Number of words: 417

While all the commercial communities of western India were involved in the China trade, the Parsi role in it was, in one significant respect, different from that of the other groups. Generally speaking. the involvement of Indian merchants in dispatching goods to China did not extend beyond the coast: for some Hindu commercial castes, in fact, there were prohibitions on crossing the sea, and those who violated them would either lose caste or have to go through elaborate purification rituals. So, instead of travelling to China themselves, these merchants would consign their goods to agents or agency houses’ with representatives in Guangzhou. who were experienced in conducting trade with the Chinese. The agents would carry the goods to China and bring back the returns in exchange for a percentage of the profits. This was known as the consignment system and the majority of Indian consignment agencies were run by Parsis, who generally charged less than the big British and American firms like Jardine Matheson & Co. or Russell & Co. This allowed many small speculators in Bombay to participate in the opium trade: [Every cooks servant labourer speculating in this drug. Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy complained in 1845, ‘some of them making handsome profits”

So broad based was the participation in Bombay’s opium trade that in 1842 no less than 163 individuals and firms petitioned the colonial government for a share of the reparations that China was forced to pay after the end of the First Opium War. Of these petitioners, as Madhavi Thampi and Shalini Saksena point out in their excellent study, China and the Making of Bombay, ‘less than one-third were Parsis, while the rest, judging from the names, appear to be Jains or Marwaris and other Hindus.”

The distinctiveness of the Parsi role in the opium trade, then, lay in the fact that they accounted for the majority of the non-Western merchants who were present in Guangzhou in the years before the First Opium War. At times they even outnumbered merchants of other nationalities. In 1831, for instance, there were forty-one Parsis in Guangzhou’s Foreign Enclave, as against thirty-two English and twenty-one American merchants.” Thus, inasmuch as the Indo- Chinese relationship had a human face in the nineteenth century, that face belonged to the Parsis. This is why they are one of the few groups in the subcontinent to retain a vivid collective memory of the China connection.

Excerpted from Pages 142 to 144 of Smoke And Ashes: A Journey Through Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh