The secrets of the sea route
By Manohar Malgonkar

LAST week, I wrote about the Silk Route. How the Roman Emperor, Justinian instigated Christian missionaries working in China to learn the secrets of silk making and to start manufacturing silk in Europe itself, and thus broke the stranglehold of the Parsees on the lucrative silk trade and, in the process killed off the Silk Route too.

But the Silk Route was not the only channel for the movement of goods between Europe and the Orient. There was the sea-route, too. And in ancient and medieval times, just as the Iranians controlled the Silk Route, so did the Arabs, control the sea route.

The Arabs have always been a hardy, adventurous people, with an inborn talent for making money. Throughout the Middle Ages, which is the period between the years 1000 and 1400 A.D., it was the Arabs, conveniently situated as they were, almost midway between Europe and Asia, who dominated sea trade between the two continents.

Their frail, tub-like dhows embarked upon voyages which customarily lasted for a whole year or more. They had no navigational instruments and only the stars to guide their paths. So they kept within sight of the coast and made frequent stops. And at each of these wayside ports they bought and sold things.

The bulk of this trade was with India where they bought such things as were in demand in Europe: bolts of muslin, teak planks, peacock feathers, perfumed oils, carved ivory and sandalwood, lemon-grass and ginger root, and gems, but, above all, pepper; pepper which grew so abundantly in the humid forests of the Malabar coast. Before the discovery of the new world and with it of the Mexican plant known as chili, black pepper was the principal spice of Indian curries and was a prized commodity in Europe where they had begun to season their food with it. They still do.

But it was by no means a one-way trade. Indeed the Arabs at one time made more money by selling things to India than from the Indian goods they took to Europe. They sold horses. They were cheap in their own land, and in India they could be sold for staggeringly high prices.

In India as elsewhere, the horse was a symbol of power and prosperity. To be mounted was to be superior; to own a horse was an attribute of wealth, as well as of authority. But more than anything else, a horse was also a tool of war, capable of elevating a foot-soldier into a sowar a cavalryman and of advancing a ranker to officer. Those were turbulent times, and what we now call the rule of law was unheard of; the country was in the grip of ceaseless strife, and soldiering and brigandage were all but synonymous.

These conditions contributed not making the demand for horses all but insatiable; the Arabs just could not bring enough of them. This also meant that the horse-trade was a wholly seller’s market, and the Arabs were experts at bargaining.

The sea route to India from the Middle East had its normal hazards and hardships; but the special cargo that these dhows carried made every voyage an adventure. To take a horse on a sea trip is just asking for trouble. Here a dozen or more horses were somehow coaxed onto the heaving deck of a frail ship and then kept confined in a stockade, all four legs tethered tightly to the woodwork to prevent the animals from kicking out and breaking themselves loose.

How these animals were fed and watered, how prevented from going berserk with sheer terror in stormy weather, their stands kept clean, is difficult to imagine. For the ships company as well as for her live cargo, these outward voyages must have been like living through nightmares for the entire duration — four months or more.

Yet they came, these Arabs, for they were tough men, known as much for their spirit of adventure as for their appetites for profits, and above all they were hard-nosed businessmen. Having made the horse trade their monopoly, they were determined not to allow their stanglehold on it to be loosened.

Their port of debarkation was Govapuri, at the mouth of the Zuari river in Goa. In ancient times and throughout the Middle Ages, Govapuri was, by all accounts, a busy and prosperous port town. But now all traces of it have vanished. It was to this port that the kings and merchant princes and bandit chiefs of Dravidian India sent their agents, with moneybags stuffed with gold mohurs to buy horses.

Owing to the hardships and privations of their voyages, these horses were in no condition for further travel; as a rule they were emaciated, wobbly on their legs and with gall-sores on their bodies. They had to be rested and fattened up before they could be marched off to their destinations, and this meant that they had to be kept in Goa itself for weeks if not months.

And this requirement created a major problem, because the Goans themselves had no idea of what a horse ate, let alone how to care for ailing horses: and the Arabs, for their part, regarded such information as a part of their trade secrets. So jealous were they of guarding their monopoly of the horse-trade that they had made it a rule never to bring in a mare to India for fear that the Indians would take to breeding horses in India itself. In the same manner, how to feed a horse, or cure its everyday ailments, was privileged information.

The Goans’ fumbling efforts to learn how to fed the horses verge on the ludicrous. They were used to feeding their cattle on rice-straw. So, thinking, perhaps, that what the Arab merchants themselves evinced a special fondness for in Goa, mutton and ghee, they began to mix mutton-stew and dollops of ghee in the rice-straw. Finally, after a year or two, they had hit upon a formula on which their charges seemed to do reasonably well: local pulses and gram mixed with green vegetables to which they added "the flowers of the raghi tree mixed with common salt."

Then, towards the end of the seventh century, Ventudeva, a dynamic king of Goa of the Kadamba dynasty, did for the Arab stranglehold on India’s horse-trade what Emperor Justinian had done for the Chinese stranglehold on silk manufacture.

He resorted to sharp practices.

Those were the days of slavery and the Arabs who, after all, were at the forefront of the slave trade, used to employ their slaves for doing all the menial tasks of looking after their horses during their voyages to India. These shipboard slaves, were mainly from East Africa and they had been converted to Islam after their capture. They certainly knew just as much about the care and management of horses as their Arab masters.

So Ventudeva arranged through his agents to entice some of these slaves to desert, on the promise that they would not only be set free, but would be resettled on land, given jobs, and even found wives for.

These escaped-slaves were resettled in a colony of their own in Sattari, and as Anant Dhume tells it: "were married to local girls...and lived happily, and their descendants continued there."

After that King Ventudeva arranged to bring mares from indigenous breeds, mainly from Kathiawad, and had them mated with Arab stallions, thereby setting up a special breed of horses. Goa which, for many years had been no more than a transit depot for Arab horses, also had its own stud farms.

These revelations by Dhume who made the study of Goa’s ancient past his mission in life, challenge earlier assumptions that there were no Muslims in India before 1000 A.D. and that the first settlement of Muslims in the peninsular part of India did not come till the twelfth century. In Goa they seem to have been living since the seventh century.