Temples as Arteries of Trade and Economic Interaction: A Case Study of the Gurjara-Pratihara Temples of North India

Religious structures in India were almost always built along or close to trade routes. One of the main reasons for this was the use of sites of religious importance as a place to stay and as makeshift banks by ancient traders, similar to how the caravanserais came to be used in late Medieval times and Mughal India (cf. Frankopan 2015: 52 ; Sharma 2010: 283). Religious sites, thus, became arteries of trade, where traders could deposit and withdraw money in lieu of traditional bills of exchange called hundis, especially if they were travelling long distances and found it difficult to carry cash. As a result, constructing temples has been favoured in several ancient Indian treatises, including the Arthashastra, which advises rulers to invest in building and commissioning temples along the major routes. With this hypothesis, which has been stated by several scholars of Ancient and Early Medieval India (cf. Thapar 2004; Frankopan 2015:52), this research is based on the survey of twelve such temples attributed to the Gurjara Pratihara Dynasty of North India (circa 8th to 12th century CE). It seeks to evaluate whether this hypothesis was actually true for all religious sites. It also seeks to place these temples along the trade routes of Ancient India to establish whether sufficient archaeological evidence exists to assert that temples served as points of economic and social contact in Early Medieval India. For the purpose of this paper, the sites were surveyed, documented and studied in juxtaposition to ancient records of trade routes for a period of four years and its results shall be discussed in detail in this paper.