Part 4.1 - Market town and Bazars of ancient India

Food-stuffs for the towns were apparently brought only to the gates, while workshop and bazar occupied, to a large extent at least, their own special streets within. Thus there was a fishmonger’s village at a gate of Sāvatthi, green-grocery is sold at the four gates of Uttara-Pāñcāla, and venison at the cross-roads (singhaṭaka) outside Benares. The slaughter-houses (suna) mentioned in the Vinaya were presumably outside. The great city of Mithilā was, according to the Mahāumagga Jātaka, composed in part of four suburbs extending beyond each of its four gates, and called not gāmas, but nigamas. These were named respectively

East, South, West, and North Yavamajjhako, ‘market-town’ . The workshop in the street was open to view, so that the Bhikkhu coming in to town or village for alms, could see fletcher and carriage-builder at work, no less than he could watch the peasant in the field. Arrows and carriages and other articles for sale were displayed in the āpaṇa (fixed shop) or, it might be, within the antarāpaṇa (stored). In these, or in the portable stock-in-trade of the hawker', retail trading constituted a means of livelihood, independently, it might be, of productive industry. The application, judgment, cleverness, and connection of the successful shopkeeper are discussed in the Nikāyas, and among trades five are ethically proscribed for lay believers:—daggers, slaves, flesh, strong drink, poisons. Textile fabrics, groceries and oil, green-groceries, grain, perfumes and flowers,birds, breasts, articles of gold and jewelry, are among the items sold in the bazars of Jātaka stories and Vinaya allusions, and for the sale of strong liquors there were the taverns (panāgara, āpaṇa).‘^[1]  

During the Jātaka period the act of exchange and consumer was both, a 'free' bargain, a transaction unregulated, with one notable exception, by any system of statute-fixed prices. Supply was hampered by slow transport, by individualistic production, and by primitive machinery.