About the Book
Even in ancient India, money is always a good
thing and everyone wants it. The stories in The Mouse Merchant -selected from the Sanskrit universe, from the period of
the late Rig Veda to the twelfth
century-tell us how money was dealt with in everyday life in ancient and
medieval Indian society. At the heart of these tales is the merchant. Sometimes
gullible, sometimes greedy ; ingenious at some moments. dim-witted at others;
and hopelessly in love with courtesans but also loyal to their wives, our
merchant heroes show how innovation in business is sometimes more important
than capital. The Mouse Merchant puts these
stories into the context of Indian business history, giving not
only rare insights into the romance of the ancient seafaring life but also great
wisdom about money.
About the Author
Arshia
Sattar teaches classical Indian literatures at various institutions all over
India. Her acclaimed English translations all over India. Her acclaimed English
translations of Valmiki's Ramayana and the Kathasaritsagara are Penguin
Classics. She has a PhD from the Department of South Asian Languages and
Civilization at the University of Chicago, and her areas of interest are Indian
epics, mythology and the story traditions of the subcontinent.
Gurcharan
Das is a world renowned author, commentator and public intellectual. His
bestselling books Include India Unbound and The Difficulty of Being Good. His
latest book, India Grows at Night, was published in 2012. A graduate of Harvard
University, Das was CEO of Procter & Gamble India before he took early
retirement to become a full-time writer. He lives in Delhi.
Foreword
Most cultures have looked down on the making of
money. This isn't surprising as moneymaking emerged from within settled
agricultural communities whose material life was relentlessly cyclical. Any
change in the seasons of planting and harvesting threatened survival. Hence,
people tended to be conservative, and suspicious of change and of anyone
different, especially an outsider. The merchant was especially distrusted
because his life entailed something new-travel, risk-taking and innovation.
People marvelled at the novelty of his life, combined with envy at his ability
to grow rich beyond measure without producing anything tangible or having to
toil under the sun. Not surprisingly, his wealth was not matched by social
acceptance until recent times. No wonder the merchant has been a subversive
figure in history.
Set against this background, Arshia Sattar's
marvellous book is like a fresh breeze. She has translated Sanskrit stories
from ancient and medieval India, which offer a nice corrective to the universal
prejudice against the merchant. They present a profoundly human and usually
sympathetic picture of his trade. Our merchant heroes are sometimes gullible,
sometimes greedy; at moments ingenious, but dim-witted at others;
and hopelessly in love with courtesans but also loyal to their wives. There are
honest and dishonest merchants; extravagant and ascetic ones. Above all, the
merchant is a full-blooded person with agency; not the stereotype of prejudice
to whom even the great William Shakespeare succumbed in The Merchant of Venice.
Most of these stories unabashedly celebrate
money. 'To have money is to have life,' proclaims Sanudasa, when he discovers
the pearls he had hidden in the topknot of his hair before he was shipwrecked.
In the Panchatantra, there is a
remarkable conversation among four brahmin friends in which the unanimous
conclusion emerges: 'Let the sole aim be, of men of sense to make money.'
In another account from the same text, even the
corpse seems to prefer death to poverty. 'A man is better dead than poor,' is
the corpse's silent answer to a destitute, weary man Further on, the text
teaches us that wealth 'can be acquired is six ways, as follows: by begging,
serving kings, farming teaching, money lending and trade'. After reviewing the
pro: and cons of each alternative, it is concluded that trade is best suited
for the acquisition of wealth because it provides the maximum
autonomy to an individual.
Despite this uninhibited praise for money and
trade, India': society was also agricultural and conservative, but it found;
rightful place for the trader within the hierarchy of caste and wealth.
While it accepted the vaishya as 'twice-born' and 0 high
caste, it placed him in the third station in the social pecking order, behind
the brahmin (the 'priest') and the kshatriya (the 'landowner', 'warrior'). Pre-modern
India was also one of the greatest storytelling cultures of the world and its
stories naturally reflect its values. Arshia Sattar has chosen stories related
to artha ('wealth' or
'material well-being'), which is one of the four classical aims of the Hindu
life. Not only do her stories reveal Indian society's attitude to the merchant
but also the merchant's attitude to money. While entertaining us with the
romance of the merchant's seafaring life, the stories offer great wisdom about
money.
The goal of artha, however, quickly hit a wall, against another
imperative of life, dharma ('moral
well-being'), the moral dimension of business and political life. Should one
unscrupulously pursue wealth and power, or does real success come from ethical
conduct? Mostly, the classical goal of dharma seems to trump artha in the stories-there is a right and a wrong way to
make money. But there are other downsides to artha. One of these, as the Panchatantra points out, is what is today called the problem of
'work-life balance':
A man preoccupied by the need for wealth
Gives up values, forsakes his family,
Abandons his mother and the land of birth,
Leaves his own place disadvantageous,
And quickly goes to foreign place;
What else?
There are always trade-offs in life. While you can
make lots of money travelling far and wide, you must be prepared to give up the
mundane pleasures of domesticity. The stories bring out other ambiguities of
the human condition-there are no easy answers.
A tradition that celebrates artha-'money is a good thing and everybody wants it,' as Arshia
Sattar puts it-also had to cope with another ideal. Early on in the development
of Indian society, from the time of the Upanishads, Buddhism and Jainism, there emerged an ascetic streak.
The sannyasi (the 'renouncer')
became a dramatic hero in saffron robes, who posed a challenge to the
traditional, secular order and its thinking about the good life. He created
ambivalence about money, in particular, and it has continued to the present
day. The brahmin, in any case, had always been in two minds about money, but he
could not speak out against it as he depended on the wealthy patrons.
The kshatriya had also mainly valued action in
war and aristocratic idleness in peace, and scorned the life of daily toil. In recent times, Marxist influences in
India have added to the ambivalence. With its antipathy to private property,
Marxism tried to convince us that the bourgeois trader was an exploiter. These
prejudices came together in the post- Independence generation of Jawaharlal
Nehru, who combined the high brahminical with the English upper-class Fabian
scorn for money, and institutionalized the most rigid socialist controls over
business between 1950 and 1990-a period also known as the 'Licence Raj'.
Only after the reforms of 1991 did India begin to lose its hypocritical attitude, and two decades later, it seems to have returned to its ancient uninhibited attitude to wealth and the celebration of artha as a legitimate goal of life. Business schools have mushroomed across the land, and many of the stories that Arshia Sattar has translated could form the basis of entertaining, edifying case material for instruction In classrooms.
Introduction
This volume consists of stories, poems and
extracts from the Sanskrit universe-a universe which, for this collection of
tales, spans the Vedas, the epics,
drama and the secular storytelling traditions. The stories here cover more than
a millennium: from the period of the late Rig Veda to that grand twelfth-century compendium of wondrous
tales, the Kathasaritsagara. Not all the stories
are about business practices or traditional commerce, but all the stories are
about money-the way money and responses to it are depicted in Sanskrit
literature, which must be related to the way money was dealt with in real life.
While the individual pieces vary enormously in terms of when they were written
and the texts from which they are taken, the extracts here share one crucial
idea without exception: money is a good thing and everybody wants it.
For all the important strands within Hinduism
that reject the acquisition of wealth and worldliness, there are equally robust
strands of Hinduism that understand how money works and revel in all that
wealth can do. This is a culture that has both a god and a goddess of wealth.
Kubera, the god of wealth, an essentially chthonic deity, appears in later
Buddhist and Jain pantheons as well-perhaps reflecting the movement of the
ascetic religions' followers towards trading as a profession. Kubera is the
Lord, the owner of all the wealth imaginable in the three worlds. Despite not
being worshipped as other divine and semi-divine figures are, Kubera remains a
positive figure, never generating the kind of ambivalence that Mammon, for
example, does. In Hinduism, conventional worship is reserved for the goddess of
wealth, Lakshmi (or Shri). Lakshmi nominally remains the consort of Vishnu in
her aspect as the goddess of wealth, but she functions more or less
independently as one who blesses her supplicants with material prosperity.
We can argue that artha has always been a Hindu value, at times elevated, at
other times scorned. For the most part, however, it remains rather close to the
core of a Hindu way of life, even when it is rejected entirely (as by the ideal
of sannyasa) or when it is
confined to a certain period in a man's life (grihasthashrama). And so it must be that this collection of
literary fragments speaks more from texts that either revel in the pleasures
that money can buy, or from texts that watch what money can do with a superior,
withering gaze.
THE TEXTS
The Vedas
The Vedas, composed
over many centuries from about the twelfth century BCE onwards,
are the first outpouring of literary expression from the subcontinent to which
we have access. Over the millennia, they have become the foundational texts of
the religion that we now call Hinduism. In and of themselves, the Vedas contain many emotions: from creatureliness and
supplication to arrogance and bravado, from contemplative quietude to anxious
pleading. There are also myths and stories of adventure and conquest; even of
love. The verse compositions in the Vedas (and I
will restrict myself from here on to talking only about the Rig Veda) are commonly called 'hymns', but given the range of
situations and moods they encompass, I would rather think of them as 'poems',
most of which are addressed to the gods. In their fullness, the Vedas provide us with a nuanced and complex view of the
world and of the human condition. The Hindu tradition has chosen to focus on
the more esoteric and philosophical poems in the Vedas, while ignoring the ones which are overtly
materialistic and acquisitive. There is much in the Vedas to delight us, and for me, the more richly observed
and depicted universe they contain is far more enchanting than the
unidimensional one that has come to dominate ideas of ancient Hindu belief.
In early Rig Vedic compositions, the gods are
asked for many things: freedom from fear as one walks in the forests, a good
night's sleep, wealth measured in heroic sons, and also and equally
importantly, wealth measured in horses and cows. The Rig Veda has given us some of the purest and most inspiring
expressions of an uplifting spirituality, but it also reveals a human world
where wealth is recognized and validated. Moreover, wealth is craved and sought
after-if you don't have it or can't get it by your own efforts, you ask the
gods to help you. The Rig Veda is
represented in this collection of tales by 'The Gambler's Lament', a most
unexpected and deeply moving 'prayer' to the dice. As I suggest above, we may
struggle to think of this as a hymn in the strict sense of word. The power that
is being beseeched for help and protection is not a conventional deity; the man
who begs for help is not someone that we would automatically identify with.
Nonetheless, it is a very early expression of how people on the subcontinent
thought about money, its place in their lives and what poverty means in a
society that has not yet learned to valorize the renunciant.
Contents
Foreword |
ix |
Translator's Note |
xxiii |
Introduction |
1 |
SECTION I: CLEVER WIVES |
|
The Story of Kirtisena |
35 |
Upakosha and Her Suitors |
45 |
The Unfaithful Wife |
51 |
SECTION II: COURTESANS |
|
How a Courtesan Should Handle Money |
55 |
The Gentleman's Life |
58 |
The Courtesan Who Fell in Love |
64 |
The Courtesan's Tricks |
73 |
SECTION III: GAMBLERS |
|
The Gambler's Lament |
85 |
The Dice Game |
88 |
The Gambler and the Gods |
95 |
SECTION IV: POVERTY |
|
Charudatta's Lament |
107 |
How to Seek a Fortune: Part One |
111 |
How to Seek a Fortune: Part Two |
116 |
The Image of Poverty |
120 |
SECTION V: THIEVES |
|
The Merchant and the Bandits |
125 |
The Man Who Outsmarted Himself |
126 |
The Miser and His Kheer |
128 |
The Merchant and the Dry Tank |
130 |
SECTION VI: WHAT A MERCHANT NEEDS FOR HIS BUSINESS TO SUCCEED |
|
The Mouse Merchant |
135 |
The Mice That Ate Iron |
137 |
Ayodhya |
139 |
King Vikrama and the Mendicant |
143 |
SECTION VII: THE SANUDASA CYCLE |
|
The Travels of Sanudasa the Merchant |
153 |
Copyright
Acknowledgements |
193 |
About the Book
Even in ancient India, money is always a good
thing and everyone wants it. The stories in The Mouse Merchant -selected from the Sanskrit universe, from the period of
the late Rig Veda to the twelfth
century-tell us how money was dealt with in everyday life in ancient and
medieval Indian society. At the heart of these tales is the merchant. Sometimes
gullible, sometimes greedy ; ingenious at some moments. dim-witted at others;
and hopelessly in love with courtesans but also loyal to their wives, our
merchant heroes show how innovation in business is sometimes more important
than capital. The Mouse Merchant puts these
stories into the context of Indian business history, giving not
only rare insights into the romance of the ancient seafaring life but also great
wisdom about money.
About the Author
Arshia
Sattar teaches classical Indian literatures at various institutions all over
India. Her acclaimed English translations all over India. Her acclaimed English
translations of Valmiki's Ramayana and the Kathasaritsagara are Penguin
Classics. She has a PhD from the Department of South Asian Languages and
Civilization at the University of Chicago, and her areas of interest are Indian
epics, mythology and the story traditions of the subcontinent.
Gurcharan
Das is a world renowned author, commentator and public intellectual. His
bestselling books Include India Unbound and The Difficulty of Being Good. His
latest book, India Grows at Night, was published in 2012. A graduate of Harvard
University, Das was CEO of Procter & Gamble India before he took early
retirement to become a full-time writer. He lives in Delhi.
Foreword
Most cultures have looked down on the making of
money. This isn't surprising as moneymaking emerged from within settled
agricultural communities whose material life was relentlessly cyclical. Any
change in the seasons of planting and harvesting threatened survival. Hence,
people tended to be conservative, and suspicious of change and of anyone
different, especially an outsider. The merchant was especially distrusted
because his life entailed something new-travel, risk-taking and innovation.
People marvelled at the novelty of his life, combined with envy at his ability
to grow rich beyond measure without producing anything tangible or having to
toil under the sun. Not surprisingly, his wealth was not matched by social
acceptance until recent times. No wonder the merchant has been a subversive
figure in history.
Set against this background, Arshia Sattar's
marvellous book is like a fresh breeze. She has translated Sanskrit stories
from ancient and medieval India, which offer a nice corrective to the universal
prejudice against the merchant. They present a profoundly human and usually
sympathetic picture of his trade. Our merchant heroes are sometimes gullible,
sometimes greedy; at moments ingenious, but dim-witted at others;
and hopelessly in love with courtesans but also loyal to their wives. There are
honest and dishonest merchants; extravagant and ascetic ones. Above all, the
merchant is a full-blooded person with agency; not the stereotype of prejudice
to whom even the great William Shakespeare succumbed in The Merchant of Venice.
Most of these stories unabashedly celebrate
money. 'To have money is to have life,' proclaims Sanudasa, when he discovers
the pearls he had hidden in the topknot of his hair before he was shipwrecked.
In the Panchatantra, there is a
remarkable conversation among four brahmin friends in which the unanimous
conclusion emerges: 'Let the sole aim be, of men of sense to make money.'
In another account from the same text, even the
corpse seems to prefer death to poverty. 'A man is better dead than poor,' is
the corpse's silent answer to a destitute, weary man Further on, the text
teaches us that wealth 'can be acquired is six ways, as follows: by begging,
serving kings, farming teaching, money lending and trade'. After reviewing the
pro: and cons of each alternative, it is concluded that trade is best suited
for the acquisition of wealth because it provides the maximum
autonomy to an individual.
Despite this uninhibited praise for money and
trade, India': society was also agricultural and conservative, but it found;
rightful place for the trader within the hierarchy of caste and wealth.
While it accepted the vaishya as 'twice-born' and 0 high
caste, it placed him in the third station in the social pecking order, behind
the brahmin (the 'priest') and the kshatriya (the 'landowner', 'warrior'). Pre-modern
India was also one of the greatest storytelling cultures of the world and its
stories naturally reflect its values. Arshia Sattar has chosen stories related
to artha ('wealth' or
'material well-being'), which is one of the four classical aims of the Hindu
life. Not only do her stories reveal Indian society's attitude to the merchant
but also the merchant's attitude to money. While entertaining us with the
romance of the merchant's seafaring life, the stories offer great wisdom about
money.
The goal of artha, however, quickly hit a wall, against another
imperative of life, dharma ('moral
well-being'), the moral dimension of business and political life. Should one
unscrupulously pursue wealth and power, or does real success come from ethical
conduct? Mostly, the classical goal of dharma seems to trump artha in the stories-there is a right and a wrong way to
make money. But there are other downsides to artha. One of these, as the Panchatantra points out, is what is today called the problem of
'work-life balance':
A man preoccupied by the need for wealth
Gives up values, forsakes his family,
Abandons his mother and the land of birth,
Leaves his own place disadvantageous,
And quickly goes to foreign place;
What else?
There are always trade-offs in life. While you can
make lots of money travelling far and wide, you must be prepared to give up the
mundane pleasures of domesticity. The stories bring out other ambiguities of
the human condition-there are no easy answers.
A tradition that celebrates artha-'money is a good thing and everybody wants it,' as Arshia
Sattar puts it-also had to cope with another ideal. Early on in the development
of Indian society, from the time of the Upanishads, Buddhism and Jainism, there emerged an ascetic streak.
The sannyasi (the 'renouncer')
became a dramatic hero in saffron robes, who posed a challenge to the
traditional, secular order and its thinking about the good life. He created
ambivalence about money, in particular, and it has continued to the present
day. The brahmin, in any case, had always been in two minds about money, but he
could not speak out against it as he depended on the wealthy patrons.
The kshatriya had also mainly valued action in
war and aristocratic idleness in peace, and scorned the life of daily toil. In recent times, Marxist influences in
India have added to the ambivalence. With its antipathy to private property,
Marxism tried to convince us that the bourgeois trader was an exploiter. These
prejudices came together in the post- Independence generation of Jawaharlal
Nehru, who combined the high brahminical with the English upper-class Fabian
scorn for money, and institutionalized the most rigid socialist controls over
business between 1950 and 1990-a period also known as the 'Licence Raj'.
Only after the reforms of 1991 did India begin to lose its hypocritical attitude, and two decades later, it seems to have returned to its ancient uninhibited attitude to wealth and the celebration of artha as a legitimate goal of life. Business schools have mushroomed across the land, and many of the stories that Arshia Sattar has translated could form the basis of entertaining, edifying case material for instruction In classrooms.
Introduction
This volume consists of stories, poems and
extracts from the Sanskrit universe-a universe which, for this collection of
tales, spans the Vedas, the epics,
drama and the secular storytelling traditions. The stories here cover more than
a millennium: from the period of the late Rig Veda to that grand twelfth-century compendium of wondrous
tales, the Kathasaritsagara. Not all the stories
are about business practices or traditional commerce, but all the stories are
about money-the way money and responses to it are depicted in Sanskrit
literature, which must be related to the way money was dealt with in real life.
While the individual pieces vary enormously in terms of when they were written
and the texts from which they are taken, the extracts here share one crucial
idea without exception: money is a good thing and everybody wants it.
For all the important strands within Hinduism
that reject the acquisition of wealth and worldliness, there are equally robust
strands of Hinduism that understand how money works and revel in all that
wealth can do. This is a culture that has both a god and a goddess of wealth.
Kubera, the god of wealth, an essentially chthonic deity, appears in later
Buddhist and Jain pantheons as well-perhaps reflecting the movement of the
ascetic religions' followers towards trading as a profession. Kubera is the
Lord, the owner of all the wealth imaginable in the three worlds. Despite not
being worshipped as other divine and semi-divine figures are, Kubera remains a
positive figure, never generating the kind of ambivalence that Mammon, for
example, does. In Hinduism, conventional worship is reserved for the goddess of
wealth, Lakshmi (or Shri). Lakshmi nominally remains the consort of Vishnu in
her aspect as the goddess of wealth, but she functions more or less
independently as one who blesses her supplicants with material prosperity.
We can argue that artha has always been a Hindu value, at times elevated, at
other times scorned. For the most part, however, it remains rather close to the
core of a Hindu way of life, even when it is rejected entirely (as by the ideal
of sannyasa) or when it is
confined to a certain period in a man's life (grihasthashrama). And so it must be that this collection of
literary fragments speaks more from texts that either revel in the pleasures
that money can buy, or from texts that watch what money can do with a superior,
withering gaze.
THE TEXTS
The Vedas
The Vedas, composed
over many centuries from about the twelfth century BCE onwards,
are the first outpouring of literary expression from the subcontinent to which
we have access. Over the millennia, they have become the foundational texts of
the religion that we now call Hinduism. In and of themselves, the Vedas contain many emotions: from creatureliness and
supplication to arrogance and bravado, from contemplative quietude to anxious
pleading. There are also myths and stories of adventure and conquest; even of
love. The verse compositions in the Vedas (and I
will restrict myself from here on to talking only about the Rig Veda) are commonly called 'hymns', but given the range of
situations and moods they encompass, I would rather think of them as 'poems',
most of which are addressed to the gods. In their fullness, the Vedas provide us with a nuanced and complex view of the
world and of the human condition. The Hindu tradition has chosen to focus on
the more esoteric and philosophical poems in the Vedas, while ignoring the ones which are overtly
materialistic and acquisitive. There is much in the Vedas to delight us, and for me, the more richly observed
and depicted universe they contain is far more enchanting than the
unidimensional one that has come to dominate ideas of ancient Hindu belief.
In early Rig Vedic compositions, the gods are
asked for many things: freedom from fear as one walks in the forests, a good
night's sleep, wealth measured in heroic sons, and also and equally
importantly, wealth measured in horses and cows. The Rig Veda has given us some of the purest and most inspiring
expressions of an uplifting spirituality, but it also reveals a human world
where wealth is recognized and validated. Moreover, wealth is craved and sought
after-if you don't have it or can't get it by your own efforts, you ask the
gods to help you. The Rig Veda is
represented in this collection of tales by 'The Gambler's Lament', a most
unexpected and deeply moving 'prayer' to the dice. As I suggest above, we may
struggle to think of this as a hymn in the strict sense of word. The power that
is being beseeched for help and protection is not a conventional deity; the man
who begs for help is not someone that we would automatically identify with.
Nonetheless, it is a very early expression of how people on the subcontinent
thought about money, its place in their lives and what poverty means in a
society that has not yet learned to valorize the renunciant.
Contents
Foreword |
ix |
Translator's Note |
xxiii |
Introduction |
1 |
SECTION I: CLEVER WIVES |
|
The Story of Kirtisena |
35 |
Upakosha and Her Suitors |
45 |
The Unfaithful Wife |
51 |
SECTION II: COURTESANS |
|
How a Courtesan Should Handle Money |
55 |
The Gentleman's Life |
58 |
The Courtesan Who Fell in Love |
64 |
The Courtesan's Tricks |
73 |
SECTION III: GAMBLERS |
|
The Gambler's Lament |
85 |
The Dice Game |
88 |
The Gambler and the Gods |
95 |
SECTION IV: POVERTY |
|
Charudatta's Lament |
107 |
How to Seek a Fortune: Part One |
111 |
How to Seek a Fortune: Part Two |
116 |
The Image of Poverty |
120 |
SECTION V: THIEVES |
|
The Merchant and the Bandits |
125 |
The Man Who Outsmarted Himself |
126 |
The Miser and His Kheer |
128 |
The Merchant and the Dry Tank |
130 |
SECTION VI: WHAT A MERCHANT NEEDS FOR HIS BUSINESS TO SUCCEED |
|
The Mouse Merchant |
135 |
The Mice That Ate Iron |
137 |
Ayodhya |
139 |
King Vikrama and the Mendicant |
143 |
SECTION VII: THE SANUDASA CYCLE |
|
The Travels of Sanudasa the Merchant |
153 |
Copyright
Acknowledgements |
193 |