ABSTRACT
The point to ponder is whether there is a problem merely of the lack of data or it indicates the indifferent attitude of a traditional agrarian society to trade and traders. There are, in fact, some historians who view that trade and traders were marginal to the mainstream of agrarian socio-economic and cultural set up of traditional India. The divergent attitudes of normative treatises to trade and traders may be related to the identifiable phases of boom and slump in the history of early Indian trade. In a sharp distinction to the brahmanical treatises, there is a positive stance to trade and traders in the two major non-brahmanical relgions of India, viz., Buddhism and Jainism. The merchant in early Indian society was therefore neither an undifferentiated entity nor merely a pedlar. Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions discovered from the Red Sea area clearly record the names of merchants who undertook distant voyages across the sea.
