The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History

by Sanjeev Sanyal

  In later centuries, several European visitors would also leave us with narratives that are useful windows into their times. Again, we need to be careful when using their writings as they are, with a few notable exceptions, often systematically biased against the Hindu and Islamic cultures that they encounter. By the end of the eighteenth century, these narratives also contain an additional layer of racism. Thus, when European colonists came across the ruins of Great Zimbabwe in southern Africa in the nineteenth century, they simply assumed that the Africans were incapable of building it. The ruins, therefore, were interpreted as a sign that light-skinned colonists must have conquered southern Africa in ancient times, and there were even attempts to connect it to King Solomon and Queen Sheba.

  As historian John Reader puts it, ‘This view of African history compounded a prevailing belief that whatever was commendable in black Africa must have been introduced from somewhere else by lighter-skinned and (by implication) more intelligent people. . . . The idea was reinforced by colonial regimes and since independence the elites themselves have seized every opportunity to perpetuate it.’8

  The Indian reader will probably have recognized the parallels with the Aryan Invasion Theory pushed by colonial-era historians to suggest that Indian civilization was a gift from light-skinned outsiders. It is then a small step to paint British colonial rulers as latter-day Aryans with a (noble) mission to civilize the natives. What is extraordinary is that this story about invading Aryans continues to survive, especially among the elite, despite the lack of any textual or archaeological support, and a plethora of genetic and other evidence against it.

  Let it be clear, nonetheless, that local sources too should not be accepted uncritically. As we shall see, even the famous edicts of Ashoka are partly political propaganda and should be taken with a pinch of salt. Acrimonious debates in newspaper columns, television shows and social media show that it is often not easy to interpret current affairs. So it shouldn’t be surprising that it is difficult to disentangle history from the random fragments that have survived the ravages of time. This is why all narratives of history are based on some philosophical framework about the flow of events that allows the historian to make sense of it all.

  The Philosophy of History

  Since this book is not meant to be an academic tome, I was hesitant to write a section on the philosophy of history as I feared that the general reader would find it tedious. In the end, I decided to include a few lines on this as it would help explain the world view that flows through many of my writings.

  The flow of historical events, the causes and effects, have been explained in numerous ways over time. In premodern times, the divine intervention of gods or of a monotheistic God was seen as a key driver of events, especially of sudden changes in direction. Those with a deterministic world view would blame Fate or their stars. Another popular way to explain history was to focus on heroic (or demonic) individuals whose thoughts and actions disproportionately influenced the course of history. This Great Man Theory may have been formalized in the early nineteenth century by writers like Thomas Carlyle, but the idea is embedded in most premodern histories and remains an important influence to this day. This should not be surprising since most history writing was financed directly or indirectly by ‘great men’ who liked to highlight their own importance.

  Perhaps as a reaction to the Great Man Theory, by the late nineteenth century we see the rise of philosophies that emphasize grand social and economic forces. This approach de-emphasized the role of individuals and presented them as part of a larger machinery. Marxist history is a product of this line of thinking where events are driven by grand, inevitable socio-economic forces. In the Marxist version, the narrative of history flows along a predetermined track like some Victorian steam engine driven by the inescapable laws of Newton. Having thus framed history, Marxism could claim to foretell the end of history. As Eric Hobsbawm puts it, ‘Marx wanted to prove a priori that a certain historical result, communism, was the inevitable result of historical development. But it is by no means clear that this can be shown by scientific historical analysis.’ 9

  Marxist history was very influential through much of the twentieth century in academia, including in non-communist countries. However, the collapse of communism and the obvious failure of the framework to explain most events has led to its sharp decline in the twenty-first century. This has opened up the field to other philosophical frameworks.

  My own writing, on subjects ranging from economics to urbanism, is strongly influenced by the fact that I view the world as a Complex Adaptive System—a chaotic place where the flow of events is influenced by the constant and often unpredictable interactions between a host of factors and independent agents. Examples of complex adaptive systems include ecological systems, financial markets, economies, the English language, cities, weather systems, common-law systems and arguably the Hindu religion. Contrast the fluid messiness of these with the neat but rigid architecture of mechanical systems that follow the laws of Newton. Thus viewed from the complex-adaptive perspective, history flows from the constant interaction of factors including technological innovation, geography and nature, grand social and economic forces, the actions of great individuals but also of not-so-great individuals, culture and ideology, pure chance and, who knows, perhaps even the occasional divine intervention.

  In other words, history is not a predetermined path but the outcome of complex interactions that, at every point in time, can lead down many paths. This does not mean that history is completely random. Some outcomes are more likely than others and some patterns do emerge even if the flow of history does not quite repeat itself. As Mark Twain is said to have remarked, ‘History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.’10

  A number of other thinkers have also used this general framework to analyse history. An interesting derivative put forward by historians like Niall Ferguson is to explore the counterfactuals or ‘What ifs’ of history. What if there had been no American War of Independence? What if Kennedy had survived the assassination attempt? While counterfactual histories can be useful to highlight the contingent nature of history and are often very entertaining, I am personally sceptical of them because the alternative scenario cannot be meaningfully recreated in a world where even the fluttering wings of a butterfly can influence the future state of the world. If Kennedy had not been assassinated, many other things would have also not happened—who knows then the path that history would have taken?

  One of the implications of the complex-adaptive system framework is to recognize that once a particular path has been taken, all later events are influenced by it (this is called path dependence). It does not matter if this particular path was highly improbable to start with—once the turn is taken, it is hardwired into history and all subsequent events derive from it. All other paths, no matter how probable beforehand, are now dead. A corollary of such thinking is the Law of Unintended Consequences. History is full of them and one hopes that this realization will make ‘great men’ a little less certain of their impact on the course of history. By the same token, history is influenced by the actions of many ordinary men and women. This is why I have taken care to include a few of their stories in this book: the merchant Naruttam who helped the Omanis capture Muscat from the Portuguese in order to save his daughter; and Odakkal Mohammad who participated in the naval revolt in Bombay in 1946.

  The Indian Soldier

  For all the many twists and turns, there are several continuities in the long history of the Indian Ocean ranging from the constant migration of people to the stories people have been telling each other over hundreds of years. One such continuity is the presence of Indian soldiers and mercenaries serving in faraway lands since ancient times.

  The global importance of Indian soldiering is not widely explored by historians perhaps because Indian empires, with a few exceptions, have rarely carried out military operations outside the subcontinent. In contrast, Indian soldiers and mercenaries have often fough
t wars from Europe to China. Once one begins to notice them, they seem to pop up everywhere in the historical record. In ancient times, one finds them fighting for the Persians against the Greeks and a little later, driving war elephants for the Macedonian general Seleucus against his rivals in the Middle East. During the medieval period, one finds Indian mercenaries fighting for Sinhalese rulers in Sri Lanka, dying for the Shiite cause in Karbala and protecting commercial interests of Tamil corporatized guilds in South East Asia. Later still they would serve the British in the Opium Wars in China, the Boer Wars in South Africa and across the globe during the World Wars.

  This tradition remains alive in the subcontinent. Gurkhas from Nepal are widely considered the world’s best infantry soldiers and continue to serve in the armies of many countries from Britain to Brunei. Similarly, India has been the single largest contributor to United Nations peacekeeping missions around the world since 1950.11 Other countries in the subcontinent too have made major contributions. This is just one of the many continuities of history that we will encounter through the book.

  The Female Line

  A secondary theme that runs through this book will be the role played by matrilineal customs in the history of the Indian Ocean rim. Let me clarify at the outset that ‘matrilineal’ is not the same as ‘matriarchal’. The latter relates to societies where women are the rulers/leaders as a matter of custom, but in reality, there are very few genuinely matriarchal societies in the world. Matrilineal societies, in contrast, are those that mark lineage through the mother and female ancestors. In such societies, men still run the show, although, in general, the status of women tends to be higher than in societies that are purely patriarchal and/or patrilineal. Note that matrilineal customs come in many forms and can coexist with forms of patrilineal systems—one cannot blindly paint all such societies with the same brush.

  There are several instances of matrilineal societies along the Indian Ocean rim. Along the south-western coast of India we have the Nairs of Kerala and the Bunts of Karnataka. To the north-east of the country there are the Garo, Khasi and Jaintia tribes of Meghalaya. Then there are the Karen of Myanmar, the Minangkabau of West Sumatra and the Cham of Vietnam. As we shall see, the existence of various shades of matrilineal customs had an important influence on the history of the Indian Ocean and sometimes allowed powerful female leaders to emerge.

  Notice how, excluding the groups along India’s western coast, all the other matrilineal groups are concentrated in and around South East Asia. It is likely that they have all inherited their matrilineal customs from common Neolithic roots. Moreover, the tradition can be so deeply engrained that it often survives major sociocultural changes. Thus, the Minangkabau of Sumatra have mostly retained their matrilineal family structure to this day, despite having adopted Islam and the constant pressures from orthodox clerics.12

  Matrilineal systems are not just a cultural oddity but had a real impact on the political history of the Indian Ocean. Royal legitimacy, for instance, was derived from the female lineage in many places. The effective founder of the Angkor empire in Cambodia, Jayavarman II, was from Java, Indonesia, and most likely acquired the throne through marriage. In AD 877, the throne passed to Indravarman I who was Jayavarman’s queen’s nephew.13 The offices of Brahmin priests in ancient Cambodia, similarly, passed from uncle to nephew down the maternal line.14 Given the importance of the female line, it is not surprising that royal inscriptions in this part of the world put a special emphasis on matrilineal genealogies.

  It is quite interesting to compare how some societies opted for a matrilineal system and others did not. Along the south-western coast of India, for example, the custom probably evolved as a result of long-distance maritime trade which meant that the male population was constantly churning while the women were more rooted. This is why the Muslim community of the Kerala coast is still called Mappila or ‘son-in-law’ in memory of the Arab traders who came here from pre-Islamic times. Interestingly, the eastern coast of India did not develop similar customs despite being just as actively engaged in maritime trade with the matrilineal societies of South East Asia. This difference is perhaps just another example of how history does not evolve along predetermined paths and the same set of circumstances can lead to different outcomes.

  This brings us back to why I decided to start this book with Nandi Varman II. His story draws together many of the elements that are explored in this book: the deep links of trade and culture across the Indian Ocean, the back-and-forth movement of people, the importance of the female lineage, but also the difficulty of piecing together history from random scraps of evidence. Moreover, it illustrates the contingent nature of history. The flow of events in southern India took a certain turn because a twelve-year-old boy in a faraway land decided to take a leap into the unknown. Who knows what would have happened to the Pallava kingdom if he had decided to stay back with his brothers?

  2

  Genetics and Ice

  At 7.58 a.m. local time, on 26 December 2004, an undersea earthquake shook the ocean floor north-west of the island of Sumatra. The earthquake of 9.1 magnitude unleashed a tsunami that killed an estimated 228,000 people and caused tens of billions of dollars’ worth of damage. The devastation was not limited to nearby Sumatra or Thailand but was spread across the Indian Ocean—India, Sri Lanka and even as far away as East Africa. It was a reminder that the Indian Ocean is not merely a geographic term but an ecosystem interconnected by both human and natural forces.

  It appears that such tsunamis have taken place many times in the past and are remembered in the oral traditions of aboriginal tribes in the region. When rescue parties arrived to look for survivors among the Onge and Jarawa people of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, they found that the tribes had suffered almost no casualties despite being very close to the epicentre. Evidently, they had followed an old oral tradition that instructed them to move inland to higher ground whenever the ground shook.1 These tribes are said to have arrived on these islands more than 30,000 years ago as part of early human migrations and must have experienced such deadly tsunamis many times in their history. In contrast, the neighbouring Nicobarese tribes, who arrived in the islands less than 600 years ago, did not have this traditional memory and suffered hundreds of casualties. An Indian military base on Car Nicobar Island was also badly damaged. Thus, in order to understand the Indian Ocean, it is necessary to go back right to the beginning.

  The Making of the Indian Ocean

  The purpose of this chapter is to give the reader a broad overview of how the geographic and human landscape of the Indian Ocean rim took shape in prehistoric times. Those who have read my previous book, Land of the Seven Rivers, will be familiar with some of the material presented here, especially that pertaining to India, but I hope they will indulge me as I narrate the story of the broader region.

  Till a hundred years ago, it was assumed that the relative positions of the continents and oceans were fixed. Geological change was seen in terms of vertical and not horizontal movement. This view was radically challenged by Alfred Wegener in 1912 and further elaborated in his book, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, published in 1915. Wegener argued that today’s continents had once been part of a gigantic supercontinent and had later drifted apart like icebergs. The hypothesis explained an observation that had puzzled cartographers like Ortelius since the sixteenth century—the fact that the continents, especially those on opposite sides of the Atlantic, seemed to fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

  We now know that Wegener was right and that the planet’s geological history has been defined by the periodic converging and drifting apart of its land masses. Around 270 million years ago, the continental land masses converged to form a gigantic supercontinent called Pangea. A map of Pangea would show India, Australia, Madagascar and Antarctica wedged together along what is now the eastern coast of Africa. In other words, the India Ocean simply did not exist.

  It was on Pangea that the dinosaurs appeared around 2
30 million years ago. The supercontinent appears to have held together till around 175 million years ago when it began to split up due to a sequence of rifts. First, it broke up into two large land masses—the northern continent of Laurasia (which included North America, Europe and Asia) and the southern continent of Gondwana (which included South America, Africa, Australia, India and Antarctica). Incidentally, the name Gondwana is derived from the Gond tribe of central India.

  Next, Gondwana itself began to break up. Geological studies suggest that India and Madagascar broke away together from Africa about 158–160 million years ago and then from Antarctica–Australia about 130 million years ago. Next, about 90 million years ago, India broke away from Madagascar and started drifting north. As it drifted north, the Indian craton passed over the Reunion hotspot, an area of long-term eruption, and experienced a period of intense volcanic activity that created the Deccan Traps in peninsular India. Scientists speculate that this volcanic activity may have contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs (with the exception of those dinosaurs that evolved into birds).