Crafts, Trade and Towns, 200 BC to 300 AD

Between 200 BCE and 300 CE, India’s towns grew busy. Workers and traders joined together in groups called guilds. These guilds organised trade, trained craftsmen and even handled money.

1.1 What was a shreni?

A shreni was a guild. A guild is a group of people who do the same work and act together. It could be weavers, potters or merchants.

Guilds grew as trade grew. More trade meant bigger towns. Bigger towns needed more artisans and merchants. Many of them then formed guilds, and each guild tended to live in one part of a town.

1.2 What rules did a guild follow?

Guilds were not casual clubs. They were registered with the town authority. Their members followed strict rules called the shreni-dharma. Guilds also had their own seals and signs.

A guild helped its members in one more way. It encouraged specialisation. Each member learned one trade well, and the trade often passed from parent to child.

1.3 How did guilds work like banks?

Rich guilds also offered money services. In the Deccan, members of the royal family invested money with a guild. The interest it earned became a regular gift to the Buddhist sangha, or community of monks.

Banking was not only a guild job. The more usual source of money was the merchant financier, called a shresthin. A common interest rate was about 15 percent.

1.4 A real example: the Nasik cave inscription

An inscription is writing carved on stone. One at Nasik, dated year 42, shows guild banking at work. A donor named Ushavadata, son-in-law of the ruler Nahapana, gave a cave to the monks’ community. He also gave a permanent fund of 3,000 kahapanas.

He did not hand over the cash for spending. He invested it. He placed 2,000 coins with one weavers’ guild. He placed 1,000 coins with another weavers’ guild. Both guilds lived at a place called Govadhana.

The coins were never to be paid back. Only the interest was to be used. It paid for cloth money for the monks who stayed in the cave. Each of twenty monks received twelve kahapanas.

1.5 Why did kings and donors trust guilds?

Guilds were registered, rule-bound groups with their own seals. That made them dependable places to invest.

This also raised the guild’s standing. Guilds became rich patrons themselves. They made lavish gifts to Buddhist and Jain monasteries.

2.1 What coins did people use?

Coins were the common money of this age. Silver and copper punch-marked coins had come into use as early as the 5th century BCE. By our period, many kinds of coins were in use.

2.2 Which metals were used?

Different metals served different needs. The table below shows the main ones.

Potin is a mixed alloy. It is mainly copper, with tin and lead.

2.3 Who first struck gold in India?

The Kushans did. They came from Central Asia and ruled the northwest. Their king Vima Kadphises began regular gold coinage. It came in three sizes: a 16-gram double dinar, an 8-gram dinar and a 2-gram quarter dinar.

These gold coins copied the Roman aureus, Rome’s gold coin. Gold arrived because the Kushans traded with Rome. Their large gold issues show how rich that trade made them.

2.4 What was on Kushan coins?

Kushan coins show gods from many lands. Greek, Roman, Iranian, Hindu and Buddhist figures all appear. The writing used a changed form of Greek letters.

So coins carry history too. They show that people of many faiths lived and traded together in the Kushan empire.

3.1 How did goods travel inside India?

Two big land routes carried goods. One ran along the Ganges and across the Punjab to Taxila. The other went from the Ganges valley through Ujjain and the Narmada valley to the western coast, or south to the Deccan.

3.2 What was the Periplus?

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea is a sailor’s guidebook. An unknown Greek-speaking merchant from Egypt wrote it around the middle of the 1st century CE.

It describes sea routes from Egypt around Arabia to India’s west coast. It also lists ports and the goods traded there. That is why historians prize it.

3.3 What did Barygaza trade?

Barygaza was a trading port in western India. Ships brought in wine, copper, tin, lead, coral and gold and silver coin. Traders earned a profit when they exchanged foreign coin for local money.

Exports included ivory, agate and carnelian, cotton and silk cloth, yarn and long pepper.

3.4 What did Muziris trade?

Muziris was a busy port in southern India. It was famous for pepper, which grew in one nearby district. It also exported pearls, ivory, silk cloth, gems and tortoise-shell.

Ships brought in a great quantity of coin. A Tamil poem describes foreign ships coming in with gold and leaving with pepper.

3.5 How do we know Roman gold came to India?

Archaeologists find Roman coins in large hoards in India. A hoard is a buried stash of coins. The coins are mostly from the emperors Augustus, Tiberius and Nero.

Many coins have a bar cut across them. That may show they were used as bullion, or plain metal, in India. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder complained that the Indian luxury trade was draining Rome’s treasury.

3.6 What else proves contact?

Arikamedu, near Puducherry, had a Roman trading settlement. Diggers found proof of a Roman trading settlement there. The emperor Augustus also received two embassies from India between 25 and 21 BCE.

3.7 Who used the monsoon winds?

Sailors learned to cross the Arabian Sea in a straight line. The Periplus credits a pilot named Hippalus with finding how to lay a course across the open ocean. Ships then no longer had to creep along the coast.

4.1 What do all three clues show?

Guild banking, many coin types and Roman gold all point one way. India had a busy, money-based economy. Trade made towns bigger and artisans richer, and it did this in many regions, not just one.

4.2 Exam trap: who complained about the gold drain?

Questions ask which ancient writer complained about Roman gold leaving for India. The answer is Pliny the Elder. He said the Indian luxury trade was draining Rome’s treasury.

One CAPF question tested this (CAPF ACs 2025 General Ability paper). Do not confuse it with the Periplus, which is a trade guide and not a complaint.

4.3 Exam trap: what is the Erythraean Sea?

Do not take Erythraean Sea to mean the Mediterranean. The book’s routes run from Egypt around Arabia to western India. A 2016 NDA question tested this (NDA & NA (II) 2016 paper).