Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (44 page)

^*
In the romanised script for Sanskrit, c is pronounced as
ch
in
church
, j as in
judge.
A dot under t, d or n means that it must be sounded with tongue turned back, retroflex. A dot under an h means that it is followed by an echo of the previous vowel (e.g.
ka
, ‘who’, as
kah
^a
). A dot under an r or an I means that it is pronounced as a separate syllable, as
bitter, little
in American English. A dot under an m means that is pronounced simply by nasalising the preceding vowel:
aha
, ‘I’, is like American ‘uhuh?’. All the stop consonants (k, g, c, j, t, d,
,
, p, b) can be aspirated, and this is shown by a following h. There are three sibilants, ś,
and s: the first two are close to English
sh
, the former as in
sheet
, the latter with the darker sound as in
push.

The motive for the trade is also hinted at by the Sanskrit names that the Indians gave to parts of this eastern world. Śri Lanka was known as
Tāmradvīpa
, ‘copper island’, or
Tāmrapa
ī
, ‘copper-leafed’; the land beyond the eastern ocean as
Suva
advīpa, Suva
abhūmi
, ‘the isle, or the land, of gold’. These names survived to be taken up, or translated, by Greek explorers,
Taprobanē
for Śri Lanka, and
Khrysē Khersonēsos
, ‘Golden Peninsula’, for South-East Asia. There is little in these countries’ known geology to suggest that the names were well founded. But the quest for precious metals was clearly part of the legend of such ancient navigation. One of the most evocative tales in the Sanskrit equivalent of the
1001 Nights
, Somadeva’s
Kathāsaritsāgaram
(’Ocean of the Streams of Story’), recounts the quest of a Brahman, setting out for his lost loves in
Kanakapurī
, ‘The City of Gold’, located somewhere beyond ‘The Islands’. One of the merchants he meets on his way has a father who returns rich from a long voyage to a far island, his ship loaded specifically with gold.

More realistically, there was scope for immense profit either in entrepôt business, exchanging Indian aromatic resins (including frankincense (
kundura
) and myrrh (
vola)
) for Chinese silk, or in obtaining local products such as camphor (
karpūra
) from Sumatra, sandalwood (
candana
) from Timor or cloves (
lavanga
) from the Moluccas.
²⁸

Indians set out for this Land of Gold from all round the subcontinent. Evidently, the shortest journey was from
Gau
a
(modern Bengal) and Kalinga: we know that Fa-Xian and Yi-Jing took ship from Tamralipti. But the prevailing wind across the Bay of Bengal from June to November is south-westerly, so the most direct sailing was to be had from the southern shores, and this is the area of all the ports noted by the Greeks.
²⁹
A handful of inscriptions in Tamil, turning up in Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, confirm this route. The ports of the western coast also had their share of departures for the east: an old Gujarati proverb mentions the wealth of sailors back from Java.
³⁰