Indian Shipping/Introduction/Isolation and Intercourse
INDIAN SHIPPING.
INTRODUCTION.
I.—Isolation and Intercourse.
Even a superficial view of the physical features of India cannot fail to show that there is hardly any part of the world better marked out by nature as a region by itself than India. It is a region, indeed, full of contrasts in physical features and climate, but the features that divide and isolate it as a whole from surrounding regions are too clear to be overlooked. In truth, the whole of India, in spite of assertions to the contrary made by some geographers, is easily perceived to be a single country endowed with a sharply defined individuality, and beneath her truly manifold and bewildering variety there is a fundamental geographical unity, a complete territorial synthesis.
Mountain-guarded and sea-girt as she is on the north and the south, India looks as if she had been meant by nature to remain aloof from the rest of the world and to develop her civilization in isolation, untouched by the currents that stir humanity abroad. And yet there is hardly any country in the world that presents such an eventful record of intercourse with foreign countries. The geography of India points to her natural isolation; but the history of India reveals other facts. And if we study that history carefully from the earliest times we shall easily recognize that contact or intercourse with other countries has been a no less potent factor in its making than isolation. It has been well said that none of the greatest movements in the world which have influenced the history of mankind have failed to touch India and contribute to the development and richness of her extraordinarily varied culture and civilization. Above all comprehension and beyond all human insight is that mysterious impulse which gave birth to the momentous movement of Aryan migration and expansion, so big with consequences, and by far the most important event in the world's history. And it is a commonplace of history that one of the main streams of this great migration of the pioneers of the world's civilization entered India through her north-western mountain passes to build up her spiritual character, even as the Indus and the Ganges have broken through the Himalayas to create her physical character. For centuries these Indo-Aryans pushed on their work of colonizing India amid struggles and conflicts with the original inhabitants of the country, and developed a civilization that is reflected in the literature they have created. Then rose Buddhism, the first of world-religions, a product of the Indian soil which extended its influence beyond its limits over all countries lying east and north of India—from the steppes of the Mongols and the mountainous wildernesses of Tibet, through Japan, and on the south and east far into the Indian Archipelago. For centuries India stood out as the heart of the Old World, moulding and dominating its thought and life. Meanwhile there continued to beat upon Indian shores successive waves of foreign influence, such as the Iranian influence flowing from the first veritable empire of the ancient Orient, the empire of the Achaemenides, which under Darius included within itself the whole of Sindh and a considerable portion of the Punjab east of the Indus, forming his twentieth satrapy and yielding the enormous tribute of fully a million sterling, an influence that left some marks upon Indian art and architecture and methods of government and administration; the Hellenic influence beginning from Alexander's invasion and exercised by a succession of Greek rulers of the Punjab and neighbouring regions, but "which touched only the fringe of Indian civilization"; and the Graeco-Roman influence during the time of the Kushan or Indo-Scythian kings. Then, also, the two great civilizing forces of the world that next arose did not fail to touch India and contribute to her making, viz. the Islamic culture and civilization, and the European, which, following in the wake of foreign invasions and commerce, has continued to influence Indian thought and life to this day. India, therefore, is a favoured country where all the diversities of human culture have met to build up an extraordinarily rich and synthetic culture. Thus intercourse is as much a characteristic of the history of India as isolation.
Hardly less convincing than these facts of the political intercourse of India are the facts of her commercial intercourse with foreign countries with which we are more directly concerned. We shall have ample evidence to show that for full thirty centuries India stood out as the very heart of the Old World, and maintained her position as one of the foremost maritime countries. She had colonies in Pegu, in Cambodia, in Java, in Sumatra, in Borneo, and even in the countries of the Farther East as far as Japan. She had trading settlements in Southern China, in the Malayan peninsula, in Arabia, and in all the chief cities of Persia and all over the east coast of Africa. She cultivated trade relations not only with the countries of Asia, but also with the whole of the then known world, including the countries under the dominion of the Roman Empire, and both the East and the West became the theatre of Indian commercial activity and gave scope to her naval energy and throbbing international life.
It will thus be seen that instead of the rigid isolation apparently decreed to her by nature, we find a remarkably active intercourse with foreign countries established by the efforts of man, and a conquest achieved over the natural environment. The great and almost impregnable barriers on the north are pierced by mountain-passes which have been throughout used as the pathways of commerce and communication with the external world. Towards the south the ocean from its very nature proved a far more effective and fatal barrier to the cultivation of foreign relations, till the rapid development of national shipping triumphed over that obstacle and converted the ocean itself into a great highway of international intercourse and commerce. The early growth of her shipping and ship-building, coupled with the genius and energy of her merchants, the skill and daring of her seamen, the enterprise of her colonists, and the zeal of her missionaries, secured to India the command of the sea for ages, and helped her to attain and long maintain her proud position as the mistress of the Eastern seas. There was no lack of energy on the part of Indians of old in utilizing to the full the opportunities presented by nature for the development of Indian maritime activity—the fine geographical position of India in the heart of the Orient, with Africa on the west and the Eastern Archipelago and Australia on the east, her connection with the vast mainland of Asia on the north, her possession of a sea-board that extends over more than four thousand miles, and finally the network of rivers which opens up the interior. In fact, in India there is to be found the conjunction or assemblage of most of those specific geographical conditions on which depends the commercial development of a country.