But there is nothing to show that ancient Indians ever attempted to map their country or write down what they knew about the geography of those times. A seaman’s manual written in the Kutchi dialect of Gujarat has been found but it exists as a relatively modern copy and nothing is known of its history. It is possible that such things existed but that they have been lost.
This doesn’t mean that ancient Indians didn’t have a sense of geography. If anything, they were very aware of the layout of the subcontinent and, given their maritime activities, of the Indian Ocean rim. For example, when the famous eighth-century philosopher adi Shankaracharya set up four monasteries, he chose sites in the four corners of the country—Puri in the east, Dwarka in the west, Sringeri in the south and Joshimath in the north. This is obviously not by chance. But it is probably true that map-making as a science was not very popular in ancient India.
In contrast, the Arabs wrote several books on geography during the medieval period. They also preserved some of the works of classical scholars like Ptolemy of Alexandria at a time when Christian Europe was refusing to accept this knowledge because they thought it was ‘pagan’. In the twelfth century, the famous Moorish geographer, Al Idrisi, drew a map that combined his own knowledge with that of Ptolemy. It showed the Indian Ocean as landlocked, an idea that suited the Arabs because this would discourage the Europeans from finding a sea route to the east.
By the fourteenth century, the Persians were drawing maps that show the Indian Peninsula. But the quality of map-making was quite basic. The real experts in this field were the Chinese. They’d been drawing maps of their own country for a long while. By the time of Admiral Zheng He, or perhaps because of his voyages, they had good strip maps of shipping routes through South East Asia and even parts of the East African coast. They are mostly in the nature of sailing instructions rather than accurate physical geography but they are quite detailed and advanced, compared to what the others had.
In the meantime, Europe didn’t know anything about the geography of Asia. The Arabs seem to have made sure of that! With the works of classical geographers lost and memories of pre-Islamic trade with India fading, the Europeans didn’t have access to proper information. They were also fooled by frauds who exploited their ignorance to make a quick buck.
Sir John Mandeville was an English man who wrote a book full of fantastical tales called The Travels. He set off from St Albans in 1322 and returned to England thirty-four years later claiming to have visited India, China, Java, Sumatra and many other places. Geographers, kings and priests studied the book in detail and it was translated into almost every important European language. 300 handwritten copies of the book have survived in various libraries—four times as many as Marco Polo’s. According to Mandeville, there were women with dogs’ heads, one-eyed giants, geese with two heads, giant snails and other such beings in Asia. He added to the medieval belief that India was ruled by a powerful Christian king called Prester John by giving his own fanciful descriptions of this king and his activities. The Europeans who read this were happy, thinking they may have a Christian ally in the east.
Funnily enough, these lies had a profound impact on the history of the world. For example, Mandeville was one of the biggest fraudsters of his times but he claimed that his travels had proved that the world was round. This popularized the idea that it was possible to reach India by sailing west. Columbus planned his 1492 expedition after reading The Travels, and explorers like Raleigh read the book very carefully. Thus, one of the greatest events of history was based on an elaborate falsehood.
Not all reports by European travellers were fictional. With the sudden expansion of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century, the control of the Arabs was finally broken and a few Europeans did travel to the east. The best known of them is Marco Polo. He is today remembered for his travels along the Silk Route to China and his stay at the court of Kublai Khan. However, he returned home by the sea route through South East Asia around 1292. On the way, he visited the ports of southern India and wrote detailed descriptions of what he saw. He tells us of busy ports that exported pepper and imported horses, of Hindu temples and rituals, of diving for pearls, of a royal harem with 500 women, and even of a popular and wise queen who ruled an inland kingdom that produced diamonds—probably the Kakatiya queen Rudrama Devi of Golkonda.
Polo’s facts and Mandeville’s fiction both fired the European imagination. The fifteenth century was the time of the Renaissance and European scholars opened their minds to the knowledge of classical civilizations. The works of Ptolemy gained importance again and attempts were made to draw maps of India based on his descriptions. The Ptolemaic maps are quite strange—since no maps had survived from the classical times, they were drawn just by reading a text! Therefore, the Ptolemaic maps miss out on basic facts that would have been quite obvious to Ptolemy himself—so much so that he didn’t dwell on them in his text. For example, the maps don’t show India’s coastline as a peninsula but as a long east-west coast. Besides, the texts were over a thousand years old by the time they were used to reconstruct India’s geography. And so, they marked places like Taxila although Taxila had disappeared over a millennium earlier! Such was the state of knowledge when the Portuguese decided to look for a way around Africa.
GO, VASCO!
The Portuguese were the first European country to make serious efforts to systematically map the world’s oceans. Prince Henry the Navigator, the king’s younger brother, became a patron of map-making and exploration. Through the fifteenth century, the Portuguese explored the west coast of Africa and established trading posts and refuelling points. They were quite unhappy when Spain backed Columbus who sailed west based on patchy and wrong information, and yet ended up making one of the greatest ‘discoveries’ of history! So, they lobbied with the Pope to divide the world into Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence. As per the Treaty of Tordesillas 1494, Spain was given a claim to all lands west of a meridian of longitude 370 leagues west of the cape Verde islands. All lands ‘discovered’ to the east belonged to Portugal.
When it became clear that Columbus had actually not found a westward route to India, the Portuguese were relieved. They had learned from an earlier voyage led by Bartholomeu Dias that Africa could be rounded. A new expedition was prepared in 1497 under Vasco da Gama. It had three ships—the flagship San Gabriel, the smaller San Rafael and the traditional Barrio. an unarmed supply ship also accompanied these three ships part of the way. The ships would have been quite small and unsophisticated compared to those of Admiral Zheng He, but the Chinese had already withdrawn and were no longer a threat to the Portuguese.
The ships set sail on 8 July 1497 and rounded the Cape of Good Hope by November. After this point, Vasco was in uncharted waters. As they sailed up the Mozambique coast, the Portuguese began to meet Arabic-speaking people. Vasco was quite pleased about this because it proved that he was indeed in the Indian Ocean. The Arabs had already established slaving ports along this coast and some of them had grown into large habitations. However, no one in this part of the world expected the European ships to reach here. The Arabs at first thought that these fair-skinned people were Turks. The Portuguese had the advantage of having several Arabic speakers amongst them as the Iberian Peninsula had only just been liberated from Moorish rule. And so, they were able to talk to the locals and pretend to be fellow-Muslims. When asked by a local sheik for his copy of the Koran, Vasco lied saying he’d left it behind in his homeland near Turkey!
This deception could not last forever and they were found out. The Portuguese fended off an attack and quickly sailed farther north in search of Kilwa, an island-city and port that was important enough to be known in Europe. However, they got lost and found themselves in Mombasa which was another port-city. Unfortunately, news of their deception had already made its way up the coast and the Portuguese narrowly escaped being trapped by the sultan of Mombasa.
Vasco da Gama pushed farther north. Along the coast, he made enqui
ries about Christians and about the kingdom of Prester John. At last he reached the harbour of Malindi, a port that had been visited by the Chinese treasure fleet eighty years earlier and was the source of two giraffes that had been taken back to China. The ruler of Malindi knew who his guests really were but he needed allies against Mombasa and therefore decided to welcome the Portuguese.
Alvaro Velho, one of Da Gama’s soldiers, has left us a description of the part-Arab, part-African world of the Swahili coast. The larger port-towns like Mombasa and Malindi had houses built of stone and lime. The population was mainly black African, with a ruling class of Arab origin. The merchants were mainly Arab but some Indians continued to visit these places despite the caste restrictions back home. Remains of this world can still be seen in the Stone Town of Zanzibar, Tanzania. The island of Zanzibar remained a major source of slaves bound for the Middle East till the nineteenth century. It continued to be ruled by an Omani Arab dynasty under British protection, till as recently as 1963.
A community of Indian merchants had visited Zanzibar for a long time but under British protection, many more came to settle there. By the early decades of the twentieth century, there was an active Indian community on the island.
Freddie Mercury, singer of the band Queen, was born here into a Parsi family in 1947. His name at birth was Farrokh Balsara and the house where he spent the first few years of his life still stands in Stone Town.
In a bloody revolution in 1963, however, the Arab dynasty was overthrown, thousands of Arabs and Indians were killed and the island soon became a semi-autonomous province of Tanzania. Still, a small Indian community lives in the narrow lanes of Stone Town, speaking the Kutchi dialect of Gujarat and worshipping in the few temples that still exist.
There is something about Zanzibar that would remind you strongly of the old parts of Kochi and even of old Ahmedabad on the other side of the Indian Ocean. Maybe it’s the food, the smell of spices sold in the open, sailing dhows bobbing in the sea or just the weight of centuries of trade with India.
In early 1498, Vasco da Gama had been trying to get a good pilot to guide his ships across the Indian Ocean but he was finding it difficult to find one. In Malindi, he got lucky and the sultan provided him with an experienced pilot described as a ‘Moor from Gujarat’. We’re not sure about who this pilot was—some say he was the famous Arab navigator Ibn Majid. But we don’t really know much other than the fact that he was called Malema Cana.
Both the pilot and the weather proved to be good and the ships reached the Indian coast in just twenty-three days. The open port of Kozhikode (also called Calicut) was filled with vessels of different sizes and the beach was lined with shops and warehouses. Further inland was a large and grand city. The Portuguese ships attracted a lot of attention and the locals rowed up to them, women and children included, to have a closer look.
The ruler of Calicut was Samudrin or Lord of the Sea (mispronounced as Zamorin). He lived in a large palace and was protected by ferocious warriors of the Nair caste. The majority of the people were Hindu, but the Portuguese first thought they were just Christian people who were ill-informed and didn’t know any better. Their confusion was probably because of the legends of Prester John and because of the presence of the Syrian Christian community there. The Portuguese corrected their view later. They also noticed that maritime trade was dominated by a large and powerful community of Arab merchants who would not be pleased to see them.
Vasco knew that he had to get back to Lisbon as soon as possible to tell everyone about his findings. The longer he stayed, the greater the danger! The Arabs were likely to trap him or turn the local ruler against him. And so, he went to the Samudri Raja and tried to make the best possible impression with gifts, claiming that he was all for peace. The Arabs did get the Nair guards to briefly hold Da Gama captive but he was soon freed and went back to Europe.
Vasco was given a hero’s welcome in Lisbon. King Manuel lost no time in writing to the Spanish monarchs to inform them that the Portuguese half of the world contained India. He also assured them that India was densely populated by Christians. Just that they were not yet strong in faith!
The Portuguese quickly followed up on their discovery. A fleet of thirteen ships and 1200 men were sent under the command of Pedro Alvares Cabral. They were heavily armed with cannon and guns—these were still unknown in the Indian Ocean. By now, the Portuguese had found out that winds and ocean currents made it more efficient to first sail south-west and then turn East rather than hug the coast of Africa. The fleet swung so far west that they landed on the Brazil coast and claimed it for Portugal. Only a small part of Brazil actually fell within the Portuguese sphere as per the Treaty of Tordesillas, but maps were not too accurate then and the Portuguese grabbed more than ‘their’ share. The Spanish then took the Philippines which was clearly in the Portuguese sphere. Soon, the Treaty came to mean little because other Europeans joined the race.
On reaching Calicut, cabral presented the Samudri Raja with many lavish gifts before demanding that they throw out the Arabs and trade only with the Portuguese. The king was stunned. While these talks were going on, a Meccan ship loaded with cargo prepared to leave for Aden. The Portuguese seized it, leading to riots in which a number of Portuguese men were killed. Cabral responded by lining up his ship and firing into the city. The Raja had to flee his palace. A number of merchant ships were seized and their sailors were burned alive in full view of the people watching from the shore. And that’s how the European domination of the Indian Ocean began. It would last till the middle of the twentieth century.
Within a few decades, the Portuguese used their cannon to establish a string of outposts in the Indian Ocean. Control over Socotra and Muscat allowed them to control the Red Sea and Persian Gulf respectively. In 1510, they conquered Goa and a year later, a fleet sent out from Goa took over Melaka and established control over the key shipping route to the Spice Islands.
Soon, the Portuguese had trading posts in Macau and Nagasaki. They maintained control over the seas with an iron fist and were extremely brutal and cruel in their dealings. They destroyed many Hindu temples and harassed the Syrian Christians for their faith. They did not spare the ships carrying Muslims for the Hajj and sometimes even burnt them mid-sea with the pilgrims on-board.
The Sri Lankans—the Tamils and the Sinhalese—probably suffered the most because of the Portuguese. Much of the island was in a state of almost constant war for one and a half centuries. Thankfully, the Portuguese did not have enough resources to try and conquer the entire subcontinent!
Did you know?
Portuguese control over the Indian Ocean was based on a network of forts along the coast. The best preserved of these forts is in Diu, a small island just off the Gujarat coast. Climbing its ramparts gives you a beautiful view of the Arabian Sea and of the impressive line of sixteenth-and-seventeenth-century cannon. There are few places in the world where you can see and touch such a large number of early cannon, their solid wood wheels bearing the marks left by centuries of rain and sun.
In 1538, the Portuguese were able to defend Diu against a combined attack by the Sultan of Gujarat and a large fleet sent by the Ottoman Turks. A huge Ottoman cannon, cast in 1531 in Egypt, is the only one remaining of this failed Turkish expedition and can still be seen in Junagarh fort. The Portuguese held on to Diu till as recently as 1961. The last of the outposts in Asia, Macau, was handed back to the Chinese in 1999. The Portuguese had been the first Europeans to come to this part of the world and they were the last to leave.
ROUND WORLD, FLAT MAP
When Vasco da Gama landed in India, there were around 110 million people living in the country. China had around 103 million, the United Kingdom 3.9 million and Portugal just 1 million. India was still a major economic power with a share of 24.5 per cent of world GDP. But this was smaller than the one-third share of world GDP that it had enjoyed in the first millennium CE. Around 1500, the Chinese economy went past the Indian one in terms of
its size for the first time. The per capita income or the income earned per person in India also fell below the global average. After having been behind India for centuries, most European countries had higher per capita incomes.
The richest country in Europe, Italy, had a per capita income that was twice as much as India’s. There were rulers like Akbar and Krishnadeva Raya who created periods of prosperity but this did not reverse the trend. The Mughal court was grand and glittering in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—but this hid the fact that India was slowly falling behind Europe.
The Europeans were technologically more advanced than everyone else in this period. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, they were simply miles ahead in map-making. The discoveries of the Portuguese were put down on hand-drawn maps and these charts were considered top secret. Before each voyage, the captain was allowed to make a copy from the royal library and was expected to return it with new discoveries marked out when he got back. Not surprisingly, the maps were something the others wanted to steal!
In 1502, Alberto Cantino, an agent of the Duke of Ferrera, stole a chart from Lisbon and took it to Italy. It is preserved in the Biblioteca Estense of Modena and shows that the Portuguese had quickly worked out that India was a peninsula though many elements of Ptolemaic geography were still included.
The first map showing the Indian Peninsula to be published for the public was by Johan Ruysch in Rome in 1508. It shows India as a peninsula and marks a few of the ports on the coast but doesn’t show much of the country’s interiors. The Indus and the Ganga are the only two Indian rivers marked but their courses are not really accurate. It also shows the Malaya peninsula and marks Melaka. A well-known map by Waldseemüller in 1513 is similar. Over the next century, more maps were published and knowledge about India’s geography improved. But mistakes were often made and passed on by map-makers copying information from each other. Empty spaces were filled up with drawings that often looked inspired by Mandeville’s fantasies!
The Incredible History of India's Geography Page 13
