What is a market?

A market is a place where people buy and sell goods. It's also called a bazaar or haat (Hindi), or mārukatté (Kannada). What's it called where you live?

A market can be a physical place or, more and more today, online. Through markets, people, families and businesses get the goods and services they need. Markets also connect people, traditions and ideas.

Three useful words:

A market serves both.

Markets aren't new in India! In the 16th century, the Hampi Bazaar in Karnataka was a rich market of the Vijayanagara Empire, a centre of busy trade, right opposite the Virupaksha temple. Many foreign travellers wrote about it.

The Portuguese traveller Domingos Paes called Hampi "the best-provided city in the world", meaning best stocked with goods: grains, seeds, milk, oil, silk, animals like cows, rabbits and horses, even birds like quails and partridges.

Another Portuguese traveller, Fernão Nuniz, saw craftsmen making golden jewels in the streets, and rubies, diamonds, pearls and other precious stones for sale, plus cotton cloth, and grass and straw in huge amounts.

Then he wrote something puzzling: the country around was so barren (dry, growing little), "it is a mystery how there should be an abundance of everything"!

Not really a mystery: it was trade. The land grew little, but goods came from everywhere else. That's exactly what a market does.