shades into something close to awe: “They sail many ships to all parts, to Aden, Ormuz, the kingdom of the Deccan, Goa, Bhatkal, all over Malabar, Ceylon, Bengal, Pegu, Siam… and Malacca, where they take quantities of merchandise, bringing other kinds back, thus making Cambay rich and important.”
The two great gateway nodes of the western Indian Ocean defined the structure of this trade. Aden, at the mouth of the Red Sea, was the Ottoman portal through which Indian goods flowed northward into Egypt and thence to the Mediterranean. Hormuz—and after its Portuguese capture in 1515, the substitute port of Bandar Abbas—was the Safavid gateway into the Persian Gulf and the overland routes of Iran. Indian Bania merchants worked both nodes simultaneously, financing trade caravans, operating as currency exchangers, managing the redistribution of Indian cottons, spices and indigo into the Islamic world and receiving in return silver bullion, horses and Persian luxury goods.
At Malacca, the great entrepôt at the narrowest point of the Strait connecting the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea, Gujarati merchants had established by 1500 a community of extraordinary scale and economic power. Pires recorded that there were “a thousand Gujarat merchants in Malacca, besides four or five thousand Gujarat seamen, who came and went,” and he coined the celebrated formulation: “Malacca cannot live without Cambay, nor Cambay without Malacca, if they are to be very rich and very prosperous.” The Gujarati commercial presence at Malacca was not merely one of several merchant communities but the structural backbone of the entire entrepôt economy.
The arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean after Vasco da Gama’s pioneering voyage of 1498 introduced a new and violent variable into this commercial equilibrium. Portuguese imperial strategy was explicitly predatory: their Estado da India sought to monopolise the spice trade by force, attacking Arab and Gujarati shipping, capturing strategic ports and requiring all Asian vessels to carry a Portuguese cartaz or pass on pain of confiscation. The fall of Malacca to the Portuguese in 1511 was a severe blow to the Gujarati commercial system. Yet Indian merchants, as the historian Edward Alpers has shown, proved remarkably adaptive. The suppression of Muslim-owned shipping actually created opportunities for Gujarati Bania merchants, who were not Muslim and could sometimes negotiate a modus vivendi with the Portuguese. When the Portuguese, guided by the logic of the Reconquista, banned Hindus from acting as agents for Portuguese officials in 1595, the policy failed immediately: Gujarati Banias were simply too crucial to the commercial life of Diu, Malacca and the East African ports for the ban to be enforced.
East Africa was a particularly important arena of Bhatia commercial activity. From Sofala in the south to Mogadishu in the north, a chain of Muslim Swahili city-states along the East African coast provided markets for Indian textiles, pottery and luxury goods, and exported ivory, gold, ambergris and enslaved persons northward to Arabia and India. Bhatia merchants participated in the commerce of Mombasa, Zanzibar and the coastal trade routes as financiers, commodity brokers and money-changers. Their deep engagement with East Africa predated the Portuguese by several centuries and survived Portuguese predation by continuing to supply the Indian textiles for which African demand remained insatiable.
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The Architecture of Indian Commercial Power
Any account of Indian merchants in Eurasia that focuses solely on geography risks missing the most important dimension of their achievement: the sophisticated institutional and financial architecture that made their commercial reach possible. Three elements were fundamental: the family firm, the hundi system, and the dharmic ethic of commercial reputation. The family firm was the basic organisational unit of Indian long-distance trade. Elder partners, typically senior male relatives, managed the home base at Multan, Shikarpur or Surat. Junior partners and agents—younger brothers, sons, nephews and trusted cousins—were stationed along the trade routes, each managing a node of the network with considerable operational autonomy but under the moral authority of the family head. The structure was simultaneously flexible and robust: it could absorb losses at individual nodes without collapsing, and it could expand by chain migration as new agents recruited their own kin into distant markets. The family firm required no external legal enforcement because its governance was internal—sustained by kinship obligation, caste solidarity and the ever-present threat of social ostracism. The hundi—the indigenous bill of exchange—was the financial instrument that tied this network together across vast distances. Written records document the use of hundis at least from the twelfth century, and by the Mughal period they had become the foundation of Indian long-distance finance. A merchant in Multan wishing to remit funds to his agent in Bukhara would deposit silver with a sarraf (a professional money-changer and banker) who would issue a hundi payable at a specified date by the sarraf’s correspondent in Bukhara. The recipient would present the hundi, receive the agreed sum, and the two sarrafs would settle between themselves at their convenience. The hundi often incorporated bima (insurance) against loss in transit at a premium that varied with the riskiness of the route. The explorer Richard Burton famously described the hundi as “the crude instrument with which the Shikarpuri Rothschild works”—a comparison that captures both the instrument’s apparent simplicity and the extraordinary financial empire it sustained. |
The Hundi System The hundi—India’s indigenous bill of exchange—enabled merchants to remit funds across thousands of miles without physically transporting silver. Drawn on a network of sarrafs (bankers), hundis often incorporated insurance (bima) against loss in transit. Explorer Richard Burton called it “the crude instrument with which the Shikarpuri Rothschild works”—a system documented from at least the twelfth century that underpinned the entire overland Eurasian trade. |
The moral dimension of Indian commercial culture was noted by virtually every outside observer. The insistence on honesty, on honouring a commercial commitment even at personal cost, on maintaining a reputation for probity across the entire network, gave Indian merchants a competitive advantage that no amount of political patronage could fully substitute for. When the Astrakhan colony was at its height, Indian merchants financed the trade of Tatar and Armenian middlemen who could legally trade in the interior where Indians could not—an arrangement that depended entirely on reciprocal trust. Surendra Gopal, in his landmark study Born to Trade, noted that crossing the seas for purposes of commerce did not in this period lead to social boycott by caste-fellows—a taboo that came much later, probably with the advent of British colonial rule in the nineteenth century.
The one consistent weakness Gopal identified in the Indian merchant enterprise was the absence of political and royal support comparable to that enjoyed by the European East India Companies. The English, Dutch and later French trading corporations could call upon naval force, state diplomacy and the coercive power of the colonial state to defend their commercial interests. Indian merchants, by contrast, navigated a world of shifting political authorities—Mughal emperors, Safavid shahs, Bukharan khans, Russian tsars—as supplicants and foreign guests, dependent on the goodwill of local rulers whom they had no power to compel. Their commercial success was achieved despite this structural disadvantage, through the superiority of their information networks, their financial instruments and their long-accumulated knowledge of the markets they served.
The one consistent weakness Gopal identified in the Indian merchant enterprise was the absence of political and royal support comparable to that enjoyed by the European East India Companies. The English, Dutch and later French trading corporations could call upon naval force, state diplomacy and the coercive power of the colonial state to defend their commercial interests. Indian merchants, by contrast, navigated a world of shifting political authorities—Mughal emperors, Safavid shahs, Bukharan khans, Russian tsars—as supplicants and foreign guests, dependent on the goodwill of local rulers whom they had no power to compel. Their commercial success was achieved despite this structural disadvantage, through the superiority of their information networks, their financial instruments and their long-accumulated knowledge of the markets they served.
Colonial Disruption and the Nineteenth-Century Transformation
The nineteenth century was both the culmination and the undoing of the Indian commercial diaspora in Eurasia. On one hand, Shikarpuri merchant networks reached their widest geographical extent in the early decades of the century, with agents stationed from Kabul to Tiflis, from Bukhara to Muscat. On the other hand, a series of structural forces converged to dissolve the conditions that had sustained this commercial world over several centuries.
The consolidation of British colonial power across the Indian subcontinent fundamentally altered the political framework within which Indian merchants operated. The East India Company and its successor, the British Crown, reorganised Indian commerce around the needs of British industrial capital: the vast markets of India were opened to Lancashire cotton manufactures, which destroyed the artisan textile production that had been the foundation of Indian export trade for millennia. The Indian merchant’s comparative advantage in supplying hand-woven cottons to Bukhara and Isfahan evaporated when machine-made British cloth arrived at lower prices. The colonial state, moreover, imposed a legal and institutional framework derived from English commercial law that displaced indigenous credit instruments and undermined the social authority of caste-based commercial networks.
Russian imperial expansion into Central Asia dealt a parallel blow from the north. The conquest of Tashkent in 1865, Samarqand in 1868 and Bukhara in 1873 brought the traditional heartland of Indian diaspora commerce under a new regime that imposed heavy restrictions on the commercial activities of foreign nationals. Indian merchants, lacking the diplomatic protection of their own state—they were British colonial subjects, and Britain’s relationship with Russia was managed by considerations wholly unrelated to the interests of Shikarpuri merchants in Bukhara—found themselves progressively marginalised. The opening of rail communications across Russian Central Asia further disrupted the caravan economy that had been the Indians’ operational medium.
Yet the end was not without its continuations and adaptations. Shikarpuri banking firms, though losing their manufacturing-trade nexus, continued to operate as pure finance capital across Central Asia into the early twentieth century. The Gujarati and Bhatia communities of the Indian Ocean world pivoted toward the new commercial opportunities created by British imperial infrastructure: the telegraph, the steamship, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The “Sindworkies”—Sindhi Hindu merchants descended from the same commercial tradition—were among the first to set up shop at Suez when the canal opened, selling handicrafts to travellers. These were the inheritors of a tradition more than a millennium old, finding in the transformations of the modern world not an ending but yet another new beginning.
What survives of this great commercial civilisation today is not merely a historical memory but a living inheritance. The Marwari business families of modern India, the Sindhi merchant communities of Hong Kong, London and Karachi, the Bhatia and Lohana communities of the East African coast and the United Kingdom—all carry within their commercial cultures the residue of the techniques, the values and the networks forged across the caravanserais and counting-houses of medieval and early modern Eurasia. They were, in every sense, born to trade.
The nineteenth century was both the culmination and the undoing of the Indian commercial diaspora in Eurasia. On one hand, Shikarpuri merchant networks reached their widest geographical extent in the early decades of the century, with agents stationed from Kabul to Tiflis, from Bukhara to Muscat. On the other hand, a series of structural forces converged to dissolve the conditions that had sustained this commercial world over several centuries.
The consolidation of British colonial power across the Indian subcontinent fundamentally altered the political framework within which Indian merchants operated. The East India Company and its successor, the British Crown, reorganised Indian commerce around the needs of British industrial capital: the vast markets of India were opened to Lancashire cotton manufactures, which destroyed the artisan textile production that had been the foundation of Indian export trade for millennia. The Indian merchant’s comparative advantage in supplying hand-woven cottons to Bukhara and Isfahan evaporated when machine-made British cloth arrived at lower prices. The colonial state, moreover, imposed a legal and institutional framework derived from English commercial law that displaced indigenous credit instruments and undermined the social authority of caste-based commercial networks.
Russian imperial expansion into Central Asia dealt a parallel blow from the north. The conquest of Tashkent in 1865, Samarqand in 1868 and Bukhara in 1873 brought the traditional heartland of Indian diaspora commerce under a new regime that imposed heavy restrictions on the commercial activities of foreign nationals. Indian merchants, lacking the diplomatic protection of their own state—they were British colonial subjects, and Britain’s relationship with Russia was managed by considerations wholly unrelated to the interests of Shikarpuri merchants in Bukhara—found themselves progressively marginalised. The opening of rail communications across Russian Central Asia further disrupted the caravan economy that had been the Indians’ operational medium.
Yet the end was not without its continuations and adaptations. Shikarpuri banking firms, though losing their manufacturing-trade nexus, continued to operate as pure finance capital across Central Asia into the early twentieth century. The Gujarati and Bhatia communities of the Indian Ocean world pivoted toward the new commercial opportunities created by British imperial infrastructure: the telegraph, the steamship, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The “Sindworkies”—Sindhi Hindu merchants descended from the same commercial tradition—were among the first to set up shop at Suez when the canal opened, selling handicrafts to travellers. These were the inheritors of a tradition more than a millennium old, finding in the transformations of the modern world not an ending but yet another new beginning.
What survives of this great commercial civilisation today is not merely a historical memory but a living inheritance. The Marwari business families of modern India, the Sindhi merchant communities of Hong Kong, London and Karachi, the Bhatia and Lohana communities of the East African coast and the United Kingdom—all carry within their commercial cultures the residue of the techniques, the values and the networks forged across the caravanserais and counting-houses of medieval and early modern Eurasia. They were, in every sense, born to trade.
Sources & Further Reading
- Gopal, Surendra. Born to Trade: Indian Business Communities in Medieval and Early Modern Eurasia. Taylor & Francis / Routledge, 2016.
- Dale, Stephen Frederic. Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600–1750. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
- Levi, Scott C. Caravans: Indian Merchants on the Silk Road. Penguin Books India, 2015.
- Levi, Scott C. “India xxx: Indian Merchants in Central Asia and Iran.” Encyclopaedia Iranica (online edition, updated October 2024). www.iranicaonline.org.
- Markovits, Claude. The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
- Alpers, Edward A. “Gujarat and Long-Distance Trade in the Indian Ocean Region before the Sixteenth Century.” In Transregional Trade and Traders: Situating Gujarat in the Indian Ocean from Early Times to 1900. Oxford University Press, 2019.
- Chaudhuri, K. N. Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
- Pires, Tomé. Suma Oriental (c. 1515), ed. Armando Cortesão. Hakluyt Society, 1944.
- Bell, John. Journey from St. Petersburg to the Front Part of Asia (1716). Cited in Russia Beyond (rbth.com), “18th Century Russia Welcomed and Cherished Indian Merchants,” September 2016.
- Jenkinson, Anthony. Account of Bukhara (1558–59). Reproduced in Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia, ed. Edward Delmar Morgan and Charles Henry Coote. Hakluyt Society, 1886.
- Burnes, Alexander. “On the Commerce of Shikarpoor and Upper Sinde” (1837). Cited in Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants.
- Habib, Irfan. “The System of Bills of Exchange (Hundis) in the Mughal Empire.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 33, 1971, pp. 290–303.
- Steel, Richard, and John Crowther. Account of the Qandahar–Isfahan caravan trade (1614). Cited in Safavid Trade Studies, James Madison University Commons, 2019.
- Goitein, S. D. and Mordechai Akiva Friedman. India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza. Brill, 2008.