Q1.
Do you remember studying about the Silk Route in Grade 7? How was India connected with it? Can you recollect China's contact with India with reference to Buddhism that you studied in Grade 7?
Answer
(a) What this chapter tells you about the Silk Route. Three facts, and they are the frame for everything else:
- Silk was known to the Chinese from the Neolithic period (4000–3000 BCE) and 'became an important craft during the Bronze Age' — so it was a Chinese product for thousands of years before it became an export.
- Around the 2nd century BCE, during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), silk became a major item of external trade.
- It became so important that 'the entire route on which it was traded came to be known as the Silk Route' — the road is named after the cargo.
(b) How India was connected with it. India was not at one end of the route; it was in the middle of it, and connected in three ways:
| Connection | What it meant |
|---|---|
| Overland, through the north-west | Branches of the route ran through the passes of the north-west into the plains of the subcontinent, linking Indian towns to the Central Asian trunk road |
| By sea | Indian ports on both coasts joined the route to the maritime trade of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. This chapter shows how old that habit was — the Harappan dockyard at Lothal and the sea trade with Magan and Dilmun (Fig. 4.26) belong to the same tradition, thousands of years earlier |
| As a supplier, not only a passage | Indian goods travelled the route in both directions — spices, cotton textiles, precious and semiprecious stones. Notice that the Harappans were already exporting 'semiprecious stone beads, ivory, timber, gold dust' westward by the third millennium BCE |
(c) China's contact with India, and Buddhism. This is the part of the Silk Route story that matters most, because it shows that a trade road carries more than trade:
- Buddhism travelled from India to China along these routes. It began in India and spread outward with travellers, traders and monks who used the same roads and passes that the caravans used.
- Monks and pilgrims travelled in both directions. Chinese pilgrims came to India to study at its monasteries and to collect Buddhist texts, and carried them home. Indian teachers went the other way.
- Texts were translated. Buddhist works were rendered from Indian languages into Chinese — an enormous scholarly effort spread over centuries.
- Art and architecture moved with the ideas. Cave monasteries, sculpture and painting along the route carry Indian forms adapted to local traditions.
The idea worth carrying away. A trade route is also an idea route. The same road that moved silk east to west moved a religion west to east, and moved writing, techniques and stories in both directions. This chapter shows the earlier version of exactly the same thing: Sargon's tablets record cargo, but they also record that Mesopotamians knew there were people called Meluhha living far to the east. Contact begins with goods and does not stop there.
Check it yourself: take an outline map of Asia and draw the Silk Route from China westward. Then mark, on the same map, the Harappan sea route of Fig. 4.26 — Lothal and Dholavira to Magan (Oman), Dilmun (Bahrain) and Ur. Two networks, roughly two thousand years apart, linking the same broad regions. Long-distance exchange between India and the west is not a late development; it is one of the oldest things in this chapter.