CDS (II) 2022 General Knowledge · Question 35 of 120

Correct — C, Guilds of Indian merchants. Both names belong to the trading corporations of peninsular India between roughly the ninth and thirteenth centuries, and both are known from inscriptions the merchants themselves put up. Nanadesi means, literally, 'of many countries' — the itinerant guild whose members traded beyond their own region and often beyond India, and which is closely associated with the Ayyavole body, the famous Five Hundred that took its name from Aiyyavole or Aihole in the Deccan. Manigramam is the other great name in the same records, attested across the Tamil country and in the Kerala copper plates, and traced by inscriptions as far as the Malay peninsula. These were not informal associations. They had their own conventions and charters, maintained armed escorts for caravans, endowed temples and irrigation works, and their inscriptions read like the minutes of a corporation rather than the acts of individual traders.

• (a)Cluster of non-revenue paying villages — That describes a land grant, and early medieval India has plenty of terms for those — brahmadeya for land given to brahmanas, devadana for land given to a temple, agrahara for a settlement of learned brahmanas. None of them is Manigramam or Nanadesi.
• (b)Village-level community groups — The right period, the wrong institution. The Chola inscriptions are full of village bodies — the ur of the ordinary village, the sabha of a brahmana settlement with its committee system, and the nagaram of a trading town. It is the nagaram that shades into commerce, but Nanadesi and Manigramam operated across regions and kingdoms, not inside one village.
• (d)Literary societies in the capital towns — There is no evidence for either name as a literary body. The famous literary assembly of Tamil tradition is the Sangam, associated with Madurai, and it belongs to a much earlier period and to legend as much as to record.

Early medieval South India ran an unusually organised long-distance trade, and the organising unit was the merchant guild. The two most cited are the Ayyavole Five Hundred, or Ainurruvar, which began at Aihole in what is now Karnataka and spread across the Deccan and beyond, and Manigramam, which is prominent in Tamil and Kerala records. Nanadesi, 'those of many lands', is the description that attaches to guilds of this itinerant kind. Their inscriptions record self-governing rules, levies collected at trade centres to fund temples and tanks, and protection arrangements that included their own fighting men. They connected the Chola and Chera coasts to Sri Lanka, Sumatra and the ports of the Malay peninsula, and to the wider Indian Ocean trade in spices, textiles, horses and gems.

The question is really a vocabulary check, and its difficulty is that all four options name real categories from the same centuries. The way through is to notice that both terms in the stem are corporate names, not descriptive ones, and to recall where each has been met — Nanadesi almost always in the company of Ayyavole, Manigramam almost always in a coastal or overseas context. If neither rings a bell, the elimination still works: land grants and village assemblies have their own well-known Sanskrit and Tamil vocabulary, and a literary society would not be named in a trade inscription. The tested point sits inside a larger theme that UPSC returns to often, the connection between temple, town and trade in the Chola period, so it is worth learning the whole vocabulary set rather than the two words.

• Nanadesi means 'of many countries' and describes the itinerant merchant guilds of early medieval South India.
• Manigramam is a merchant corporation attested in Tamil and Kerala inscriptions and traced overseas into South-East Asia.
• The Ayyavole Five Hundred, or Ainurruvar, was the most powerful of these guilds and took its name from Aihole.
• Anjuvannam is the other body named alongside them in Kerala records, associated with West Asian traders.
• Village and town assemblies of the same period carry different names — ur for the ordinary village, sabha for a brahmana settlement, nagaram for a trading town.

• Reading Manigramam as a village name because of the -gramam ending; it is the name of a corporation of merchants.
• Mixing merchant guilds with village assemblies, which are the other great subject of Chola inscriptions.
• Assuming these were purely Tamil bodies; the Ayyavole guild began in the Deccan and the network reached South-East Asia.

As a term-identification item, or folded into a statements question on the merchant guilds of South India and their reach.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The merchant guild known as the Ayyavole Five Hundred, prominent in early medieval South India, took its name from a town in which present-day State?

  • (a)Tamil Nadu
  • (b)Kerala
  • (c)Karnataka
  • (d)Andhra Pradesh

  Answer(c) Karnataka — from Aihole, in the Deccan country of the Chalukyas.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In Chola inscriptions, the assembly of a brahmana settlement, which ran its affairs through committees, was called the

  • (a)ur
  • (b)sabha
  • (c)nagaram
  • (d)nadu

  Answer(b) sabha — the ur was the assembly of an ordinary village and the nagaram that of a trading town.