Mahavira and his Teaching

Author(s): C C Shah, Rishabhdas Ranka, Dalsukh Malvania
Publisher: Bhagwan Mahavir 2500th Nirvan Mahotsava Samiti

Page 275

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the temple of Pārsvanatha at Saraspur just outside Ahmedabad which had only recently been built by the Jaina banker Santi Das, one of the richest men of his age, and which by a curious chance was visited by Jean Thevenot' a qaurter of a century later (in 1666) after it had been desecrated by Aurangzeb.
R. WILLIAMS
It is desirable to look for a moment at the establishments of Indian traders to the north of the great mountain barriers, particularly in Persia and Eastern Anatolia. Though these are of very ancient date there are records of an Indian colony in Armenia before 400 A.D.2-it was under the Safawi dynasty in Iran that they were perhaps most notable. As the centre of radiation of their activity lay in Gujarat it would seem almost inevitable that Jainas should be of their number; and this is proved conclusively by the report of at least one foreign traveller.
In the middle of the seventeenth century an Englishman, Thomas Herbert was struck by the prevalence at Amol in Persia of foreign communities "Scythians, Jews, Kurds, Banyans and Indians" (what he meant by this last differentiation is not clear); and about the same time Thevenot4 calculated that there were in Isfahan more than 1500 banyans who followed no trade or calling and whose sole business lay in lending money at interest. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the French painter Corneille le Brun encountered in Isfahan banyans who take no form of life not even that of fleas and lice. And, as late as the reign of Catherine the Great of Russia, a Scots soldier of fortune in her service noted that the banyans ("a sort of pagan Indians") had a factory at Astrakhan on the north of the Black Sea.6
1. Voyages Amsterdam 1727 Vol. V p. 27.
2. Sylvain Levi in the Revue de 1 'Histoire des Religions XXIII (1896)
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pp. 45-6.
Some Years' Travels London 1665 p. 198
op. cit, Vol. III, p. 390.
Voyages en Moscovre et en Perse, Paris 1723, Vol. I, p. 251. P. H. Bruce: Memoirs of Travels, Dublin 1783, p. 299.
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