On Gauhati, The "Cow Market"

The North-Eastern part of India is commonly perceived to be underdeveloped and poor, incapable of entering the globalized market economy.

However, the name of the biggest city of the area, Gauhati, translates to “cow market.”

(I must thank my reader Salil for pointing this out, in a comment to an earlier post on Assam.)

The idea of a major “cow market” fits in neatly with Carl Menger’s theory of the origin of money (pdf here, scroll down to chapter 8) wherein he writes of cattle being money in ancient times. In his own words:

In the earliest periods of economic development, cattle seem to have been the most saleable commodity among most peoples of the ancient world. Domestic animals constituted the chief item of the wealth of every individual among nomads and peoples passing from a nomadic economy to agriculture. Their marketability extended literally to all economizing individuals, and the lack of artificial roads combined with the fact that cattle transported themselves (almost without cost in the primitive stages of civilization!) to make them saleable over a wider geographical area than most other commodities. A number of circumstances, moreover, favored broad quantitative and temporal limits to their marketability.

A cow is a commodity of considerable durability. Its cost of maintenance is insignificant where pastures are available in abundance and where the animals are kept under the open sky. And in a culture in which everyone attempts to possess as large herds as possible, cattle are usually not brought to market in excessive quantities at any one time. In the period of which I am speaking, there was no similar juncture of circumstances establishing as broad a range of marketability for any other commodity. If we add to these circumstances the fact that trade in domestic animals was at least as well developed as trade in any other commodity, cattle appear to have been the most saleable of all available commodities and hence the natural money of the peoples of the ancient world.

The trade and commerce of the most cultured people of the ancient world, the Greeks, whose stages of development history has revealed to us in fairly distinct outlines, showed no trace of coined money even as late as the time of Homer. Barter still prevailed, and wealth consisted of herds of cattle. Payments were made in cattle. Prices were reckoned in cattle. And cattle were used for the payment of fines. Even Draco imposed fines in cattle, and the practice was not abandoned until Solon converted them, apparently because they had outlived their usefulness, into metallic money at the rate of one drachma for a sheep and five drachmae for a cow. Even more distinctly than with the Greeks, traces of cattle-money can be recognized in the case of the cattle breeding ancestors of the peoples of the Italian peninsula.

Until very late, cattle and, next to them sheep, formed the means of exchange among the Romans. Their earliest legal penalties were cattle fines (imposed in cattle and sheep) which appear still in the lex Aternia Tarpeia of the year 454 B.C., and were only converted to coined money 24 years later.

(I recommend you read the entire chapter.)

Thus, ancient Gauhati must have been a thriving centre of commerce, not very different from Greece and Rome. As with Greece and Rome, cattle owners from all over travelled to Gauhati to make their exchanges. It was not “Assam for the Assamese”; rather, Gauhati must have been an open market for all “friendly strangers.”

If that is the past, we have an idea for the future.

Incidentally, the “Go” in “Goa” also means “cow”: Goa was a land rich in cows, which were money. Also note how “gau” is phonetically similar to the word “cow.”

A history of Goa I just read says that the ancient markets were visited by Arabs, Jews, Christians, Jains, and Buddhists, apart from the Hindus.

The same must be true of ancient Gauhati, which must have attracted tribesmen from all over. Even the Ahoms came from Thailand, I am told.

So I must repeat the point I made earlier: That the “Assam for the Assamese” movement goes against the interests of the North-East economy. In the end, it is like the MNS call for a Mumbai for Maharashtrians alone – the Marathi manoos. The All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) and the Asom Gana Porishad (AGP) need to review their xenophobic ideology. It is interesting that the AGP is an ally of the BJP.

For the success of any market, it must be open to all those who seek to trade. This was the past. This must be the future.