The common practice of Buddhism in India had been in steady decline but it was still home to several institutions that attracted pilgrims and scholars from abroad. It now collapsed from the systematic destruction of these institutions. The Turks were unbelievably cruel towards Hindus and even fellow Muslims, but they seem to have reserved their worst for the Buddhists. One possible explanation for this is that they themselves had converted to Islam from Buddhism relatively recently and felt that they had to prove a point.
Encouraged by these successes, Bakhtiyar Khilji now decided to attempt the conquest of the wealthy kingdom of Bengal. Avoiding the usual routes, he led his army through the jungles of Jharkhand and made a surprise attack on Nabadwip, a pilgrimage town on the Ganga. It so happened that the aging ruler of Bengal, Lakshman Sen, was visiting the town when a scouting party of eighteen Turkic horsemen was seen approaching the city. Taken totally by surprise, Lakshman Sen and his retinue escaped by boat. The popular version of this story is often told as if Bakhtiyar Khilji conquered Bengal with eighteen horsemen. In reality, the Sen dynasty would keep up an active resistance in East Bengal for another half a century by using the riverine terrain against Turkic cavalry.
After pillaging Bengal for two years, Bakhtiyar, it would seem, got bored. Ever the thrill seeker, he now decided to cross the Himalayas and conquer Tibet. He marched north and crossed the Teesta River by a stone bridge. He also asked the king of Kamrup (modern Assam) for troops and supplies. The Assamese king delayed, so an impatient Bakhtiyar decided to carry on by himself. The Turks raped and looted their way through the mountains of Darjeeling and Sikkim before entering Tibet. Here he faced stiffer resistance. With supply lines stretched, Bakhtiyar decided to retreat but his army was relentlessly harassed by guerrilla attacks as it made its way back through the mountain passes. Supplies were so short that the Turks were forced to eat some of their horses.21
When the retreating army finally reached the Teesta, they found that the Assamese had destroyed the bridge and laid a trap. In the end, most of the Turks were killed by the Assamese or drowned in a desperate attempt to cross the fast-flowing river. Bakhtiyar escaped with only a hundred of his men. Unfortunately for him, he had now lost his authority and was soon assassinated by one of his followers. The death of Bakhtiyar Khilji, however, did not slow the Turks. In 1235, the great city of Ujjain, a major Hindu religious and cultural centre in Madhya Pradesh, was destroyed by the Delhi Sultanate.
If the Turks were feeling smug about their successes in India, they were about to get a taste of their own medicine. The Mongols led by Chengiz Khan attacked and devastated the Turkic homelands in Central Asia in 1220–22. They soon conquered Iran and went on to sack Baghdad in 1258. The region would be ruled by Chengiz Khan’s descendants for the next century and, despite the fact that Mongols were generally tolerant of different religions, for a while there was genuine concern that Islam would not recover from this shock. Interestingly, till they converted to Islam towards the end of their rule, the Mongol rulers of Iran were Buddhists or shamanists. This Buddhist episode in Iranian history is now almost forgotten.
Even as the Mongols were marching into the Middle East, they were simultaneously making inroads into China. Chengiz Khan captured the Yanjing (modern Beijing) capital of the northern Jin kingdom in 1215. However, the conquest of the southern Song empire would be a long and bloody affair that would be completed by Chengiz’s grandson, Kublai, in 1276. It is said that the last Song emperor, an eight-year-old boy, would die after jumping into the sea to avoid capture.
The rapid and simultaneous collapse of three established civilizations is difficult to explain merely on the basis of the tactical superiority of Turko-Mongol cavalry. All three civilizations had long experience of dealing with Central Asians. The popular perception in India is that the Hindus were unable to deal with a younger and more vigorous Islam. This too is inaccurate because Hindus had been dealing quite successfully with Islam for five centuries before Muhammad Ghori broke through. Moreover, the Turks did not conquer India during a period of glorious Muslim expansion but at a time when Islam itself was under severe stress in the Middle East and Central Asia. Were the established civilizations weakened by the equivalent of the Plague of Justinian in Asia? We know that the Black Death would devastate Europe and the Middle East in the following century, but did some such epidemic affect China and India in the thirteenth century? The available records are silent.
Whatever the reasons for the success of the Turks in India, the systematic destruction of temples did not just hurt intellectual and cultural life but also had a long-term paralysing impact on finance and risk-taking. As already discussed, temples acted as banks and their destruction meant that Indian merchant networks suddenly lost their financial muscle. Thus, we see a distinct decline in the importance of seafaring Indian merchants in the Indian Ocean rim from this point. The Indian merchant class became much more shore-based while the space they vacated was steadily taken over by Arabs and the Chinese. In other words, the Arabs and the Chinese recovered faster from the Turko-Mongol shock. In contrast, Indian Hindus imposed on themselves caste rules that discouraged the crossing of the seas. Why did a people with such a strong maritime tradition impose these restrictions on themselves? Was it a loss of civilizational self-confidence? I have long looked for a satisfactory answer but have not yet found one.
Nonetheless, I do not want to leave the reader with the impression that the Turks always had an easy time in India. Although they conquered the Gangetic plains with relative ease, they faced much stiffer resistance in other places. For instance, when they attempted to invade Odisha in 1247, the Turks were soundly defeated by Narasimha Deva I. It is said that the Odiya king pretended that he would embrace Islam and surrender the temple of Puri. However, while the Turks were celebrating their victory, the temple bells began to ring to signal a surprise attack by the Odiya army. The Odiya then chased the invaders back into Bengal. It is likely that the famous Sun Temple in Konark was built by Narasimha Deva I to celebrate this victory. At that time, Konark was a thriving port with links across the Indian Ocean. One of the temple’s panels depicts the king, seated on an elephant, receiving the gift of a giraffe from a foreign ambassador!
The Travellers
Despite the destruction caused by the Turko-Mongol hordes on land, the maritime world of the Indian Ocean recovered soon enough. Perhaps the most vivid eyewitness account of the times has been left behind by two travellers—Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta. The former was born in 1254 to a Venetian merchant who made a journey to China around 1260. A seventeen-year-old Marco Polo would join his father when he decided to make a second journey in 1271. Over the next twenty years, the Polos would travel extensively in the Mongol empire before returning to Venice. Several years after his return, Marco Polo would be captured in a war with Genoa and imprisoned. It was in prison that he dictated his book, The Travels, to a cellmate.
The book is mostly remembered for its descriptions of the Silk Route through Central Asia and of Kublai Khan’s empire in China, but it is often forgotten that Marco Polo returned home by the sea route and has left us many interesting observations about the Indian Ocean world. He set sail in 1290 from the port Zaiton (Quanzhou) as part of a delegation accompanying a Mongol princess being sent to get married to the Mongol ruler of Persia.
According to Marco Polo, the Chinese ships of the period were the largest in the world:
In most ships, are at least sixty cabins, each of which can easily accommodate one merchant. They have one steer oar and four masts. Often they add another two masts. . . . The crew needed to man a ship ranges from 150–300 according to her size. One ship can take five or six thousand baskets of pepper. 22
Polo tells us that as they sailed south they stopped at the kingdom of Champa. A few years earlier, the Mongols had sent a large army to subdue the Chams who had stoutly defended their fortified cities. However, the devastation in the countryside had been so great that they had ultimately agreed
to pay an annual tribute to Kublai Khan of aloe wood and twenty elephants. From Champa, they sailed in a south-westerly direction till they came to the island of Bintan (this is probably the Indonesian island of the same name, just south of Singapore). They then sailed up the Straits of Malacca along the eastern coast of Sumatra. It appears that the Sri Vijaya kingdom had disintegrated by this time as Polo tells us that it was divided into eight independent kingdoms. He also tells us that most inhabitants of the island were Hindu–Buddhist but that the small kingdom of Ferlec had converted to Islam (this is probably Perlak in Aceh, in the northern tip of Sumatra).
As they made their way into the Bay of Bengal, the ships stopped by the Nicobar Islands. Polo is quite disapproving of the fact that ‘the people live like beasts. I assure you that they go stark naked, men and women alike, without any covering of any sort’. This is an obvious reference to the native population of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands that, in some cases, have managed to maintain their hunter–gatherer lifestyles into modern times. However, note that this was a conscious preference rather than a lack of exposure to ‘civilization’. Far from it, the heavy flow of mercantile trade past these islands meant that the Nicobarese were very familiar with things like cloth. Marco Polo tells us that the locals had acquired sashes of very high-quality silk that hung in their huts as a sign of wealth but steadfastly refused to wear them.
Marco Polo’s ship now sailed across to Sri Lanka. Interestingly, he mentions that the island was once much larger and that part of it had been submerged in ancient times. One wonders if this medieval myth was a lingering memory of the Great Flood at the end of the last Ice Age. He next sailed north to India. Some of his accounts of the Indian coastline can be confusing at first glance as he mixes up the east and west coasts. Nevertheless, he relates some interesting anecdotes. For instance, he tells us that Indians were great believers in astrology and that business negotiations would often be suspended to avoid inauspicious times of the day. Polo also mentions that Indians had a peculiar way of drinking water—they poured the water into their mouths without the lips touching the cup. This way of drinking water still survives in parts of southern India!
Till Marco Polo’s time, India was almost the only source of diamonds. The Travels relates how the Indians acquired these gems. Evidently the Indians claimed that there was a valley full of venomous snakes where the ground was covered in diamonds. The diamond merchants obtained the gems, you guessed it, by throwing large chunks of meat into the valley. The diamonds would stick to the meat that giant eagles picked up and carried to their nests. As one can see, the story mentioned by Herodotus and in the Arabian Nights was still circulating in the Indian Ocean. Perhaps one of the most successful cock and bull stories ever; one wonders who came up with it originally.
Marco Polo also mentions that the source of the diamonds was an inland kingdom ruled by a wise and popular queen. This is very likely a reference to Rudrama Devi, the queen of the Kakatiya dynasty who ruled over a kingdom that included the diamond mines of Golconda (just outside modern Hyderabad). She came to the throne in 1262 as her father did not have any sons.23 Although she married a Chalukya prince, she remained the ruler and temple inscriptions tell us of how she personally led her armies to battle. She is depicted on a temple pillar riding a lion, like the goddess Durga, with a shield and sword.
Rudrama Devi ruled till around 1289, just a year before Marco Polo’s visit. Since she too had no sons, the throne was passed to her daughter’s son, Prataparudra. He would be the last Kakatiya king and would face the fury of repeated attacks by the armies of the Delhi Sultanate led by the notorious Malik Kafur. This is how Sultan Alauddin Khilji obtained the Koh-i-Noor diamond. An attack by the Turks on the city of Madurai further south ended the ancient Tamil dynasty of the Pandyas in 1311.
About half a century after Marco Polo, a Moroccan traveller called Ibn Battuta also visited India. He is arguably one of the greatest travel writers of all time and would eventually make his way to China before returning home to Tangier to write about his adventures. When Ibn Battuta visited India, the throne of Delhi was occupied by Muhammad bin Tughlaq. The Moroccan accepted a senior position in the Sultan’s government and spent many years in Delhi, but eventually he grew to fear the cruel and erratic ruler. Therefore, he was very relieved when he got the opportunity to accompany a diplomatic mission to China.
Along with the rest of the embassy, Ibn Battuta made his way from Delhi to Gujarat and then to the port of Calicut (i.e. Kozhikode) in Kerala. In his writings, the Moroccan traveller casually mentions the chaos and devastation caused by the Turks across India—the destroyed cities and the lawless countryside. He also tells us of his brush with ‘infidel bandits’ who should be more properly seen as an indigenous resistance to the Turkish invaders. In Kerala, however, the old spice ports were still thriving and crowded with foreign merchant ships. Ibn Battuta confirms Marco Polo’s testimony about the enormous size of Chinese ships. He describes a large junk that had a complement of a thousand men—six hundred soldiers and four hundred sailors:
In the vessel they build four decks, and it has cabins, suites and salons for merchants; a set of several rooms and a latrine; it can be locked by the occupant, and he can take along with him slave girls and wives.24
Clearly, some merchants lived well on the cruise. However, this does not mean that these voyages were not dangerous, as Ibn Battuta soon found out.
When the Sultan’s embassy arrived in Calicut, most of the space on the ships had already been taken. After some negotiations, the embassy and the Sultan’s gifts were accommodated in a large junk but the Moroccan found that none of the bigger suites were available for him and his harem of slave girls. Now, Ibn Battuta was not a man who was willing to go on a long voyage without a private salon where he could enjoy his slave girls. So, he had his personal effects shifted to a smaller ship which could accommodate the ladies.
The evening before they were supposed to embark, a storm began to blow and the heavy surf meant that Ibn Battuta was unable to get on the ship. The next morning, it was found that the large junk carrying the main embassy had been dashed on the shore and many had been killed. Among the dead bodies that were washed up on the shore were several of his companions, including one whose head had been pierced by a large iron nail used to build Chinese ships (the Indo-Arab stitching technique clearly had its advantages). Meanwhile, the smaller ship containing the Moroccan’s personal effects decided to sail off without him! Thus, he suddenly found himself penniless and stranded in Calicut. He would try to desperately contact the surviving ship but later would find out that his personal goods and slaves had been seized by the authorities in Sumatra and sold off.
Ever the adventurer, Ibn Battuta was not to be held down by misfortune for long. He was afraid to return to Delhi as he did not know how the Sultan would react to the news of the failed embassy. So, he joined a Turkic warlord on his invasion of the Hindu kingdom of Goa. He would later visit the Maldives that had been converted from Buddhism to Islam only a few decades earlier. The islands were the source of cowry shells that were used as small change across the Indian Ocean till well into the modern era. Here he landed himself a job as a Qadi and married a local lass but found that, despite the religious conversion, the natives were continuing with pre-Islamic social mores. He writes disapprovingly:
The womenfolk do not cover their heads, not even on one side. Most of them wear just one apron from the navel to the ground, the rest of their bodies being uncovered. It is thus that they walk abroad in the bazaars and elsewhere. When I was qadi there, I tried to put an end to the practice and ordered them to wear clothes, but I met with no success.25
Ibn Battuta ultimately would give up on the Maldivians and, leaving behind a pregnant wife, continue on his travels. He would eventually make his way through Sri Lanka and South East Asia to China. It is a testimony to the active trade routes of the times that in China he would meet a fellow Moroccan whom he had previously met several years
earlier in Delhi. Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta may have written down their experiences but it is clear that they were using well-established networks used by many others.
8
Treasure and Spice
As the testimonies of Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo show, the world of Indian Ocean trade survived the Turko-Mongol shock even if the relative importance of Indian merchants declined thereafter. The Mongols managed to extend their influence over Champa but when they tried to extend it to Japan and Java, they were rebuffed. Meanwhile, the steady decline of the Sri Vijaya in Sumatra meant that Java became the centre of political power in the region. Under the vigorous leadership of Kertanagara, the Javans extended their control over nearby islands like Bali and Madura. This expansion was briefly interrupted by a civil war when Kertanagara was assassinated by a vassal who usurped the throne in 1292.
The murdered king’s son-in-law, Kertarajasa, was organizing a revolt against the usurper when a Mongol fleet arrived from China with a large expeditionary force. Kertarajasa entered into an alliance with them and used them to recover the throne. If the Mongols were expecting the new king to become a grateful tributary, however, they were mistaken. Kertarajasa next turned on the foreigners and drove them away. He also established a new capital at Majapahit, the name by which his empire would be remembered.
Kertarajasa would be succeeded briefly by a son who died without issue, so the crown passed to his eldest daughter and her line. In medieval Java too, the matrilineal succession was important, but it was probably more like the Kakatiyas of south India, the female line being used when the direct patrilineal line did not produce a suitable male heir. Note how this is quite different from a purely patrilineal system where, in the absence of a son, the throne would pass to a nephew or male cousin even if distantly related.
The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History Page 16
