Introduction: strategic location and regional power

The previous chapter looked at peripatetic ethnicities that moved across considerable distances; we now turn to a much more localised exemplar of the same processes. Immediately east of the coastal plain that stretches south from the gulf of Cambay is a triangular knot of difficult mountains through which the Narmada and Tapti cut their way to the sea at the important harbours of Bharuch and Surat respectively. East of the mountains lies more open country, long the seat of established agrarian regimes which needed access to the seaports and trade of the Indian Ocean and which also needed, therefore, to maintain transit through the forests and mountains. But if these forested hills were an obstacle from one point of view, they were a resource from another: they could be strongholds, bases and customs posts, and in their recesses grew the great timbers needed for mansions and ships. Not surprisingly, therefore, the expansion of trade in the Indian Ocean region in the early centuries of the current era was accompanied by settlement and stateformation. Cave-shrines began to be excavated at suitable locations for holy men to take their cut from the tolls and booty, and villages granted to Brahmans – for example, Pimpalner in western Khandesh granted by a Chalukya king in 377–8 CE.