GUJARAT

 

GUJARAT (Skt. Gurjará), a province of India on its northwestern coastline. Gujarat derives its name from the Indo-Iranian Gujar tribes, which entered north India around 550 C.E. with the White Huns and established their presence in southern Rajasthan, with their headquarters at Bhilmal, to the northwest of Mount Abu. Among these Gujars, a sub-clan, the Pratihāras, later to claim Rajput status, assumed a primacy around 725 C.E., subsequently shifting their power-base to Kanauj on the Ganges, where they ruled until its fall to the Ghaznavid Sultan Maḥmud in 409/1018. During the period of Gujara-Pratihāra rule in Bhilmal, the Arabs of Sind came to refer to the region east of the Thar desert as al-Jorz, and regarded its king as one of the greatest rulers in the world and an inveterate foe of Islam (Wink, pp. 277-302; S. M. Ahmad, pp. 3, 6, 11-12, 42, 66).

Gujarat lacks precise geographical delineation, but may be described as the region bordering the Gulf of Cambay/Khambāyat and the hinterlands watered by rivers which flow into it: the Sabarmati, on which stands Ahmadabad (q.v.), the capital since the 15th century; the Mahi, close to which Baroda is located and which enters the sea at the port of Cambay; the Narmada, at the mouth of which Broach is situated; and the Tapti, which flowing past Burhanpur (q.v.), enters the sea at Surat. To the southwest of the Gulf of Cambay, the Kathiawar peninsula (Saurashtra) is generally reckoned an extension of Gujarat extending westwards as far as the Rann of Cutch; to the north, Gujarat is bounded by the southernmost foothills of the Aravalli range, together with the flanks of Mount Abu, comprising the southern Rajput principality of Mewar. To the east lie the Malwa plateau and the foothills of the Vindhyas, while between the Narmada and the Tapti lie the spurs of the Satpura range. To the south, Gujarat extends into the Bombay Konkan (Ḥodud al-ʿālam, ed. Sotuda, pp. 66-67, tr. Minorsky, p. 88, comm., pp. 244-45).

In view of the lack of physical boundaries, the historical frontiers of Gujarat as a political entity have fluctuated greatly. Before the coming of Islam, Gujarat was the core-region of a series of Hindu regional kingdoms. It was incorporated into the Delhi sultanate around 704/1304-05, and between 793/1391 and 991/1583 it was an independent sultanate. From the time of Akbar’s conquest of 980/1572-73 until 1171/1758, it was a province of the Mughal empire. Thereafter, until the British annexation of 1818, it was the hunting ground of various rival Maratha warlords. Under the British Raj (1818-1947), Gujarat was a patchwork quilt of British administrative districts and princely states, of which the most prominent were the territories belonging to the Maratha Gaekwad of Baroda. In the present-day Indian Union, Gujarat State is an artificial construct primarily designed to accomodate speakers of Gujarati.

Persian influence in Gujarat before the Sultanate. Coming from the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea, Gujarat is the maritime gateway to India. In consequence, Persia’s links with Gujarat by sea are very ancient. Overland communication would have passed through the Zābo-lestān region, but the physical barriers presented by the Thar desert and the Rann of Cutch were very formidable. Travelers on foot from Persia to Gujarat via Zābolestān who reached the Indus would find it easier thereafter to pass downstream to the sea and then skirt the Kathiawar peninsula by ship to the ports of Gujarat. In the time of Abu Rayḥān Biruni (362-ca. 442/973-ca. 1050; q.v.), the main overland route from Persia went via Moltān to Bazana (Bazāna), where it met the highway from Kanauj (Qannuj) and then proceeded to Anhilwara (Nahrwāla; present-day Patan) and thence either to Somnath in Ka-thiawar or to Broach (Biruni, tr., II, pp. 202, 205).

Maritime contacts between Gujarat and the Persian Gulf region reach back to the period of Indus Valley civilization (ca. 2500-1500 B.C.E.), with the site of the port of Lothal at the head of the Gulf of Cambay, as well as other excavations in Gujarat, revealing the extent of Gujarat’s earliest commercial contacts with the west (Rao, pp. 39-78, 114-26; Dani and Masson, pp. 312-18). “Meluhha” in Sumerian and Akkadian sources may refer to Gujarat (Thapar, pp. 1-42). Although Gujarat lay beyond the trans-Indus satrapies of the Achaemenid empire listed in Darius I’s inscription at Naqš-e Rostam, there is a strong presumption of maritime trade between the Persian Gulf and the ports of Gujarat during the Achaemenid period, as well as of overland commerce funnelled through Taxila. Certainly, by the time of the Periplus of the Erythaean Sea (perhaps between 95 and 130 C.E.), Gujarat had become the fulcrum of maritime trade on the Arabian Sea (Huntingford, pp. 43-45, 85, 109-12, 153-54), with the coins of the Indo-Bactrian kings, Apollodotus I and Menander, still circulating in Barygaza (mod-ern Broach) in the late 1st century C.E. (Huntingford, pp. 46-47; Tarn, pp. 215-15). The conquest of northwestern India by the Sakas during the 1st century B.C.E. extended into Cutch and Kathiawar as far south as Broach, as did the first-century Indo-Parthian kingdom of Gondophares (q.v.; Marshall, I, pp. 44, 60). The subsequent rise of the Kushans resulted in the further dispersal of Saka principalities throughout Cutch, Kathiawar, Malwa, and the Narmada valley, the last conquered by Rudradaman in 150 C.E. (Kielhorn, p. 41). These Saka chieftains continued to use Sanskritized Persian titles such as kšatrapa and mahakšatrapa, had names of apparently Persian origin, and minted coins with debased Greek and Kharoṣṭhi characters (Rapson, Catalogue, pp. xcvii-clvii; Thomas, pp. 204-13). Throughout this period, Gujarat’s ties with the Iranian world were maintained either overland via Arachosia (q.v.; Zābolestān) or Gandhara (q.v.; Taxila), or by sea. Evidence of western trade links has been confirmed by archeological discoveries, including, on thirty-three sites in Gujarat and Kathiawar, red polished ware imitative of Roman Samian ware (Subbarao, pp. 109-10; Margabandhu, pp. 316-22).

It is unlikely that contacts between the Persian Gulf and the Kshatrapa principalities in Gujarat and Kathiawar were interrupted by the rise of the Sasanians in Persia in 224 C.E. The case for the exercise of Sasanian political hegemony over the lands east of the Indus is still unproven, although Ernst Herzfeld was convinced by the Paikuli inscription of Narseh (293-303 C.E.) that, as a result of campaigns undertaken by Bahrām II in 284 C.E., “Kacch, Kathiawar, Malwa and the adjoining hinterland of these countries” were part of the Sasanian Empire (I, p. 43). Others have argued in favor of an informal hegemony (Piacentini, pp. 136-48). Ṭabari recalled the tradition that Bahrām V (420-32) returned from India with an Indian wife whose dowry was Daybol, Makrān, and parts of Sind (I, p. 868). Sasanian maritime trade with India and beyond must have centered upon the ports of the Gulf of Cambay. Evidence for this trade is preserved in the fragments of Indian red polished ware, of predominantly Gujarati or Maharashtrian provenance, found on coastal sites on the northern shores of the Persian Gulf, and especially at Sirāf (Whitehead and Williamson, p. 39). Data is lacking to confirm a Sasanian naval presence in Indian waters, although such may well have existed to police the coasts of Kathiawar and Gujarat (Hadi Hasan, pp. 65-76). Sasanian diplomatic links with rulers in western India are confirmed by Ṭabari’s account of an embassy, presumably traveling by sea, from the Chalukya ruler, Pulakeshin II (608-42), to the court of Ḵosrow II Parvēz (Ṭabari, I, p. 1052). A hint of such exchanges is preserved at Ajanta in a fresco representing the god Kubera-Vaisravana and his entourage, formerly taken to be a Persian envoy being received by a Chalukyan ruler (Kröger, p. 444). Further evidence for Persian-Gujarati links in the Sasanian period is provided by the prevalence in Gujarat and Malwa of what are known as Indo–Sasanian coin-types, although their precise significance remains to be explained. The invading Huns, having adopted Persian-type coinage early in their first encounter with Sasanian civilization, probably introduced it into India in the course of their conquest of the northwest.

Whatever the relations of Gujarat to Sasanian Persia, the Saka kšatrapas were conquered by Chandragupta II Vikramaditya around 410 C.E. Following the demise of the Guptas after 468, Gujarat passed under the rule of the Maitraka dynasty (late 5th to the early 8th century) until its collapse under the attacks of the Arabs, whose invasion of Sind began in 92/711. The Maitrakas made their capital at Valabhi in eastern Kathiawar, on a site then much closer to the sea than now, to which it was linked by the Bhavnagar channel. This was the great international entrepot visited by Hiuen Tsang in 640 and which, according to Biruni (tr., I, pp. 192-93), was destroyed by the Arabs of al-Manṣura in the 8th century. Thereafter, Chaulukya hegemony lasted from the middle of the 10th century until about 1304, first under the rule of Solanki and then the Vaghela clan, which made Anhilwara the capital of Gujarat. During these centuries, the presence in Gujarat of Middle-Easterners, mostly Muslims, but also Armenian Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, is well-documented. Among Muslim traders, the majority would have been Arabs, but there is indubitable epigraphic evidence for the presence of Persians (see EPIGRAPHY v).

Sadid-al-Din Moḥammad ʿAwfi (q.v.), who had person-ally visited Cambay, relates in his Jawāmeʿ al-ḥekāyāt an extraordinary story regarding the justice of Siddharaja Jayasimha (1094-1143) towards the Muslim community there, indicating that there was already a mosque in Cambay during that ruler’s reign. This mosque was rebuilt in 615/1218, during the reign of Bhimdeva II (1178-1242), by a certain Saʿid b. Abu Šaraf b. ʿAli b. Šāpur Bami, a Persian from Bam in the province of Kermān. Other surviving inscriptions from Cambay preserve the names of two others members of the same family, one of whom seems to have been a ship’s captain (Desai, 1961b, pp. 353-64).

As early as 633/1236, a tomb was erected in Petlad (northeast of Cambay) for Šayḵ-al-Mašāyeḵ Arjun of Damoh and Aḵsi (presumably the Aḵsi in Farḡāna), who may have been a Persian refugee from the Mongol onslaught (Yazdani, pp. 15-18). In the shrine (dargah) of Tāj-al-Din outside Cambay are epitaphs of a man from Qazvin, and another whose father’s name of Ardašir points to a Persian background. An epitaph of 683/1284 in Cambay records the death of a man from Estrābād/Astarābād. An inscription from Junagadh, dated 685/1286-87, records the building of a mosque by a benefactor from Iraj (Abraj) in Fārs, an obviously wealthy entrepreneur described as a prince of ship-masters and a prop of pilgrims bound for Mecca. He may have owned a fleet of vessels, implying that as early as the late 13th century, the shipping of pilgrims to the Ḥejāz from Gujarat and Kathiawar was well established. There is also a record of the death in Cambay in 685/1287 of a certain Zayn-al-Din ʿAli b. Sālār, an otherwise unknown Sufi poet from Yazd (Desai, 1961c, pp. 19-20). Also in Cambay there is preserved a tablet recording the building of another mosque in 775/1364, of which the architect appears to have come from Šuštar in Ḵuzestān (Burgess, 1896, p. 29). This epigraphic evidence confirms the existence of a flourishing community of Persians in Gujarat as well as in Kathiawar a century before the Ḵalji conquest (Oza, pp. 1-5).

There was another community forming in Gujarat at this time which must also have included Persians. The Fatimid Caliph, al-Mostanṣer (427-87/1036-94) had initiated the Ismaʿili proselytization of northwestern India through the agency of the Sulayhid rulers of Yemen, with which Gujarat had long enjoyed close commercial ties. Among the dāʿis (q.v.) despatched to Gujarat in 476/1083 was a certain Marzbān b. Esḥāq b. Marzbān, whose name suggests a Persian origin (Hamdāni, p. 324). Throughout the 11th and 12th centuries, the work of proselytization continued, laying the foundations of the future Gujarati Bohra community. While the various Ismaili sects recruited converts from among the local Hindus, some Persians in Gujarat were probably drawn to the revolutionary doctrine, for the Fatimid dāʿis were already established in Persia itself. According to Nezāri Khoja tradition, Satgur Nur or Nur-al-Din was the first Nezāri dāʿi sent from Alamut to Gujarat, where he settled in Patan, but no certain dates can be ascribed to his arrival (Daftary, pp. 415, 478).

Meanwhile, Gujarat had begun to experience Muslim military pressure from the north. In 416/1025-26, Sultan Maḥmud of Ḡazna marched through Gujarat and sacked the Hindu metropolis of Anhilwara on his way to Somnath (Nazim, pp. 115-21). A subsequent raid into Gujarat in 574/1178 by Moʿezz-al-Din Moḥammad Ḡuri may have ended disastrously. Not until the reign of ʿAlāʾ-al-Din Moḥammad Shah Ḵalji (695-715/1296-1316), did the sultans of Delhi reach out to annex Gujarat. A campaign of 704/1304-05 led to the incorporation of Gujarat as a province of the Delhi sultanate (Misra, pp. 72-87). Moḥammad b. Toḡloq’s presence in Gujarat between 746/1347 and 751/1351 must have introduced many Gujarati Muslims to the Persianized manners and culture of the Delhi court.

Firuzšāh Shah Toḡloq (752-90/1351-88) appointed as governor of Gujarat one of his most trusted lieutenants, Ẓafar Khan I, a Punjabi Khatri convert. At Ẓafar Khan’s death in 773/1371-72, his son, Ẓafar Khan II was installed in his place. He proved an energetic and warlike governor, remaining loyal to the feuding Toḡloqs in Delhi until Timur’s sack of the city (801/1398) and the dynasty’s subsequent demise. In 810/1407, Ẓafar Khan, who, for all practical purposes, had been an independent ruler for several years, assumed the title of sultan of Gujarat as Moẓaffar Shah. In 813/1410, just prior to his own death, he elevated his grandson to the throne as co-ruler, with the title of Nāṣer-al-Din Aḥmad Shah (814-46/1411/42).

Thirteen successive sultans ruled over the independent kingdom of Gujarat between the demise of the Tughluqids (817/1414) and the Mughal conquest (980/1573). They belonged to a single family and, unlike several contemporary Indo-Muslim dynasties, they were of indigenous stock. They welcomed foreign Muslims to their court, but, in contrast with the Bahmanid sultans of the Deccan or the sultans of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur (qq.v.), they seemed to have shown no particular fondness for Persians. The predominant non-Gujarati element in the early years of the sultanate would have consisted of refugees from Delhi, following Timur’s sack and the collapse of the last Toḡloqids in 801/1398-99.

Aḥmad I (814-46/1411-42) may be regarded as the true architect of the independent sultanate both as a result of his successful pacification of local Hindu rajahs and his campaigns against his Muslim neighbors, and because he obtained a deed of investiture for himself from the titular ʿAbbasid caliph in Cairo (Spies). He was also the founder of the city of Ahmadabad, which became thereafter his capital. The apogee of the sultanate occurred during the reigns of his grandson, Maḥmud I Bēgrā (862-917/1458-1511), and his great-grandson, Moẓaffar II (917-32/1511-26).

Even during this culminating phase in the history of the sultanate, the sultans seem to have restricted their contacts with foreign rulers to their immediate neighbors in Malwa, Khandesh, and the Deccan (first, the Bahmanids, and later, the Nezamsahis). Before Maḥmud I, there is no record of official contacts with Delhi since the demise of the Tughluqids or, more remarkably, with Persia. Other Indo-Muslim rulers maintained at least nominal contacts with Šāhrok (807-50/1405-47), the son and succssor of Timur, but the sultans of Gujarat apparently did not.

Shah Esmāʿil I Ṣafawi (q.v.) sent an embassy with rich presents to congratulate Moẓaffar Shah II on his accession in 917/1511 and to announce his victory over the Uzbek Moḥammad Šibāni (Šaybak) Khan at Marv on 30 Šaʿbān 916/2 December 1510. At first, the Persian envoy was honorably received, but subsequently, his entourage was attacked and his property destroyed by a mob inflamed either by anti-Shiʿite feeling, or, according to one version, by the machinations of Ṣāḥeb Khan, the exiled prince of the Malwa, who had sought refuge in Gujarat (Burton-Page, p. 1128). Sultan Moẓaffar was compelled to pay heavy compensation for the envoy’s losses.

Maḥmud I’s reign coincided with the arrival in India of the Portuguese and the rapid establishment of their naval hegemony in the waters off Gujarat. This caused the sultan, and, after him, Moẓaffar II, to establish an alliance with the Mamluk ruler of Egypt, Qānsuh Ḡawri (906-22/1501-17), but there is no evidence that the Safavids were ever approached for assistance, perhaps because the sultan of Gujarat was fearful of Shiʿite proselytization. The last effective sultan of Gujarat, Bahādor Shah (932-43/1526-37), was forced to cede Diu to the Portuguese in 943/1537. His grandson and the last of the line, Moẓaffar III (968-80/1561-73 and 991/1583), put up a spirited but ultimately ineffective resistance to Akbar’s invasion of 980/1572-73.

The Sultanate of Gujarat and Persian culture. For the best part of two centuries, the independent sultanate of Gujarat was the cynosure of its neighbors on account of its wealth and prosperity, which had long made the Gujarati merchant a familiar figure in the ports of the Indian Ocean. As Tome Pires, a Portuguese official at Malacca, writing of conditions during the reigns of Maḥmud I and Moẓaffar II, expressed it: “Cambay stretches out two arms; with her right arm she reaches toward Aden and with the other towards Malacca” (Pires, I, p. 41). His contemporary, Duarte Barbosa, describing Gujarat’s mari-time trade, recorded the import of horses from the Middle East and elephants from Malabar, and lists exports which included muslins, chintzes and silks, carnelian, ginger, and other spices, aromatics, opium, indigo, and other substances for dyeing, cereals, and legumes (Barbosa, I, pp. 108-58). Persia was the destination for many of these commodities, and they were partly paid for in horses and pearls taken from Hormuz (Barbosa, I, p. 82). It was the latter item, in particular, which led Sultan Sekandar Lodi of Delhi, according to ʿAli-Moḥammad Khan, author of the Merʾāt-e aḥmadi, to complain that the “support of the throne of Delhi is wheat and barley but “the foundation of the realm of Gujarat is coral and pearls” (apud Bayley, p. 20). Hence, the sultans of Gujarat possessed ample means to sustain lavish patronage of religion and the arts, and to build madrasas, and ḵānaqāhs, and to provide douceurs for the literati, mainly poets and historians, whose presence and praise enhanced the fame of the dynasty.

Persia was one of several conduits through which Sufism established itself in Gujarat. Thus, the Kāzeruni order (ṭariqa) founded by Shaikh Abu Esḥāq Ebrāhim b. Šahriār (q.v.), who died at Kāzerun in 426/1035, exercised a pervasive influence among the seamen and traders who sailed the seas between the Persian Gulf and China, including the ports of Gujarat (Trimingham, pp. 21-24). The Sohravardi order was established at the invitation of Aḥmad Shah I, but Češti, Šaṭṭāri, and other orders were also welcome. The activities of Shah Wajih-al-Din ʿAlawi contributed to the dissemination of the Šaṭṭāri selsela along the sea routes from Gujarat, exercising a pervasive influence among the same kinds of people who, in an earlier age, had followed the Kazeruni selsela. The Neʿmat-Allāhis were introduced by Shaikh Kamāl Kermāni, who had been a disciple of Shah Neʿmat-Allāh Wali. These and other Sufis, many of whom had strong links with Persia, created with their ḵānaqāhs and shrines a distinctive sacral map for Gujarat.

From the time of the Ḵalji, Persian became the language of administration and, under the sultans, of polite learning in Gujarat. Because of the privileged status of Persian as a court language, the Hindu elites of Gujarat, as elsewhere in India, acquired and in many instances mastered the language. Although many religious scholars were among the immigrants from Persia to Gujarat (ʿAli-Moḥammad Khan mentions sayyeds from Mašhad, Shiraz, and Hormuz), the principal contribution of Gujarat to Persian literature lay in the fields of poetry and historiography. Those sultans who were cultivated patrons and in some instances poets themselves, as in the case of Aḥmad I and Moẓaffar II (917-32/1511-26), encouraged both Arabic and Persian letters, and Maḥmud I initiated translations from Arabic into Persian. The many references to Persian poets in the sources and the survival of fragments of their writing show that the court favored traditional literary patronage, but it was in the field of historiography that the ties to the Persian literary tradition appear strongest. Gujarat sheltered a highly developed tradition of historical writing, although most of the chronicles are now lost and are known only by name or from extracts preserved in later histories. However, it appears that narrative histories were written of the individual reigns of most sultans. Of the surviving Persian histories of Gujarat, the best known are: Shaikh Sekandar b. Moḥammad Manjhu, a second generation Gujarati whose family originated from Persia, the author of the Merʾāt-e sekandari, which describes the history of Muslim Gujarat down to 1020/1611, and incorporates much material derived from earlier lost histories; ʿAbd-Allāh Moḥammad b. ʿOmar Makki, known as Háāji Dabir, also of Persian origin, and the author of the Ẓafar al-wāleh be-Moẓaffar wa-āleh, written in Arabic; and ʿAli-Moḥam-mad Khan, the last Mughal divān of Gujarat (appointed in 1056/1746), and the author of the Merʾāt-e aḥmadi.

It might be supposed that of all the Muslim regimes to emerge in medieval India, Gujarat, relatively close to Persia, would have been most influenced by Persian traditions of art and architecture. In fact, the reverse was the case. Perhaps due to the long history of state patronage in western India, to the strength of local Hindu guilds of craftsmen, and to the indigenous origins of the ruling house, the architecture of Gujarat under the sultans proved almost impervious to external influences. Traditional Jain and Hindu architecture and decoration were less radically modified to meet Muslim needs or Muslim aesthetic values than in any other part of India. Thus, for example, the tomb of the Persian, ʿOmar b. Aḥmad Kā-zeruni (725/1325), adjacent to the Cambay JāmeʿMosque constitutes a modified Hindu mandapa (a columned hall in a temple). Under the early sultans, such foreign artistic influences as there were came from Tughluqid Delhi. During the reign of the third sultan, Qoṭb-al-Din Aḥmad II (855-62/1451-58), or shortly thereafter, innovation occurred when three large structures were built in brick in the arcuate style, rather than in the stone masonry traditionally employed in the region. These were the tomb of Daryā Khan in Ahmadabad and the mosque of Alef Khan at Dhōlkā, built for two close companions of Maḥmud I, probably by the same architect; and the tomb of Aʿẓam and Moʿaẓẓam, two Khorasanian brothers, on the Sarkhej road. It has been assumed that all three buildings were the work of Persian architects lured to Gujarat by its great wealth (Burgess, 1896, pp. 34-36; Brown, pp. 52-53). While Maḥmud I’s reign witnessed the culmination of architectural patronage under the sultanate, none of his undertakings shows much external influence. He laid out gardens everywhere, and a tradition is preserved that these owed their origin to a native of Khorasan who constructed gardens of a design hitherto unknown in Gujarat, although thereafter a Gujarati carpenter named Halu supposedly outdid the Khorasanian with a design which pleased the sultan even more (Sekandar Manjhu, tr., pp. 212-13).

With Akbar’s conquest of 980/1572-73, Gujarat was reduced to the status of a province of the Mughal empire. The prosperity which Gujarat had enjoyed under the sultans continued for the century and three-quarters of Mughal rule, although the prevailing patterns of international trade were modified by the increasing activities of the European trading companies. Gujarat’s commerce with Persia was undoubtedly stimulated by the stabilization of the subcontinent under Mughal rule, which coincided with that of Persia under the Safavids. It seems that the sea route remained the cheapest, safest, and shortest route between the two empires. Vessels sailing from the Gulf of Cambay with the monsoon winds behind them could make port at Hormuz or Bandar(-e) ʿAbbās in two or three weeks, and when the winds were right, they could make the same time on the return journey. It has been calculated that the overall distance between Ahma-dabad and Isfahan could be completed within two and a half months (Dale, pp. 46-48). Some of the commodities exported from Gujarat to Persia have already been mentioned. Persian exports to Gujarat were probably still dominated by the trade in horses, but the Jesuit Manuel Godinho, visiting Bandar ʿAbbās in 1663, described caravans converging on the port from Isfahan, Shiraz, Lār, and all over Persia, laden with silk, carpets, rhubarb, rosewater, raisins, almonds, dried plums, wine, “and a thousand other stuffs” (Correia-Afonso, p. 92), although all these were now mainly carried in English or Dutch bottoms. These time-worn exchanges between Persia and Gujarat were to be mortally damaged by the anarchy in Persia after the demise of the Safavids in 1135/1722, which itself initiated a further wave of Persian refugees to the ports of western India, and by the fall of Ahmadabad to the Marathas in 1171/1758. Thereafter, new trading patterns emerged, dictated by the imperatives of European expansion.

 

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(Gavin R. G. Hambly)

Originally Published: December 15, 2002

Last Updated: February 24, 2012

This article is available in print.
Vol. XI, Fasc. 4, pp. 385-390