The Parsi Connection with China and Its Role in the Making of Modern India

 

Valedictory Address for Threads of Continuity

 

By Amitav Ghosh, well-known author

 

 

 

India and China have been exchanging goods, ideas and technologies for millennia – the Parsis played a vital role, not only in this trade but also in cultural exchanges as they were by far the most numerous of the subcontinental merchants who actually traveled to China with their goods and took to the seaborne China trade much earlier than the other merchant communities. The China trade led directly to the foundation of many important Parsi business houses, most significantly that of the Tatas. But the China trade also provided the Parsis with resources of another kind: what we might call cultural capital. In many ways the China trade was the crucible of modern Parsi experience. In this sense it was also a vital element in an enterprise in which the Parsis played an enormously important role: the shaping of modern India