We do not know the exact sequence of events, but a study of the available information suggests the following: The fleet probably assembled near the main Chola port of Nagapattinam. Appropriately for a port that traded with South East Asia, the name means ‘Port of the Nagas’. There is still a major port there but the medieval port was probably several kilometres to the south.11 The Chola fleet would have first sailed south towards Sri Lanka before swinging east using ocean currents that would have taken them across to Sumatra. They probably then sailed down the west coast of the island towards the Strait of Sunda where they may have been resupplied by Javanese allies and picked up local guides.
The fleet now made its way north into the Straits of Malacca and systematically sacked Sri Vijaya ports along the way. Finally, we are told that the Cholas decisively defeated the main Sri Vijaya army in Kadaram (now Kedah province in Malaysia). The invading force then withdrew, stopping by at the Nicobar Islands on their way home.
The Chola raid significantly diminished Sri Vijaya power but it is remarkable that the Chinese did not do anything to support their supposed vassals. It is possible that the Chinese were just as annoyed at Sri Vijaya’s rent extraction and had entered into an understanding with the Indians. The Sumatrans too seem to have accepted their reduced status as they continued to send ambassadors to the Chola court and even participated in a joint diplomatic mission to China. When a Chola naval fleet returned to Kadaram in 1068, it was in support of a Sri Vijaya king against his local rivals. Meanwhile, with external threats diminished, Java began to rebuild itself under a Balinese prince, Airlangga. The process of revival would culminate in the great Majapahit empire in the fourteenth century.
Merchant Guilds and Temple Banks
As one can see, maritime trade was not just a driver of the economy during the Chola era but was the key factor determining geopolitical developments. So, how did medieval Indian merchants organize themselves? The average reader may be under the impression that we are dealing with individual merchants functioning under the umbrella of royal protection. Individual merchants did exist and some of them became very wealthy and powerful. However, much of the trade was done by corporatized merchant guilds. Such organizations, created under contract, are called Samaya in inscriptions.12 One of the largest guilds, called ‘The Five Hundred’, was established in Aihole, Karnataka and soon became a multinational corporation. Another guild, called Manigramam, was from Tamil country and is mentioned in Nandi Varman’s inscriptions in Thailand!
A code of conduct called ‘banaju-dharma’ governed such organizations. Membership was based on economic interest and often cut across caste divisions—for instance, The Five Hundred was founded by Karnataka Brahmins but would later be dominated by Tamil Chettiars. Moreover, the supply chain depended on contracts between different guilds. Thus, the weavers’ guild would contract with the merchants’ guild to supply a certain amount of cloth for export. While these corporations had links to the ruling dynasties, they were capable of making independent arrangements for themselves. Thus, we find that business carried on irrespective of changing rulers, wars and geopolitical balance. Some of the larger guilds had companies of mercenaries that protected their interests from pirates, rivals and even avaricious rulers. In this way, the Manigramam guild survived several centuries till around AD 1300!
The network of temples played an important role in financing this economic model. Unlike their Sumerian and Egyptian contemporaries, Vedic Hindus had preferred simple fire altars to grand religious structures. This changed in later times as temples became the centre of social and cultural life. The early medieval period saw a sharp increase in temple building. Much of Indian classical music, dance, drama, sculpture, painting and other art forms evolved in the temples rather than at the royal court. What is less appreciated is that the temples were key to the financing of trade, industry and infrastructure building.
It is well known that medieval temples were very wealthy but the common impression is that this wealth was mostly due to royal grants. In reality, the network of large and small temples had a close relationship with merchant and artisan communities as well as the village/town councils; this is quite clear from an examination of various donations and contracts. Moreover, the reason that the temples accumulated so much wealth is that they acted as bankers and financiers!
For instance, a study of temple records by Kanakalatha Mukund shows that temple lending was mostly directed to corporatized bodies like guilds and village councils rather than individual merchants.13 The temples lent money to village/town councils for infrastructure investment and to merchant and artisan guilds for business. Interest rates usually ranged from 12.5 to 15 per cent per annum. An eleventh-century inscription clearly shows that there was an active credit market. Thus, by the Chola period, Indian Ocean trade was no longer about individual merchants and small moneylenders, but was a sophisticated network of multinational guilds financed by large temple banks. Like globalized businesses of today, they too had to navigate between local political rivalries and those of major geopolitical powers.
The Odiya Candidate
The first shock to the Chola empire came in the 1060s. The Chalukyas had come back and retrieved their empire from the Rashtrakutas. This is another example of the persistence and cyclical revival of old dynasties in peninsular India. What makes them even more confusing is that it’s often not entirely clear how the revivalists are related to the old dynasty. As the Chalukyas expanded south, they came in conflict with the Cholas. With the Cholas distracted by wars on their northern borders, the Sinhalese began to claw back their island under the leadership of Vijayabahu. Around 1070, the Cholas were finally pushed out. They would try to re-establish control over Sri Lanka but would not succeed.
There may be a temptation to see the wars between the Cholas and the Sinhalese kings in terms of ethnic conflict. However, one must realize that the Sri Lankans were part of an anti-Chola alliance led by another Tamil clan, the Pandyas. Indeed, Vijayabahu’s army had several Tamil mercenary units. Having pushed the Cholas out, the Sinhalese would help the Pandyas recover their kingdom on the mainland. Thus, this is better seen as a struggle for supremacy between two geopolitical alliances rather than two ethnic groups. One can clearly see this in how events played out over the next two centuries.
After Vijayabahu, the Sinhalese kingdom was consumed by civil war and broke up into several kingdoms. These were reunited by a king called Parakramabahu.14 Unfortunately he had no sons and after his death Sri Lanka appears to have slid back into chaos. At this moment in history, a complete outsider managed to capture the throne. His name was Nissanka Malla, an Odiya prince, who used the Sinhalese link to ancient Kalinga to claim descent from King Vijaya (recall the Kalingan prince who is said to have first settled the island in the sixth century BC). Given that his claim to the throne was always suspect, Nissanka converted to Buddhism and proclaimed that only a true Buddhist could be the king of Sri Lanka. Thus, it was an insecure Indian prince who cemented the link between Buddhism and the Sri Lankan throne!
The Cholas watched all this and decided to back their own Odiya candidate—Magha of Kalinga. According to the Culavamsa, sequel to the Mahavamsa, Magha landed in Sri Lanka with 24,000 soldiers and proceeded to carve out a kingdom in the north of the island. Although the Cholas were in severe decline by this time, they seem to have backed him as best they could. Magha also encouraged a lot of Tamils to settle in his kingdom. It is quite extraordinary that two adventurers from faraway Odisha were at the heart of a rivalry that would later come to be seen as Tamil–Sinhala conflict.
As if things were not complicated enough, Sri Lanka suffered a naval invasion from South East Asia in 1247. It was led by Chandrabhanu, a prince from a kingdom on the Malay peninsula. We do not know what prompted such a long-range expedition. It is possible that this was the last throw of the dice by the pro-Chola alliance in the Indian Ocean. The Sinhalese defeated the Malay prince with some difficulty and forced him to seek ref
uge in Magha’s kingdom in the north. The prince from South East Asia then somehow managed to become the ruler of Magha’s kingdom. It is possible that the Cholas gave him the throne after Magha’s death. So here we have an impossible combination of a Malay prince ruling over a Tamil kingdom founded by an Odiya adventurer in the north of Sri Lanka!
It appears that Chandrabhanu still had ambitions of conquering the rest of the island and decided to make a second attempt. This time the Sinhalese asked for help from their traditional Pandya allies who defeated and killed Chandrabhanu. However, in exchange for their help, the Tamil clan took over the defeated king’s territories. When the Pandyas later collapsed during the Muslim invasions, this territory would become an independent state. This is the origin of the Tamil kingdom of Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka.
Memories of Fustat
I hope it is clear from the above narrative that the Bay of Bengal and eastern Indian Ocean rim was a very interconnected region linked over vast distances by maritime trade, cultural exchange, geo-political rivalries, marriage alliances and military operations. The same can be said of the Arabian Sea and western Indian Ocean rim. The Yemeni port of Aden became a great hub for business with Arab and Indian merchants flocking to it.
During this period, the Jews established an elaborate business network that extended from the Mediterranean to the west coast of India. The detailed records of how this group carried out business are available to us due to a lucky combination of dry climate and medieval superstition. The Jews of this period believed that they could not destroy any document with the name of God written on it. This included all business correspondence. So, when a merchant died, his papers were sent to a repository in Fustat, Old Cairo. Tens of thousands of manuscripts have survived and provide a very vivid picture of the times.
For instance, we have a letter from Mahruz, a Jewish merchant in Aden, to his cousin who had been attacked by pirates on the western coast of India and had taken refuge in the Gujarati port of Bharuch (the same port mentioned a thousand years earlier in The Periplus). In the letter, Mahruz tells his cousin to get in touch with his Indian contact Tinbu in case he needed money and help: ‘If my lord, you need gold, please take it on my account from the nakhoda Tinbu, for he is staying in Tana [on the Konkan coast], and between him and me there are inseparable bonds of friendship and brotherhood.’15
Great Zimbabwe and the Zunj
As we saw in the previous chapter, the east coast of Africa saw the establishment of a number of Arab and Persian settlements during the eighth and ninth centuries. The settlers were often dissident Muslims fleeing persecution—Ibadhi, Shia and Kharajite.16 They created a string of ports down the coast—Mogadishu, Mombasa, Kilwa, Zanzibar and so on. The migrants soon married local women and absorbed local influences. The Swahili language is the outcome of the interaction between Arabic and Bantu languages. One could argue that more than just a language, it is an evolving culture that emerged from the churn of the Indian Ocean and would be further shaped by Portuguese, Indian, English and other influences.
Over time, the coastal settlements would grow from refugee outposts to prosperous ports. The key to their prosperity was their role in procuring two commodities from the African hinterlands—slaves and gold. So many African slaves would be transported to the Middle East that a revolt by them in AD 869 would take over much of southern Iraq, at the heart of the Abbasid empire. Known as the Zunj Revolt, the rebels would briefly run an independent state that included the port of Basra. It would take the Abbasids fifteen years of armed force, bribery and amnesties to quell the rebellion. Despite this shock, slavery would remain alive in the Middle East till 1962 when Saudi Arabia became the last country to abolish the practice.17
Meanwhile, the interiors of Africa began to witness political and economic changes due to the supply chains that needed to pump slaves and gold to the coast. By this time the Bantu migrants had largely replaced or absorbed the ancient Khoi-San hunter–gatherers. Since the 1930s, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of the small kingdom of Mapungubwe that existed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the Limpopo valley in Zimbabwe. The settlements have yielded beads from India and Egypt showing that goods from the Indian Ocean rim made it inland. The sites have also yielded the skeletons of a ‘king’ and a ‘queen’ who were buried along with gold ornaments and burial goods.18
Mapungubwe was soon superseded by a larger kingdom further north that has left behind the remains of hundreds of structures built in stone. The largest and most impressive of these structures are concentrated at Great Zimbabwe, the kingdom’s capital. The term ‘dzimba dzimabwe’ means ‘houses of stone’ in the local Shona dialect. A related form—Zimbabwe—would become the name of the country when it became free in 1980. Excavations at Great Zimbabwe have yielded a glazed Persian bowl, Chinese dishes, Arab coins minted in Kilwa and so on. Recent genetic testing of a small local tribe has found DNA traces from Yemeni Jews! So, it is quite obvious that this kingdom had close trading relations with Indian Ocean ports like Kilwa.
The overwhelming evidence is that Great Zimbabwe was built and ruled by the local Shona people even if ideas and influences were exchanged with the Indian Ocean world. However, note that colonial-era historians would insist that native Africans were simply not capable of building such elaborate stone structures and that this was the work of colonizers from the north. Under the racist government of Rhodesia, any research suggesting a native origin was deliberately suppressed. Colonial-era histories would repeatedly stress that black Africans did not have a history till the Europeans arrived: ‘They have stayed, for untold centuries, sunk in barbarism. . . . The heart of Africa was scarcely beating.’19
Indian readers will recognize the parallels with the colonial-era ‘Aryan Invasion Theory’ about how Indian civilization was a gift from white-skinned invaders from the north. It was commonly argued by colonial-era scholars that India was not even a country but merely a geographical term and that Hinduism was not a religion but a collective noun for a bunch of unconnected pagan cults. The subtext was that, therefore, there was nothing wrong in keeping India under colonial rule or denigrating Hinduism. It is amazing how many of these racist ideas have remained alive even after the end of the colonial era. Some of these ideas take forms that look benign but are startlingly insidious when examined. Take, for instance, popular fictional characters like Tarzan and Phantom who are white heroes ‘protecting’ the locals. The underlying message is that the natives are incapable of looking after themselves. A lingering justification for intervention—both overt and covert.
The Apocalypse
At the end of the twelfth century, the Indian Ocean rim could be divided into two zones of civilizational influence. There was an Islamic zone that ran from Central Asia to the Swahili coast, and an Indic zone that ran from eastern Afghanistan to southern Vietnam. Further east, there was the Chinese civilizational zone that ran from the Gobi desert to the Pacific Ocean, and included Japan, Korea and northern Vietnam. Although the exact borders of these zones shifted back and forth, it would have seemed to a casual observer of that time that a sort of equilibrium had been established. Unfortunately, this was about to unravel and all three civilizations would soon face a major shock. The source of their troubles was the same—the steppes of Central Asia.
India was the first to get a taste of what was to follow. Turkic invaders from Central Asia pushed out the Hindu Shahi rulers of Kabul and then began to make raids into India. Led by Mahmud of Ghazni, the Turks made as many as seventeen raids between AD 1000 and 1025 and destroyed and pillaged many of the prosperous cities and temple towns of north-western India. Perhaps the most infamous of these was an attack on the revered temple of Somnath in Gujarat. Fifty thousand of its defenders were put to the sword and some twenty million dirhams worth of gold, silver and gems were carried away. Somnath would be destroyed and rebuilt many times, but Mahmud’s attack is still remembered most vividly. The temple that stands on the spot today was built in the 19
50s. Its symbolic importance can be gauged from the fact that it was one of the first projects initiated by the Indian Republic.
Despite the death and destruction caused by Mahmud, the Turks were unable to hold territory beyond some parts of western Punjab and Sindh. Indeed, an alliance led by Raja Suheldeo Pasi defeated a large Turkic army led by Mahmud’s nephew at the Battle of Bahraich in 1033 (one version of oral history suggests Suheldeo was himself killed in battle). For a century and a half after this defeat, the Turks seem to have kept out of the heartlands.
To an Indian of those times, the Turkic raids would have seemed like yet another round of incursions like those of the Macedonians, Huns, Bactrians and Scythians of the past. The invaders had been either pushed out or absorbed, and had not posed a civilizational threat. If anything, there seems to have been a sense of complacency. So when Prithviraj Chauhan, ruler of Delhi, fended off a raid by Muhammad Ghori in 1191, he allowed the invader to return home to Afghanistan! Ghori returned the following year to defeat and kill Prithviraj. This led to the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate and opened up the rest of India to conquest. Over the next two centuries, the Turks would lay waste ancient cities, temples and universities in one of the most bloody episodes in human history. It is difficult to estimate exact numbers, but millions would have perished.
Bands of Turkic adventurers poured into India to seek their fortune. Bakhtiyar Khilji was one of these adventurers.20 He seems to have arrived in Ghazni from Central Asia around 1195 before moving to India as a soldier. He soon managed to get himself a small estate near Mirzapur (now in Uttar Pradesh) where he gathered a sizeable body of Central Asian soldiers of fortune like himself. Around 1200, Bakhtiyar attacked and destroyed the famous university of Nalanda. Most of the Brahmin scholars and Buddhist monks were put to death and its library was torched. Another famous university at Vikramshila was similarly destroyed soon thereafter.
The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History Page 15
