Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography (13 page)

For fifteen centuries, this Christian community continued to observe old practices, including the use of Syriac, a dialect of the Aramaic language. Aramaic is the language that would have been used by Jesus Christ himself and it is astonishing that it survived in isolation for so long in India
⁷
. Unfortunately, the Portuguese tried to forcibly eradicate Jewish customs, including the language, and replace them with Catholic ones in the sixteenth century. Nonetheless, some ancient traditions live on in the Syrian Christian community.

As one can see, the legacy of the ancient trade-routes is still very much alive and is yet another example of India’s astonishing ability to maintain civilizational continuities. If Cleopatra had made good her escape, we would probably have a group that directly traced its origins to the Egyptian queen and Julius Caesar. It is still possible to experience the atmosphere of those times in the older parts of Kochi (Cochin). Pepper, ginger and other spices are still warehoused and traded in the bylanes. Deals are sometimes negotiated using a system of hand signals, hidden from onlookers by a cloth, that evolved centuries ago. Sitting in the toddy-shop, I watch modern ships ply in the harbour. I imagine myself as Hippalus, the ancient Greek mariner, enjoying his first drink after months at sea. Not far is ‘Jew Town’ where a tiny Jewish community lives clustered around a sixteenth-century synagogue. The Jews must have been held in high esteem by King Rama Varma for he allowed the construction of the synagogue right next to his palace. Sadly, the community has been sharply depleted in recent decades by emigration to Israel.

Even as the western coast traded with the Middle East and the Graeco–Roman world, the eastern coast of India saw a similar boom in trade with South-East Asia and all the way to China. There were dozens of ports all along the coast including the great port of Tamralipti in Bengal, the cluster of ports around Chilka lake in Orissa (recently renamed Odisha), the Pallava port of Mahabalipuram and the Chola port of Nagapattinam. Note that I am generalizing about a very long period of time and the relative importance of the various ports waxed and waned over the centuries.

From these ports, merchant fleets set sail for Suvarnadwipa (the Island of Gold or Sumatra) and Yavadwipa (Java). Some of them sailed on further to what is now South Vietnam. It is here, thousands of miles from the Indian mainland, that we see the rise of the first Indianized kingom in South East Asia. Chinese texts tell us of the Hindu kingdom of Funan that flourished in the Mekong delta in the second century
AD
.
⁸
According to a legend told both by Chinese sources as well as by local inscriptions, the kingdom was founded by the Indian Brahmin, Kaundinya, who married a local princess of the Naga (Snake) clan. Together they founded a dynasty that ruled Funan for a hundred and fifty years. The Naga or snake motif would remain an important royal symbol in this part of the world.

The capital of Funan was Vyadhapura, now the Cambodian village of Banam and its main port was Oc Eo. In the early twentieth century, French colonial archaeologists found the remains of a large urban agglomeration of houses built on
stilts along a network of canals extending 200 kilometers. There were irrigation canals as well as big canals that were navigable by ocean-going vessels. This is why it was possible for Chinese travellers to talk about sailing across Funan on their way to the Malayan peninsula.

Over the next thousand years, Funan’s legacy would evolve into the great Hindu–Buddhist kingdoms of Angkor in Cambodia and Champa in Vietnam. Strongly Indianized kingdoms and cultures evolved in other parts of South East Asia as well. In Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, the Srivijaya kingdom prospered on trade between India and China. In Java, a succession of Hindu kingdoms culminated in the powerful Majapahit empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Significantly, Indian civilization exerted this influence on South East Asia almost exclusively through trade and, with the exception of the Chola raids on Srivijaya in the eleventh century, there is no record of Indian military intervention in the region. Contrast this with successive Chinese emperors who repeatedly tried to impose a tributary relationship with these kingdoms. Although they sometimes succeeded in gaining temporary submission, often backed by military threats, they failed to match India in making civilizational inroads till the voyages of Admiral Zheng He in the fifteenth century.

The cultural impact of this era lives on in South-East Asia. It may be most obvious in the Hindu island of Bali, but, throughout the region, the influence of ancient India is alive in the names of places and people as well as the large number of Indian-derived words used in everyday speech. The national
languages of both Malaysia and Indonesia are called ‘Bahasa’, and both are full of Sanskrit words. Indeed, the name itself is derived from the Sanskrit word
bhasha
meaning language. From Myanmar to Vietnam, Buddhism remains the dominant religion. To this day, the coronation of the king of Buddhist Thailand and other royal ceremonies must be done by Hindu priests. There are more shrines to the god Brahma in Bangkok than in all of India.

India’s influence is civilizational rather than narrowly religious, and it extends all the way to the Korean peninsula. The prestige associated with ancient Indian civilization, for example, is recalled in the national myth of Korea. According to the
Samguk Yusa
,
⁹
Princess Huh Hwang-ok of Ayodhya sailed all the way to Korea to marry King Suro in the fourth century
AD
. They had ten sons and together founded Korea’s earliest dynasty. The Gimhae Kim clan claims to be direct descendants of this union and remains influential (former President Kim Dae Jung was from this clan).

It is amazing how the essence of a civilization can survive over large distances in space and time. Watching the Ramayana performed in the Javanese style against a backdrop of the ninth-century Prambanan temples in Java, one is struck by how the landscape of a far-off time and a faraway land is evoked. The stone temples transform themselves from scene to scene—sometimes they recall the rocky outcrops of Kishkindha, sometimes Ravan’s palace in Lanka. A couple of hours’ drive away, the sunset seen from the top of the Buddhist stupa at Borobodur retains its magical effect even if Buddhist chants have now been replaced by the Islamic call to prayer.

In India, too, cultural traditions continue to recall the ancient
trade routes. For instance, in the state of Orissa, the festival of Kartik Purnima still celebrates the day when Sadhaba merchants set sail for South-East Asia. People light lamps before sunrise and set them afloat on small paper boats in rivers or in the sea. The festival is held in early November when the monsoon winds reverse. At the same time, in the town of Cuttack, a large fair takes place—called ‘Bali-Yatra’ (literally meaning ‘the voyage to Bali’), scholars feel it marks the departure of merchant fleets for the island of Bali.
¹⁰
These festivals echo a culture that celebrated its entrepreneurs and risk-takers.

Further south, the seventh-century stone temple of Mahabalipuram still stands on the shore as if waiting for merchant fleets to come home. The town, 60 km south of modern Chennai, was a thriving port under the Pallava dynasty from the seventh to the ninth century
AD
. According to local legend, the existing temple complex was only one of seven such temple complexes that once existed. It was said that the sea swallowed up the other six temples as well as numerous palaces, bazaars and other grand buildings. Local fishermen had tales of how their nets would often get tangled in underwater structures. Serious historians, however, used to dismiss these stories as mere myth.

On 26 December 2006, a massive earthquake devastated the Indonesian province of Aceh and triggered a tsunami across the Indian Ocean. The event is estimated to have killed 230,000 people. The tsunami struck India’s south-eastern coast as well. However, before the waves crashed in, the sea withdrew a couple of kilometres. The residents of Mahabalipuram reported seeing a number of large stone
structures rising from the seabed. Then the sea returned and covered them up again. Since then, divers have confirmed that there are a large number of man-made structures out in the sea although they have not yet been systematically mapped. The tsunami also shifted the sands along the shore and uncovered a number of other structures, including a large stone lion.
¹¹
Archaeologists also found the foundations of a brick temple from the Sangam period that may have been destroyed by a tsunami 2200 years ago. A second tsunami may have hit this coast in the thirteenth century. Yet again, folk memory has been proved to have been based on historical fact even if one cannot exactly confirm if there indeed were another six temples in Mahabalipuram.

As we have seen, the boom in maritime trade made India both an economic and a cultural superpower. According to Angus Maddison, the country accounted for 33 per cent of world GDP in the first century
AD
. India’s share was three times that of western Europe and was much larger than that of the Roman empire as a whole (21 per cent). China’s share of 26 per cent of world GDP was significantly smaller than India’s
¹²
. He also estimates India’s population at 75 million (compared to today’s 1.2 billion).

What did the merchant fleets plying the Indian Ocean look like in this era? There were a wide variety of vessels, ranging from small boats for river and coastal use to large ships with double masts for long sea voyages. There were also regional variations. As shown in the panels of Borobodur, the
Indonesians preferred a design with outriggers. However, they all seem to have shared a peculiar design trait: they were not held together by nails; they were stitched together with rope! Throughout the ages, travellers from outside the Indian Ocean world have repeatedly commented on this odd design preference. The technique persisted into modern times—locally built vessels were being stitched together well into the twentieth century. A survey of the Orissa coast by Eric Kentley in the 1980s found that boats called ‘padua’ were still being made by sewing together planks with coir ropes.
¹³
I am told that there are boat-builders who continue using this approach into the twenty-first century. Like the Harappan ox-cart, it is another example of how ancient technologies live on in India even as it adopts new ones.

It is unclear why the shipbuilders in the Indian Ocean region had such a strong preference for this peculiar technique when they had access to iron nails from an early stage. It has been suggested that it may have been the result of a superstition that magnetic lodestones in the sea would suck in ships with iron-nails, but this is a very unlikely explanation. More likely, it was a response to the fact that these ships sailed in waters full of atolls and reefs, and had to be beached in many places due to the lack of sheltered harbours or due to the rough monsoon sea. All this required a hull that was a bit flexible and would not break-up easily. The stitched technique provided this flexibility although it would later limit the ability of Indian ship-building to match Chinese and then European design innovations.

So, how did it feel to sail in these ships? A Chinese scholar Fa Xian (also spelled Fa Hien) visited India in the fifth century
and has left us a fascinating account of his return journey by the sea route.
¹⁴
Fa Xian came to India by the land route through Central Asia. He spent several years in northern India studying and gathering Buddhist texts. He then made his way to the port of Tamralipti. The site of this famous port of antiquity, now called Tamluk, is not far from modern Kolkata. It is close to where the Rupnarayan river joins the Gangetic delta, but the old channel that served the port has silted up and is no longer navigable. Except for a 1200-year-old temple dedicated to the goddess Kali, there is little there to hint at a glorious past as a successful hub of commerce. Indeed, Tamluk is close to the infamous village of Nandigram where a dispute over land acquisition in 2007 led to a bloody clash between the state government and locals that left scores dead. It is now considered a hotbed of Maoist rebels.

In 410
AD
, however, Fa Xian would have found a port town bustling with activity. He tells us that he boarded a large merchant ship bound for Sri Lanka. The voyage was during the winter months when the monsoons winds would have been blowing south. The ship sailed in a south-westerly direction for just fourteen days before arriving in Sri Lanka. Fa Xian calls it the Land of the Lions—a clear reference to the mythical origins of the Sinhalese people (there were never any real lions in Sri Lanka).

The Chinese scholar spent two years in Sri Lanka studying Buddhist texts before setting sail for South East Asia. He tells us that it was a large vessel that could carry two hundred people. It was accompanied by a smaller ship that carried extra provisions and could help in an emergency. Unfortunately, after two days at sea, the ships were caught in
a major storm and the larger ship sprang a leak. Suddenly there was panic. Many of the merchants wanted to shift to the smaller vessel immediately, but its crew panicked when faced with a virtual stampede. They cut the cables and sailed off. This further increased the state of panic. The merchants were now forced to throw most of their goods overboard. Fa Xian tells us that he too threw away his water-pitcher, wash-basin and other possessions. He was afraid that the merchants would also throw out his precious cargo of books, but fortunately this did not happen.

Finally, after thirteen days, the storm cleared up. The crew beached the ship on a small island, possibly one of the Andaman and Nicobar islands. The leak was found and repaired before they set sail again. We are told that the mood remained tense because the area was notorious for pirates and the crew was not quite sure about their location. In the end, however, they regained their bearings and set a course for Java.