THE OLD AND THE GOLD
The world described above was at the heart of a network of merchants that extended from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea. This boom in trade happened because of an understanding of monsoon-wind patterns, a discovery that the Greeks say was made by a navigator called Hippalus.
This discovery allowed merchant ships to sail directly across the Arabian Sea rather than hug the coast. Because of this, Greek, Roman, Jewish and Arab traders flocked to Indian ports and Indian merchants made their way to the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and even down the East African coast. We know of all these trade routes from a detailed manual called the Periplus Maris Erythraei, written by an unknown Greek.
According to this manual, the port of Berenike was a key hub in the trade. It was located on the Red Sea coast of Egypt and established by the Ptolemies, a Greek dynasty founded in Egypt by one of Alexander’s generals.
Goods from India landed here and were taken over Land to the Nile. They were then transported down the Nile in boats to Alexandria. There were other routes as well. Some ships, for example, sailed all the way up the Red Sea to Aqaba. Goods were then transported by camels and donkeys through Desert towns like Petra to Mediterranean ports like Tyre and Sidon.
You must have heard of Cleopatra, the famous Egyptian queen. There is a story that when she was defeated by the Romans, she tried to escape with her family to India. She sent Caesarion, her seventeen-year-old son, whose father was Julius Caesar, to Berenike with a great deal of treasure. However, Cleopatra was captured in Alexandria and she committed suicide by snakebite. Caesarion reached Berenike and could have easily escaped to India but he was convinced by his tutors (who had probably been bribed) to return to Alexandria for negotiations. Once he came back, he was promptly murdered!
The Periplus tells us that ships sailing from Berenike to India went down the red Sea to Yemen and then, dodging pirates, to the island of Socotra. This island had a mixed population of Arab, Greek and Indian traders. Even the island’s name comes from Sanskrit—Dwipa Sukhadara or the Island of Bliss. This may explain why many Yemenis carry genes of Indian extract. From here, there were two major routes to India. The first made its way north to Oman and then across the Arabian Sea to Gujarat. Ships were advised to make this journey in July to take advantage of the monsoon wind.
There were many ports in Gujarat but Barygaza (modern Bharuch) seems to have been the most important. The port-town is on the estuary of the Narmada river. It’s a difficult route for ships to travel because of the dangerous shoals and currents. But the local king appointed fishermen to act as pilots and tow merchant ships to the Barygaza port which was several miles upriver.
Imports into Barygaza were gold, silver, brass, copper, lead, perfumes and ‘various sashes half a yard wide’. Italian and Arabian wine were imported in large quantities. The local king also ‘imported’ beautiful women for his harem. Exports included spikenard, ivory, onyx stone, silk and, of course, cotton textiles. As mentioned earlier, cotton textiles have always been a major export from the subcontinent.
The second route to India was a more southerly one that went across from Socotra to the Kerala coast. The most important port in this area was Muzaris (or Muchheri Pattanam) and it is mentioned frequently in Greek and Roman as well as Indian texts. A variety of goods were traded in Muzaris but the most important item of export was pepper, a spice that grows naturally in the southern tip of India. It must have been exported in very large quantities because it was commonly available as far as Roman Britain!
For a long time, historians were not sure about the exact location of this port. Excavations between 2004 and 2009 have identified it with a village called Pattanam, 30 km north of Kochi. Archaeologists have dug up a large number of Roman coins, jars and other artefacts in the area. It was a major port till it was destroyed by a big flood on the Periyar river in 1341 CE. The main trading hub then shifted to Kochi but the Muzaris area still remained important—the Portuguese and the Dutch even maintained a fort there!
The oldest surviving structure in Muzaris is the Kizhthali Shiva temple, which is said to have been built by the cheras in the second century BCE. The dragons carved into the steps in front of the shrine strongly remind one of the temples of South East Asia. Did this style make its way from Kerala to Java or the other way round?
During ancient times, a trade route by Land from Muzaris and other Kerala ports went through the Palghat Gap (a gap in the Nilgiri mountain range near Coimbatore) to inland cities like Madurai or further on to ports in the eastern coast. Some Greek and Roman products were then re-exported to Bengal and South East Asia.
According to another ancient Greek geographer, Strabo, around 120 ships made the year-long trip to India and back in the first century CE. This probably excludes Indian merchant ships that also made this trip but in the reverse. India traded a lot with the Greeks and the Romans at this point—this meant that there was a large flow of gold and silver coins coming in from these parts of the world. Roman writer Pliny says that India took at least fifty million sesterces (ancient Roman coins) away from Rome every year! Hoards of them have been found in excavation sites in the subcontinent, proving that this was indeed true.
At one point, the Romans were giving India so much gold that the Emperor Vespasian was forced to discourage the import of Indian luxury goods and ban the export of gold to India! Over centuries of trade, India accumulated a large store of gold and silver. Even now, 25–30 per cent of all the gold ever mined is said to be owned by Indians privately though the country has very few gold mines.
Many groups of people came to India’s western coast to trade or find refuge over the years. Their descendants continue to live here and in many instances, preserve ancient customs and traditions to this day. Not many know that India has one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. It is believed that the earliest Jews came to India to trade in the time of King Solomon but after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, many refugees settled in Kerala. St Thomas the apostle is said to have landed in Muzaris at around this time and lived amongst this community. The descendants of the people he converted survive as the Syrian Christian community.
For fifteen centuries, the Syrian Christian community continued to observe old practices, including the use of Syriac, a dialect of the aramaic language—the language that Jesus christ used! Though the Portuguese tried to forcibly destroy Jewish customs, including the language, and replace them with Catholic ones in the sixteenth century, some ancient traditions continue to live on in the Syrian Christian community.
As you can see, Indian civilization is full of continuities. If Cleopatra had escaped to India, we would probably have a group that directly traced its origins to the Egyptian queen and Julius Caesar. It is still possible to experience the atmosphere of those times in the older parts of Kochi. Pepper, ginger and other spices are still warehoused and traded in the bylanes. People still sometimes use a system of hand signals, hidden from onlookers by a cloth, which evolved centuries ago. Not far is ‘Jew Town’ where a tiny Jewish community lives around a sixteenth-century synagogue. The Jews must have been held in high esteem by King Rama Varma for he allowed the synagogue to be built right next to his palace. Many people from this community have now moved to Israel.
WHAT’S IN THE FISHING NET?
Even as the western coast traded with the Middle East and the Greeks and the Romans, the eastern coast of India saw a similar increase in trade with South East Asia all the way to China. There were many ports all along the coast, including Tamralipti in Bengal, the cluster of ports around Chilka lake in Orissa, the Pallava port of Mahabalipuram and the Chola port of Nagapattinam. The importance of these ports varied over the years.
From these ports, ships sailed to Suvarnadwipa (the Island of Gold or Sumatra) and Yavadwipa (Java). Some of them sailed on further to what is now South Vietnam.
It is here, thousands of miles from the Indian mainland, that we see the rise of the
first Indianized kingdom in South East Asia. Chinese texts tell us of the Hindu kingdom of Funan that flourished in the Mekong delta in the second century CE.
According to legend, the kingdom of Funan was founded by the Indian Brahmin Kaundinya, who married a local princess of the Naga (Snake) clan. Together, they began a dynasty that ruled Funan for 150 years. The Naga or snake remains an important royal symbol in this part of the world even today.
The capital of Funan was Vyadhapura, now the Cambodian village of Banam and its main port was Oc Eo. In the early twentieth century, French colonial archaeologists found the remains of a large urban centre of houses built on stilts along a network of canals extending 200 kilometres. There were irrigation canals as well as big canals that could be used by ocean-going vessels. This is why it was possible for Chinese travellers to talk about sailing across Funan on their way to the Malayan peninsula.
Over the next thousand years, Funan’s influence evolved into the great Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms of angkor in Cambodia and Champa in Vietnam. Strongly Indianized kingdoms and cultures came up in other parts of South East Asia as well. In Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, the Srivijaya kingdom prospered on trade between India and China. In Java, a series of Hindu kingdoms resulted in the powerful Mahapahit empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The influence of the Indian civilization on South East Asia grew almost entirely because of trade. With the exception of the Chola raids on Srivijaya in the eleventh century, there was no military action in the region. The Chinese Emperors, on the other hand, repeatedly tried to force their culture and influence on these kingdoms through military threats. But they were not as successful as the Indians till the voyage of admiral Zheng he in the fifteenth century.
South East Asia still bears evidence of this past. It’s probably most obvious in the Hindu island of Bali but throughout the region, the influence of ancient India is alive in the names of places and people as well as the large number of words of Indian origin that are used in everyday speech.
The national languages of both Malaysia and Indonesia are called ‘Bahasa’ and both are full of Sanskrit words. The name itself comes from the Sanskrit word ‘bhasha’, meaning language. From Myanmar to Vietnam, Buddhism is the dominant religion even today. And even now, the crowning of the king of Buddhist Thailand and other royal ceremonies must be done by Hindu priests. There are more shrines to the god Brahma in Bangkok than in all of India!
India’s influence is more cultural than just religious and it extends all the way to the Korean peninsula. According to the Samguk Yusa, Princess Huh Hwang-ok of Ayodhya sailed all the way to Korea to marry King Suro in the fourth century CE. It is said that they had ten sons who together founded Korea’s earliest dynasty. The Gimhae Kim clan claims to be direct descendants of this dynasty and is still quite powerful.
It is incredible how the essence of a civilization can survive over such large distances in space and time! The Javanese perform the Ramayana in their style, against a backdrop of the ninth-century Parambanan temples. It is amazing how they evoke the landscape of a far-off time and a faraway land! The stone temples change from scene to scene. Sometimes they remind one of the rocky outcrops of Kishkindha, sometimes Ravana’s palace in Lanka. A couple of hours’ drive away, the sunset seen from the top of the Buddhist stupa at Borobodur still creates a magical effect even though the Buddhist chants have now been replaced by the Islamic call to prayer.
In India as well, cultural traditions continue to recall the ancient trade routes. For example, in the state of Orissa, the festival of Kartik Purnima continues to be celebrated on the day when sea merchants set sail for South East Asia. People light lamps before sunrise and set them afloat on small paper boats in rivers or in the sea. The festival is held in early November when the monsoon winds reverse. In the town of cuttack, a large fair takes place—Bali-Yatra (meaning voyage to Bali)— around the same time. Scholars feel this marks the departure of merchant fleets for the island of Bali.
Further south, the seventh-century stone temple of Mahabalipuram still stands on the shore as if waiting for merchant ships to come home. The town, 60 km south of modern Chennai, was a busy port under the Pallava dynasty from the seventh to the ninth century CE. The existing temple complex is said to have been only one of the seven such similar complexes that once existed. It seems the others as well as numerous palaces, bazaars and grand buildings were swallowed by the sea. Local fishermen often tell tales of how their nets sometimes get tangled in such underwater structures. Historians, However, used to dismiss these stories as mere myth.
On 26 december 2004, a massive earthquake destroyed the Indonesian province of Aceh and triggered a tsunami across the Indian Ocean. About 2,30,000 people died in this tragedy. The tsunami struck India’s south-eastern coast as well. However, before the waves crashed in, the sea withdrew a couple of kilometres. The residents of Mahabalipuram reported observing a number of large stone structures rising from the seabed. Then the seawaters flowed back and covered them up again. Since then, divers have confirmed that there are a number of man-made structures out in the sea though they are yet to be systematically mapped.
The tsunami also shifted the sands along the shore and this uncovered a number of other structures, including a large stone lion. Archaeologists also found the foundations of a brick temple from the Sangam period that may have been destroyed by a tsunami 2200 years ago. A second tsunami may have hit this coast in the thirteenth century. Were there six other temple complexes in Mahabalipuram? This hasn’t been proved yet but once again, the memory of this culture does seem to be based on historical fact even if it hasn’t been fully confirmed.
SAILING ON STITCHED SHIPS
As we have seen, the boom in overseas trade made India an economic and cultural superpower. According to Angus Maddison, a British economist, the country accounted for 33 per cent of the world GDP in the first century CE!
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the broadest quantitative measure of a nation’s total economic activity. It represents the monetary value of all goods and services produced within a nation’s geographic borders over a specified period of time.
India’s share was three times that of western Europe and much larger than that of the Roman Empire as a whole! China’s share of 26 per cent of world GDP was much smaller than India’s. India’s population was estimated to be 75 million at that time.
What did the merchant ships in the Indian Ocean look like in those times? There were many kinds of vessels, ranging from small boats for river and coastal use to large ships with double masts for long voyages. There were also regional variations. However, they all seem to have shared a peculiar design trait: they were not held together by nails; they were stitched with rope!
Throughout the ages, travellers from outside the Indian Ocean have repeatedly commented on this odd design. This technique persisted into modern times—locally built vessels were stitched together well into the twentieth century! Apparently, there are boatbuilders who continue to do this even now. Like the Harappan ox-cart, this example shows how ancient technologies live on in India even as new ones come up.
We’re not sure why the shipbuilders in the Indian Ocean region used this technique when they had access to iron nails from an early stage. Some say it may have been because of a superstition that magnetic lodestones in the sea would suck in ships which bore iron nails but this not very convincing. It’s more likely that this was because these ships sailed in waters full of atolls and reefs and had to be beached in many places due to lack of sheltered harbours or due to the rough monsoon sea. This would require a hull that was flexible and did not break easily. The stitched technique provided this flexibility but it later limited the ability of Indian shipbuilding to match Chinese and then European design innovations.
So how did it feel to sail in these ships? A Chinese scholar named Fa Xian visited India in the fifth century and has left us a fascinating account of his return journey by sea. He came to India by
Land through Central Asia. Fa Xian spent several years in northern India studying and gathering Buddhist texts. He then went to Tamralipti. The site of this famous ancient port, now called Tamluk, is not far from modern Kolkata. It is close to where the Rupnarayan river joins the Gangetic delta, but the old channel that served the port has silted up since. Except for a 1200-year-old temple dedicated to the goddess Kali, there is little here that suggests it was once a busy port.
In 410 CE, However, when Fa Xian visited it, Tamralipti was a port town bustling with activity. He boarded a merchant ship bound for Sri Lanka. The voyage was during the winter months when the monsoon winds would have been blowing south. The ship sailed in a south-westerly direction for just fourteen days before arriving in Sri Lanka. Fa Xian calls it the Land of the Lions—a clear reference to the mythical origins of the Sinhalese that we have talked about earlier. After all, there were never any real lions in Sri Lanka.
The Chinese scholar spent two years in Sri Lanka studying Buddhist texts before he set sail for South East Asia. He tells us that he travelled in a large vessel that could carry two hundred people. This vessel was accompanied by a smaller ship that carried extra provisions and could help in an emergency. However, after two days at sea, the ships were caught in a major storm and the larger ship developed a leak. Suddenly, there was pandemonium! Many of the merchants wanted to shift to the smaller vessel at once but its crew panicked when it saw the stampede. They cut the cables and sailed off!
This only made things worse. The merchants then threw most of their goods into the sea. Fa Xian also threw his water pitcher, washbasin and other belongings. He was afraid that the merchants would throw out his precious books but that fortunately did not happen!
The Incredible History of India's Geography Page 8
