Notes Towards Understanding Economic Changes in Medieval Kerala

The present article seeks to examine certain aspects of the economic developments in Kerala in what could be described as the medieval period, namely from the thirteenth or fourteenth century onwards. The period prior to that was dominated by the Cera Kingdom of Mahodayapuram, which historians have held to have been holding sway between the ninth and early twelfth centuries. As is fairly clear now, one major feature of that kingdom was that it represented the fulfilment of agrarian development in Kerala in the major river valleys, particularly the floodplains of Periyar, which had been brought under riziculture. In fact, it has been shown that the kingdom was a political expression of the class of intermediaries in the field of agrarian production. ¹ Along with rice, what are called ‘cash crops’ were also cultivated in that period. Inscriptions speak about pepper, coconut, betel nut, and so on, which were not items of staple food. ² Apart from what was produced in cultivated lands, spices such as pepper grew as wild products in the Western Ghats, and they were brought to the ports through the large number of rivers cutting across the land. Trade, largely in these items, too is attested in the records. ³

These activities registered considerable growth in the centuries that followed. This followed two developments. At one level, dry land, known as paṟampŭ or purayiṭam, was brought under cultivation for raising ‘cash crops’ or ‘commercial crops’ such as coconut, areca nut, pepper and betel leaves. ⁴ Inscriptions from the twelfth century onwards point to the increased use of such dry land, ⁵ which later came to be known as ‘garden land’. ⁶ A Sanskrit poet introduces Kerala as the land ‘rich in coconut and areca palms on which climb pepper and betel vines’. Accounts of trade contained in the writings of Arab, Chinese and European travellers testify to the trade in these items from the port towns of Kerala. ⁷

Whether the production of tradable surplus in Kerala created an increased demand for these products in the international market or whether such demand induced the increase in production, there is evidence of international trade from classical Greco-Roman times. ⁸ What was a goods-for-goods exchange based on need and reciprocity was transformed into an ‘instituted process’ by the medieval period, based on clear notions of price and profit. State showed considerable interest in this trade, and benefited from it immensely. West Asian trade continued even after the ‘decline and fall of the Roman Empire’, now with Jewish, Syrian Christian and Muslim traders as the principal. Charters such as the Syrian Christian Copper Plates and the Jewish Copper Plates from the time of the Cera kingdom bear this out. Writers in the past waxed eloquent about the religious toleration of the rulers of Kerala on the basis of this; but a more realistic understanding is that ‘charity began at the market place, for it is difficult for us, with our inhuman caste system, to proclaim to the world that charity begins at home’. ⁹ The Cairo Geniza records mention activities of Jewish traders in subsequent centuries in towns like Kollam and Kodungallur (Shingly) and other centres. ¹⁰ Kollam and other coastal towns of Kerala have thrown up Chinese and Arabic pottery dating from this period (thirteenth–sixteenth centuries) in huge quantities. ¹¹ Information provided by Arab and Chinese travellers stands corroborated and supplemented by these. ¹² European travellers too were visiting the coast of Kerala in this period, trade being one of their primary interests. ¹³

The rise of urban centres and urban conditions were among the results of this growth in trade. Poems in Maṇipravāḷaṃ, a ‘new language’ blending Sanskrit and Malayalam, mention the names of a few towns and make comparisons among them, some of them with detailed descriptions of marketplaces. ¹⁴ There are accounts in these descriptions of the various articles bought and sold in these markets, which included local products as well as items which were imported from places far afield such as China and Arabia. Almost all texts describing a market refer to quarrels among the vendors, the unintelligible speech of people from far-off places, the acrid tongue of the fishwives, and so on. ¹⁵ One text mentions the price of an Arabian horse. ¹⁶ The Uṇṇunīlīsandeśam describes ships from China as well as the Coromandel Coast docked in the port of Kollam. ¹⁷ Texts abound in motifs of ships. A Candrotsavam verse advises the heroine to behave with prudence, like steering a ship properly. ¹⁸ Another verse in the same text uses the motif of a ship in the ocean to describe a woman going from one lover to another. ¹⁹ Padyaratnam, an anthology of poems from about the same period has a verse that uses metaphors of a ship and its different parts in describing a woman gradually approaching her lover. ²⁰

Accounts of the Portuguese writer, Duarte Barbosa, who had close familiarity with the Kerala coast in the sixteenth century, are relevant here. ²¹ He mentions a section of Nairs known as Beabares (Yāvāri or Rāvāri according to the translator, perhaps from Skt. vyāparin, ‘trader’) and their importance on account of their access to cash. ²² It is possible that a ‘Hindu ship-owning merchant of Malabari origin’ that the Cairo Geniza papers talk about, Nmby Rwy, described as a ‘noble merchant’, was a Rāvāri. ²³ Barbosa refers to the caste of mogeres (for Mogeyar), ‘most of them gain their living on the sea, they are sailors, and some of them fishers… Some of them are very rich and own ships in which they sail and trade with the Moors’. ²⁴ He also refers to the presence of paradēśi (‘those from other lands’) traders in Calicut. ²⁵ Descriptions of such towns by Arab and Chinese travellers in this period acquire importance here.

So also, Maṇipravāḷam texts give detailed information regarding transactions in coined money, a new experience in the economic history of Kerala. Apart from local issues such as kāśŭ, kaḻañcŭ, kāṇam, accŭ, āṉayaccŭ, and so on, even foreign coins such as tiramam (for dirham) ²⁶ and aśaravi (for ashrafi) ²⁷ find a place in the lists. ²⁸ The Anantapuravarṇanaṃ gives a long list of coins transacted in the market in the town. ²⁹ The documents of the Zamorins of Calicut mention coins of Arabian origin such as dramma (for dirham) and iṟiyāl (for riyal) ³⁰ along with local issues such as paṇam, tāram, rāśi, cakram and kāśŭ. ³¹ Speaking of ceṭṭi traders, Barbosa says that ‘their sons also[,] … as soon as they are ten years of age, go about changing small coins’. ³² He mentions the Nayres’ (i.e., Nairs) access to cash and the pay they received. ³³ He goes on: ‘When the kings go to war they pay all the Nayres who serve therein, even though they be in the service of other Lords, their daily wages, that is to say, four taras each, every day (which contains five reis)’. ³⁴ The lamentation of the sixteenth-century poet, Pūntānam, about people’s greed for money is to be read in this context of increasing monetisation: ³⁵

However much wealth one has,

One’s desire is never satiated.

When you get ten [paṇams], you wish you had a hundred;

With a hundred in hand, you long for a thousand.

When you have a thousand paṇams, you think

It will be wonderful to have ten thousand!

Climbing the rope of desire,

People go up and up!

Placing these details within the perspective of the whole peninsula can be of interest. It is well known that the Vijayanagara Empire was monetised to a very high level. ³⁶ Revenue demands and collection are recorded in terms of cash and not kind, perhaps for the first time in the history of the peninsula. ³⁷ Monetary systems in South India were based solely on metals. This differed substantially from elsewhere in the subcontinent, where a variety of freely convertible metallic and non-metallic currencies were used for specialised purposes. So also, the Vijayanagara currency system had its basis in gold, unlike currencies in the North, which were based on silver. Gold coins called variously as varāha, gadyāṇa, pon or hon (of 52 grains) were the medium for tax payment and most large-volume transactions. Europeans knew of this as ‘Pagoda’. Their value approximated closely to that of other coins used in long-distance trade. ³⁸ Surgeon General George Bidie, who was also the Superintendent of Madras Museum, had noted that ‘it is a curious fact that the Venetian Sequin, which used to circulate on the Malabar Coast, and the Ducat which also found its way to Madras are very nearly of the same weight as the pagoda’. ³⁹ Evidence of the considerable foreign trade discussed above explains this and makes it less ‘curious’ than what Bidie had thought.

A coin of lower denomination was paṇam, ten of which constituted a pon. This seems to have been the medium of tax payments and other day-to-day transactions. The Vijayanagara paṇam carried only very simple die-struck designs—a fact that makes it especially hard to assign coin-finds to specific mints. The inability to identify mints is a problem of particular intensity since there are many coins that contain names of imperial officers in place of the name of the reigning monarch on their reverse sides. ⁴⁰ Another coin of a smaller denomination was the silver tāra. ⁴¹ Copper coins, too, were used in small-scale daily transactions at lower levels of societal relations as we see from the Zamorin’s records, Barbosa’s accounts and the literary texts. Panchmukhi’s study of Vijayanagara coins points in the same direction: ‘The copper issues of the Vijayanagara mint are vast and present a fertile field for the study of different types’. ⁴² Although he uses the expression ‘the Vijayanagara mint’, there were, in reality, many centres at which coins were struck, probably even by private parties, as the evidence he has himself gathered shows. ⁴³ Such a pattern of diversified and even private minting seems to have existed in precolonial Malabar. ⁴⁴ This was in contrast with the situation obtaining in the Mughal empire, which ‘could well boast of one of the finest coined currencies in the contemporary world’. ⁴⁵ Their South Indian counterparts are wanting in this discipline and uniformity. The circulation of these coins and their uses, the mints that issued them, and even their weights and types, are not studied to the extent which they deserve. Earlier numismatists and historians focussed almost exclusively on the coinage of precious metals.

A distinction has to be made when speaking about the profusion of coins and their wide currency in the sources. Coins of high denomination, such as the varāhan or Pagoda, may have been reserved for purposes of accounting, revenue assessment and transfers of huge amounts from the localities to the ‘provincial’ and ‘imperial’ capitals. They were otherwise largely units of account. Coins of lower value, often copper, were used in day-to-day transactions at the grassroots levels. So also, the entry of coined money did not mean shutting out goods-for-goods exchange. The accounts of goods-for-goods exchange contained in the Anantapuravarṇanam are relevant here. ⁴⁶ But the presence of money is felt even there, as goods were not any more exchanged arbitrarily on the basis of need and reciprocity; the value of goods was computed in a rough way in terms of money. Price in terms of money brought in the factors of profit and loss. In a comparable manner, the presence of money tended to standardise wages. Even when payments were made in kind, it was computed with reference to money. One of the possible implications of the increased use of money in transactions is a greater mobility that labour got which might have bordered on freedom. This had wider implications for understanding the nature of economy and society and has to be worked out in greater detail. It should not be taken to mean that labour was entirely freed from the fetters that it was under, and that payment of wages in grains gave way to payments in cash. Factors such as caste and social mobility limited by it have to be reckoned with in making generalisations based on this.

In this context, a word or two about commodity production will be useful. Barbosa has described in detail the different artisan castes and their activities. ⁴⁷ It has been observed that there was a steady increase in taxes other than land revenue from the middle of the fourteenth century onwards. ⁴⁸ It is obvious that this was in response to the changes that we saw in the economy. Technological innovations, especially in the cotton textile sector, among other things, underpinned tendencies towards the expansion of commodity production and a progressive expansion and intensification of circuits of exchange, clear evidence of which is on record since the mid-fourteenth century. ⁴⁹ Taxes on artisans, such as ponvargam, ponvari and svarna-dāyam, were probably assessed and even collected in gold coins while taxes such as kāśāyavargam or kāśāyakkuḍi were collected in coins of smaller denominations. ⁵⁰ Other artisan communities and service personnel were required to pay taxes on their instruments of production. For instance, an inscription from Tiruvaigavur (Papanasam taluk, Thanjavur district) dated 1429 gives a list of taxes considered to be legitimate by the iḍangai and the valangai caste clusters. These included taxes on the tools of the kanmālạr (as the blacksmiths, braziers, silversmiths, carpenters and goldsmiths were collectively known); on the potter’s wheel (tirigai-āyam) of the chief potter and so on. ⁵¹ It is impossible to make quantitative estimates of the rate of commodification in the Vijayanagara Empire in the face of a wide variety of weights and measures, differing scales of taxation and the absence of detailed surveys of cultivated land or compilations of wage rates and prices. In this connection, it is instructive to note that historians of the Mughal Empire have suggested that the commutation of taxes in kind to payments in cash implied that at least 50% of agricultural production was for sale. They have also hypothesised that given the similarity in structures of taxation on artisans, a similar proportion of craft production was also destined for sale. ⁵²

Revival and expansion of exchange networks that had been so rudely ruptured during the century of political instability following the collapse of the early medieval patterning of social relationships received a huge boost from the progressive commodification of production, assessment and collection of taxes in cash, expansion of craft production and the spread of sedentary settlements to the arid regions of the interior. ⁵³ The rise of fortified settlements and new urban centres points to this. Burton Stein noted that administrative headquarters and seats of the Nāyakas in the late medieval era rarely coincided with the primary focii of spiritual energies, unlike in the earlier period. ⁵⁴ The rise of these urban centres with but an incidental role for temples underlines a significant difference in the patterning of power relationships between the two social systems. The more centralised extraction of surplus in the latter period implied that artisans had become increasingly dependent on the patronage of imperial bureaucrats, the Nāyakas and their entourages. Inducements such as lower rates of taxation for the first few years of their relocation were a further lure for the craftsmen.

On the whole, it can be seen that many centres in South India in this period experienced brisk trade, considerable monetisation and a concomitant urban atmosphere. However, there is no way to understand the demographic pattern, a sure indicator of urbanisation, except to make guesses about the growth of the population. ⁵⁵ Rural, agrarian sentiments continued in the midst of this urban atmosphere, particularly in the world of the brāhmaṇical temples where traditions died hard. These broad patterns appear to be similar all over South India. The general pattern of economic changes in Kerala conformed to what was happening in the rest of the peninsula, even though state initiative in fiscal matters as in Vijayanagara, particularly insisting on revenue assessment and collection in cash, is not seen until about the middle of the eighteenth century. Many items of payments to the state such as tribute, as well as gifts and rewards by the king, were made in cash. Duarte Barbosa mentions the circulation of cash on a considerable scale. So also, inscriptions and literature, both indigenous and foreign in the context of Vijayanagara, ⁵⁶ bear testimony to the considerable growth of trade and craft production that the Maṇipravāḷaṃ literature refers to.

These developments, namely, the growth of trade in both quality and quantity, widespread urbanisation, extensive circulation of money, the tendency of labour to become freer, increased craft production and so on, had their implications for society, particularly in terms of their potential to a transition into another formation. This is not to insist on a deterministic course in history and look for a teleological pattern, but certain broad statements are possible. The passages are admittedly dark and need illumination with research of a more detailed nature. Interestingly, we see that much of the resources so generated went into conspicuous consumption and not investment. ⁵⁷ This was done in many ways: ostentatious constructions, generous patronage of arts and letters, elaborate feeding enterprises (annadāna) and so on—what Narayana Rao and others call a ‘profligate generosity’. Consumption itself was an investment of sorts, although it did not produce further wealth. This, among other things, prevented the accumulation of capital. Irfan Habib had observed long back that, despite many positive conditions, the potentialities of capitalist development in Mughal India were very limited. ⁵⁸ Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Christopher Bayly call the powerful administrative officials who had begun to outfit ships to trade with ports in the Persian Gulf and the eastern Indian Ocean archipelago ‘portfolio capitalists’. ⁵⁹

However, it is questionable whether there were conditions under which the market economy would cease to be non-capitalist. As Giovanni Arrighi puts it, ‘unless the state has been subordinated to their class interest, the market economy remains non-capitalist’. ⁶⁰ Whether or not one can, or has to, call what would be in store a capitalist formation, one thing is clear: changes were on the cards. The forces and processes of this transition, its character and direction as well as its causality call for detailed studies.