In this chapter, we explore something of the “European” impact on India
and the subcontinent’s response to it.
In the classical period, there is considerable evidence of Roman and Greek
contacts and/or influence. While the Phoenicians may have been the first
to sail to ports of India in the tenth century BCE, it was after the discovery of
the trade winds in the first century BCEthat maritime contact increased.
Greek and Roman coins of the period were left in the ports of South India
where “foreign” merchants were called yavan
̄
a ̄s.^1 The Greek influences
on the northern portions of the subcontinent were mediated through the
Persian empire at first, and then through the eastern satrapies of the Greek
empire. The Bactrian Greeks became one of the mediators of this influence.
As observed earlier, among the results of this influence were the flourishing
of new forms of anthropomorphized iconography, an increasingly sacralized
notion of kingship, even a theology that helped shape the ideas of the
Buddha in the Kus.a ̄n.as’ court and perhaps of the brahmanical deities
patronized in the subsequent “vaidika” courts.
Religious minorities
Among the early migrants into the subcontinent were three religious
streams, which became a permanent if small part of the Indian “quilt.” These
were Jews, “Syrian Christians,” and Zoroastrians or Pa ̄rsı ̄s whose story is worth
noting, even if in brief.
Jewish communities
There were at least three separate migrations of Jews into India – one group,
known as the Cochin Jews, settled in the southwestern area now referred
to as Kerala; another known as “Bene Israel” settled largely in what is now
Mumbai; the third was a small nineteenth-century migration of entre-
preneurs and their families known as Baghdadi Jews. Of the three, the first
two groups are clearly the oldest and the most striking for what they reveal
about continuities and accommodations.
“Cochin Jews”
The earliest settlements of Jews were in Cranganore on the Kerala coast. It
is possible these folks came early in the Common Era as Roman traders are
said to have referred to them. However, it is more likely most of them
came and settled around the seventh century along with Arab merchants.
These communities were primarily mercantile; indeed, their economic and
Streams from the “West” and their Aftermath 163