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Afghan Caravan Trade and Imperialism in India1

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Afghan Caravan Trade and Imperialism in India1 Páginas 00-00 Chungara Revista de Antropología Chilena AFGHAN CARAVAN TRADE AND IMPERIALISM IN INDIA1 COMERCIO DE CARAVANAS AFGANAS E IMPERIALISMO EN INDIA André Wink2 It is often supposed that Afghanistan has historically been the 'graveyard of empires’. 'It is today's textbook example of a 'failed state.' Afghans, however, should be considered among the most important empire builders of Asia in the 15th and 16th centuries. In this paper it is shown that in South Asia, the physical infrastructure of caravanserais and roads created by Afghan nomadic caravan traders known as powindas was fundamental to the development of the empires of the Indo-Afghans (1451-1556), as well as to the Mughal empire (1526-1857), and ultimately the British Raj of the 19th and 20th centuries. Key words: Afghanistan, India, caravan, Mughal Empire, powinda. A menudo se supone que Afganistán ha sido históricamente un "cementerio de imperios" y se presenta en los manuales como ejemplo de “sistemas estatales fracasados”. Los afganos, sin embargo, deberían ser considerados los más importantes constructores de imperios de Asia del sur en los siglos XV y XVI. En este estudio se muestra que en el sur de Asia, la infraestructura física de caravaneros y caminos creados por las caravanas nómadas de mercaderes afganos conocidos como powindas fue fundamental para el desarrollo de los imperios Indo-Afganos (1451-1556), así como para el imperio de Mughal (1526-1857), y finalmente el Raj británico de los siglos XIX y XX. Palabras claves: Afganistán, India, caravanas, imperio Mughal, powinda. In the medieval (7th-15th) centuries, Afghanistan shatter zone running from the Makran coast on the was a (semi-) arid and in many places cold country, Arabian Sea to the Pamir Knot and the Karakorum a wild assemblage of hills, mountains covered with Range in Central Asia. Located in the southern part of perennial snow, and wastes unmarked by enclosures the country of Roh, this (semi-) arid and mountainous even in the cultivated parts, destitute of roads or region to the west of the Indus and south of the Hindu navigable rivers and canals, with only a few towns Kush, containing only a modest amount of land for at great distance from each other, and, above all, agriculture, was and still is eminently suitable for overwhelmingly poor (Figure 1, Table 1). Astride of pasturing large flocks of sheep and goats. With that of what the Bâburnâma (1993 f. 141b) describes as some Baluchistan and parts of Sind, the western Panjab, and of the ‘most worthless mountain zones in the world,’ Rajasthan, Afghanistan’s pastoral and mixed pastoral- this country had been a genuine pastoral-nomadic agricultural economy was the closest approximation habitat since ancient times. It was the eastern part to be found in South Asia to the purely nomadic of what constitutes Afghanistan today, together with economies of the arid zone of Persia and the much a sizable but narrow strip of Pakistan. As it was still vaster open spaces beyond the Hindu Kush mountains known to Babur, medieval Afghanistan was an area which historically were known as Turan, the steppe to the south of Kabul on both sides of the Sulayman lands of the Turko-Mongol world. mountain range, extending down to the Indus river, and generally mentioned together with Bangash, The Pastoral-Nomadic Economy of Afghanistan Bannu and Dasht. This was the southern part of and Kabul what modern scholarship has referred to as ‘Indo- Khurasan’ and, with less precision, the ‘Indo-Iranian The ethnogenesis of the Afghans (also known frontier,’ i.e. the middle part of the Makran-Pamir as Pashtuns, and in India as Pathans or Rohillas) 1 An earlier version of this article was presented at the International Workshop “Caravan Archaeologies: En Route to the Past, Present and Future”, Pica, Chile (May 2017). This manuscript was evaluated by external reviewers and edited by the Chungara Editorial Committee and the invited editors Persis B. Clarkson and Calogero M. Santoro. 2 Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. [email protected] Recibido: enero 2018. Aceptado: julio 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/S0717-73562018005001603. Publicado en línea: 28-agosto-2018. André Wink 2 Figure 1. Afghanistan and locations mentioned in the text. Sources for the map: Natural Earth; Courtesty NASA/JPL-Caltech; The General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO). Map drawn by W. Hiebert. Afganistán y lugares mencionados en el texto. Fuentes: Natural Earth; Courtesty NASA/JPL-Caltech; The General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO). Mapa dibujado por W. Hierbet. Afghan caravan trade and imperialism in India 3 Table 1. Chronological sequence of political regimes and key historical events in medieval Afghanistan. Secuencia cronológica de los regímenes políticos y los acontecimientos históricos claves en el Afganistán medieval. Regime Date Delhi Sultanate 1206-1526 Lodi Sultanate 1451-1529 (the last dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate) Timur destroys Delhi 1398 Mughal Empire 1526-1857 Sur Afghan Empire 1540-1556 (also known as the Afghan interregnum) in this area is an obscure and entangled process that favored by the Ghilzais, who tended extremely large took place over centuries and involved successive flocks of sheep, but as a rule did not engage in trade. waves of nomadic migrations into and through the The pastoral nomads of medieval Afghanistan, Afghan ‘homeland.’ The medieval Afghans shared in then, kept large herds of sheep and goats, as well a common nomadic culture -called kūchī or powinda- as some camels and horses (on which more below), supplemented with rudimentary agriculture, hunting where grazing land was sufficient, supplementing and gathering, highway robbery, and with long- pastoralism with agriculture where possible, and distance trade between India and Khurasan along the engaging in trade mostly where their nomadic routes of their annual migrations (Arlinghaus 1983; migration patterns coincided with trade routes. This Bâburnâma 1993; Elphinstone 1992; Wink 1990- was a fundamentally pastoral-nomadic society in 2004). The summer pastures or yaylaqs of the Afghan which kinship was the main organizing principle of nomads were in the upland portions of southern tribes -not territory- and in which there was no place Indo-Khurasan: the Sulayman mountain range and for chiefs or kings. Medieval Afghanistan was, in the Ghazna plateau. On some of the relatively well- other words, not a kingdom. watered and fertile soil near their summer pastures If there was one fundamental difference between they planted wheat and barley. After the autumn the pastoral-nomadic economies of medieval harvest they brought their flocks of sheep and goats Afghanistan and Turko-Mongol Central Asia, it was down from the mountains and the plateau to the winter that the first had a very limited potential for horse- pastures or qishlaqs at lower altitudes in the other breeding. In Afghanistan, as Elphinstone put it, ‘the subregions of Indo-Khurasan. Among the various great stock of the pastoral tribes is sheep, and those of trajectories of Afghan nomadic migration, the most the kind called in Persian Doomba, and remarkable important were those to the Derajat in the Indus river for tails a foot broad, and almost entirely composed valley, the Kabul river valley, and Qandahar. The of fat’ (Elphinstone 1992: I, p. 190). Goats were also Derajat was a natural winter grazing area for Afghan common in all the mountainous parts of the country, nomads. Especially below Kalabagh, the snow-fed and by no means scarce in the plains. Afghan nomads Indus river inundated a wide area and when the river who lived near the deserts had camels, while the retreated in the fall and winter it left the flood plains poor used bullocks and asses, and almost every man moist and rich with grasses. Many of the Afghan had a horse; but in general the horses of the Afghan nomads following the routes from the Ghazna plateau dominion -even in its much extended eighteenth- and to the Indus river flood plains engaged in trade or hired nineteenth-century version- were ‘not remarkably themselves out as camel drivers. Those who migrated good’ (Elphinstone 1992: I, p. 189). It is, hence, between the Ghazna plateau and northern Indo- somewhat paradoxical that in the course of the Khurasan had their winter pastures at lower altitudes medieval centuries Afghan traders acquired a near along the Kabul river, in such tumans or ‘districts’ as monopoly of the trade in horses between Central Asia Nangrahar or Lamghanat - here the Afghan nomads, and India, and that this trade became one of the driving by Babur’s time, had taken control of the trade along forces of Afghan migration and political expansion the Khyber route, between the Panjab and Khurasan into India. According to Babur, every year seven, and Turan. The third trajectory of Afghan nomadic eight or ten thousand horses were brought to Kabul by migration, between the Ghazna plateau and the Afghan traders (saudāgarān), and these included both relatively low and snow-free valleys around Qandahar ‘thoroughbred horses’ (aspān-i-tapchaq) and ‘trade (of the Arghandab, Tarnak and Arghastan rivers) is horses’ (aspān-i-saudā) (Bâburnâma 1993: ff. 129, known to have been followed regularly throughout the 148b). Great numbers of excellent horses were sold medieval centuries, and in Babur’s time was especially annually by Afghan traders in India under the name of 4 André Wink ‘Kabul’ and ‘Qandahar’ horses, but these were almost lived in villages continued to share in this culture, all from Balkh, a province of Turkistan, or from engaging in agriculture in a distinct and less laborious Bukhara and the Turkman country. Afghan traders fashion. Such Afghans still lived in tents or mat huts bought these horses cheap, when they were thin and during the part of the year they spent in their qishlaqs in bad shape, and would then fatten them up in and or winter pastures, while Tajiks did not spend any around Qunduz, or near Parwan and Charikar, or in part of the year in tents or mat huts.
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