Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography (19 page)

Given this cultural shift, Indian
merchants became increasingly shore-based, while shipping passed mostly into the
hands of Arabs. However, there were also Jews, Persians and even the Chinese. Ibn
Batuta saw a number of Chinese ships in Calicut (Kozhikode) and he describes a
military junk that must have accompanied a merchant fleet. It was large enough to
accommodate a thousand men, six hundred sailors and four hundred men-at-arms. In
other words, Ibn Batuta was exploiting a very active trading network on his
journeys. It is testimony to the vigour and sophistication of this network that Ibn
Batuta met a man from Ceuta, a city very close to his home town of Tangier, first in
Delhi and then, accidentally, again in China.
³⁴
Ibn Batuta may have been the one to write about his travels but the routes he
took were well known to the world of Arab merchants.

Nonetheless, the spirit of ancient India
was kept alive for
several more centuries by the kingdoms of
South East Asia. Angkor continued to be the capital of the Khmer empire till it was
sacked by the Thais in 1431. Its ruins must be seen to be believed. Lesser known but
equally interesting are the remains of the kingdom of Champa in Vietnam. The kingdom
flourished till its capital Vijaya was sacked by Viet troops in 1471. A smaller Cham
kingdom would limp along till it, too, was overrun in the late seventeenth century.
Hindu temples built by the Chams are scattered across Vietnam—a few are
still used by the tiny Balamon Cham community that continues to practise Hinduism
(they number around 30,000). Sadly, the most important cluster of Cham temples in My
Son was heavily bombed by the Americans during the Vietnam war. The site is now
designated a UNESCO World Heritage site but frankly there is very little to see. The
small museum at the entrance has some pre-war photographs that provide an idea of
its former glory.

Perhaps the most vigorous of the
India-inspired cultures, however, was that of Java. In the fourteenth century, the
Majapahits of Java had established direct or indirect control over much of what is
now Indonesia. As they expanded, they pushed out the ancient Srivijaya kingdom based
in Sumatra. A naval raid on the Srivijaya capital of Palembang in 1377 finally
eliminated their main rival in the region.
³⁵

Faced with the Javan threat, one of the
Srivijaya princes, Sang Nila Utama, is said to have sought refuge in the Riau
cluster of islands, just south of the Malay peninsula. One day, so the story goes,
he had gone hunting on the island of Temasek where he is said to have seen a lion.
So, when he built a settlement here, he named it Singapura (Sanskrit for Lion-
City). This is how Singapore got its name—although
the prince had almost certainly not seen a lion but a Malayan tiger. The last wild
tiger of Singapore was killed in the 1930s in the neighborhood of Choa Chu Kang.

One of Sang Nila Utama’s
successors, Parmeswara, appears to have found Singapore untenable due to local
rivalries and the continued threat of the Javans. He moved farther north and
established his headquarters at Melaka (also spelled Malacca). This is what
South-East Asia looked like when Admiral Zheng He arrived with the Chinese
‘treasure fleet’.

Zheng He was an unlikely admiral for the
Chinese fleet. He was a Muslim eunuch from land-locked Yunnan who had been brought
as a boy prisoner to the Ming court and castrated. Yet, he led seven major naval
expeditions between 1405 and 1433 that visited South-East Asia, India, Sri Lanka,
Arabia and East Africa. The ‘treasure fleets’ were of an
astonishing scale, with over hundred ships and tens of thousands of men. Chinese
naval technology at this stage was centuries ahead of the rest of the world. In
recent years, some authors have argued that Zheng He may even have visited the
Americas. He certainly had the technology, but I am not convinced that he actually
made the journey across the Pacific.

The naval expeditions had many
objectives including trade and exploration. However, the main goal was to project
Chinese power and to cement its geo-political position. The Chinese had overthrown
Mongol rule just a few decades earlier, and they were very keen to establish their
place in the world. If the sheer size of the fleet did not overawe the locals, Zheng
He was prepared to make military interventions as he did in a civil war in Sri
Lanka.

When Zheng He was making his voyages,
there already existed a number of Chinese settlements in South East Asia but the
Majapahit empire of Java was the most powerful in the region.
³⁶
Indeed, a century earlier, the Javans had militarily beaten back
Chinese–Mongol attempts to establish control in the region. In 1378, the
Ming emperor had sent envoys to try and instal his candidate on the Srivijaya
throne. The Majapahit had, not surprisingly, seen this as interference in their
sphere of influence and had killed the envoys.
³⁷

Zheng He would have been aware of this
history. The Chinese admiral, therefore, decided to create a counterweight by
supporting Parmeswara’s nascent kingdom in Melaka. A large Chinese
settlement was created in Melaka and Parmeswara personally visited the Ming court.
Most interestingly, the Chinese encouraged the Melakans to convert to Islam. Zheng
He and many of his commanders were Muslims, but this policy is unlikely to have been
driven merely by religious zeal. By most indications, Zheng He had a pragmatic view
of religion. It is probable that Chinese support of Islam in South East Asia was
more of a geo-political strategy to create a counterweight to the Hindus of
Java.

It is even possible that the Chinese
wanted to diminish the outside risk of an Indian revival re-exerting its influence
on the region. The Chinese of this period were very conscious of themselves as a
civilizational nation and wanted to establish themselves as the civilizational top
dog. In any event, the Chinese strategy set in motion the steady Islamization of
South East Asia.
³⁸
Melaka boomed while the Majapahit slowly withdrew till the last of the
Majapahit princes sought refuge in the small island of Bali, where their descendants
have kept
alive their culture. The network of Chinese merchants
survived European colonization and they are still an important part of business in
the region.

The Chinese domination of the seas,
however, came to an abrupt end. The mandarins decided that the voyages were not
worth the expense. The treasure fleets were allowed to rot and their records
suppressed. Like India, China turned inward and slipped into centuries of decline.
Technological superiority could not save China from the closing of the mind. For a
while, it seemed that the Indian Ocean would revert to the Arabs but that was not to
be. In December 1497, a small Portuguese fleet rounded the Cape of Good Hope and
sailed boldly into the Indian Ocean.

As we saw in
Chapter 3
, geographical awareness jumped sharply between the Vedic Age and the Iron Age. The epics clearly show knowledge of the far corners of the subcontinent. They certainly had a fairly detailed knowledge of the terrain by the time of the Mauryan empire. But, did ancient Indians try to map their country? Over centuries of maritime trade, they would have come to know quite a lot about the geography of the Indian Ocean rim, even as far as the Chinese coast in the west and of the Red Sea in the east. At the same time, they were also quite used to diagrammatic representation of ideas, including architectural plans. Thanks to Aryabhatta, by the time of the Guptas, Indians were aware that the world was spherical and even had a fairly accurate estimate of its circumference. All the ingredients of cartography were there—one would have expected the Indians to pull
together this knowledge to systematically map their country and the surrounding oceans. Similarly, one would expect that there would be maritime manuals equivalent to the Greek
Periplus
to help merchants and seamen.

Yet, there is nothing to prove that ancient Indians ever attempted to map their country or systematically write down geographical knowledge. A seaman’s manual written in the Kutchhi dialect of Gujarat has been found, but it exists as a relatively modern copy and nothing is known of its history.
¹
Of maps there are none. Of course, it is entirely possible that such things existed but have been lost. What survives is a cosmological scheme centred around ‘Jambudwipa’ or the Continent of the Rose Apple that was really not meant as a cartographic description.
²

I am not suggesting that ancient Indians did not have a sense of geography. If anything, they were very strongly conscious of the layout of the subcontinent and, given their maritime activities, of the Indian Ocean rim. Thus, when the famous eighth-century philosopher Adi Shankaracharya set up four monasteries, he chose sites in the four corners of the country—Puri in the east, Dwarka in the west, Sringeri in the south and Joshimath in the north. This is clearly not a random distribution. Nonetheless, it does seem that cartography as a science did not flourish in ancient India.

In contrast, the Arabs wrote several books on geography during the medieval period. They also preserved some of the works of classical scholars like Ptolemy of Alexandria at a time when Christian Europe would have dismissed such knowledge as pagan. In the twelfth century, the famous Moorish geographer, Al Idrisi, drew a map that combined his
own knowledge with that of Ptolemy. It showed the Indian Ocean as landlocked, an idea that suited Arab interests by discouraging any attempt by Europeans to find a sea route to the east. By the fourteenth century, the Persians were drawing maps that show the Indian peninsula. Nonetheless, the quality of cartography remained quite basic. The real experts of medieval cartography were the Chinese. They had long been drawing maps of their own country. By the time of Admiral Zheng He, or perhaps as a result of his voyages, they had good strip-maps of shipping routes through South East Asia and even of parts of the East African coast. These are mostly in the nature of sailing instructions rather than accurate representations of the physical geography, but they are surprisingly detailed and far in advance of anything possessed by other people.

Meanwhile, Europe was literally in the dark about the geography of Asia. The Arabs appear to have been able to enforce an information blockade over centuries. With the works of classical geographers lost and memories of pre-Islamic trade with India fading, Europe was hostage to garbled information and even blatant charlatans. One of the most famous of the charlatans was Sir John Mandeville, an Englishman who wrote a book full of fantastical tales called simply
The Travels
. He set off from St. Albans in 1322 and returned to England thirty-four years later claiming to have visited India, China, Java, Sumatra and many other places. Geographers, kings and priests studied the book in detail and it was translated into virtually every important European language. His importance can be gauged from the fact that 300 handwritten copies of
The Travels
have survived in various libraries, four times as many as Marco Polo’s book.
³

Some writers like Giles Milton have argued that Mandeville’s stories about the Eastern Mediterranean have an element of truth in them, but it cannot be denied that his writings about Asia are outrageous. He talks of women with dogs’ heads, one-eyed giants, geese with two heads, giant snails, men with testicles that dangled between their knees, and cannibal pagans who ate their babies. He embellished the widely-held medieval belief that India was ruled by a powerful Christian king called Prester John. Mandeville tells us that he arrived in India after an arduous overland journey but was pleased to find the rich and populous kingdom of Prester John. He goes to some length to describe the palace and the liberal use of precious stones. We are told that the emperor ruled over a massive kingdom and was waited upon by seven kings, seventy-two dukes and 360 earls—all Christian. Every time he went to battle, he was accompanied by three huge crosses of solid gold. Each cross was protected by 10,000 men-at-arms and 100,000 foot soldiers.
⁴
All this was lapped up by Europeans pleased to hear that there was a potential Christian ally in the east.

Despite everything, Mandeville’s book had a very profound impact on the history of the world. He claimed that his travels had proved that the world was round and his book popularized the idea that it was possible to reach India by sailing west. Columbus planned his 1492 expedition after reading
The Travels
, and explorers like Raleigh read the book very carefully. Thus, one of the greatest discoveries of history was based on an elaborate lie!

Not all reports by European travellers, however, were fictional. With the sudden expansion of the Mongol empire in
the thirteenth century, the Arab stranglehold was finally broken and a few Europeans did genuinely travel to the east. The best known of these is Marco Polo. He is today remembered for his travels along the Silk Route to China and his stay at the court of Kublai Khan. However, he returned home by the sea route through South East Asia around 1292. On the way, he visited the ports of southern India and has left us extensive descriptions of what he saw. He tells us of bustling ports that exported pepper and imported horses, of Hindu temples and rituals, of diving for pearls, of a royal harem with 500 concubines, and even of a popular and wise queen who ruled an inland kingdom that produced diamonds (probably Kakatiya queen Rudrama Devi of Golkonda).
⁵

Polo’s facts and Mandeville’s fiction both fired the European imagination. As the Renaissance took hold in the fifteenth century, European scholars opened their minds to the knowledge of classical civilizations. The works of Ptolemy were revisited and there were attempts to draw maps of India based on his descriptions. The Ptolemaic maps are a strange construct. Since no maps had survived from classical times, they were drawn purely by reading a text. Therefore, the Ptolemaic maps miss out on basic facts that would have been so obvious to Ptolemy himself that he did not dwell on them in his text. For instance, the maps do not show India’s coastline as a peninsula but as a long east–west coast. Furthermore, the texts were over a thousand years old by the time they were being used to re-construct India’s geography. Thus, they prominently mark places like Taxila that had disappeared over a millennia earlier. Such was the state of knowledge when the Portuguese decided to look for a way around Africa.

The Portuguese were the first European country to invest heavily into the systematic mapping of the world’s oceans. Prince Henry the Navigator, the king’s younger brother, became a patron of cartography and exploration. Through the fifteenth century, the Portuguese explored the west coast of Africa and established trading posts and refuelling points. Imagine their indignation when Spain backed a maverick called Columbus who sailed west, based on patchy and erroneous data, and made one of the greatest discoveries of history. Incensed, they lobbied with the Pope to divide the world into Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence. As per the Treaty of Tordesillas 1494, Spain was awarded a claim to all lands west of a meridian of longitude 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands. All lands discovered to the east of the line belonged to Portugal.

When it soon became clear that Columbus had not found a westward route to India, the Portuguese must have heaved a sigh of relief. They knew from an earlier voyage led by Bartholomeu Dias that Africa could be rounded. A new expedition was prepared in 1497 under Vasco da Gama. It comprised of three ships—the flagship
San Gabriel
, the smaller
San Rafael
and the traditional caravel
Barrio
.
⁶
An unarmed supply-ship also accompanied them part of the way. Note that these ships would have been quite small and unsophisticated compared to those of Admiral Zheng He, but the Chinese had already withdrawn into an inward-looking shell and were no threat to the Portuguese.

The fleet set sail on 8 July 1497 and rounded the Cape of
Good Hope by November. After this point Vasco was in uncharted waters. As they sailed up the Mozambique coast, the Portuguese began to encounter Arabic-speaking people. Vasco must have been very pleased to see this because it proved that he was indeed in the Indian Ocean. The Arabs had long established slaving ports along this coast and some of them had grown into sizeable habitations. However, no one in this world expected to come upon a European fleet. Indeed, it appears that the Arabs initially thought that these fair-skinned foreigners were Turks. The Portuguese had the advantage of having several Arabic speakers amongst them as the Iberian peninsula had only recently been liberated from Moorish rule. Thus, they were able to converse with the locals and pretend to be fellow-Muslims. When asked by a local sheikh for his copy of the Koran, Vasco lied that he had left it behind in his homeland near Turkey.
⁷

The deception could not last for ever and was eventually discovered. The Portuguese fended off an attack and hastily sailed farther north in search of Kilwa, an island-city and port that was important enough to be known in Europe. However, they got lost and instead found themselves in Mombasa which was another important port-city. Unfortunately, news of their deception had already made its way up the coast and the Portuguese narrowly escaped being lured into a trap by the sultan of Mombasa.

Vasco da Gama pushed farther north. Along the coast, he made inquiries about Christians and about the kingdom of Prester John. At last he found himself in the harbour of Malindi, a port that had been visited by the Chinese treasure fleet eighty years earlier and was the source of two giraffes that had
been taken back to China. The ruler of Malindi was under no illusions about the identity of his guests but was in need of allies against Mombasa. He, therefore, opted to welcome the Portuguese.

Alvaro Velho, one of Da Gama’s soldiers, has left us a description of the part-Arab, part-African world of the Swahili coast. The larger port-towns like Mombasa and Malindi had houses built of stone and lime. The population was mainly black African, with a ruling class of Arab extract. The merchants were mainly Arab but some Indians continued to visit these parts despite the caste restrictions. Vestiges of this world can still be seen in the Stone-Town of Zanzibar, Tanzania. The island of Zanzibar remained a major source of slaves bound for the Middle East till the nineteenth century. It continued to be ruled by an Omani Arab dynasty, under British protection, till as recently as 1963.

A community of Indian merchants had long visited Zanzibar but, under British protection, many more went to settle down there. By the early decades of the twentieth century, there was a thriving Indian community on the island. The singer Freddie Mercury was born here into a Parsi family in 1946. His name at birth was Farrokh Balsara and the house where he spent the first few years of his life still stands in Stone-Town. In a bloody revolution in 1963, however, the Arab dynasty was overthrown, thousands of Arabs and Indians were killed and the island soon became a semi-autonomous province of Tanzania. Still, a small Indian community lives in the narrow lanes of Stone-Town, speaking the Kutchhi dialect of Gujarat and worshipping in the few remaining temples. There was something about the atmosphere of Zanzibar that
reminded me strongly of the old parts of Kochi and even of old Ahmedabad on the other side of the Indian Ocean. Perhaps it was the food, the smell of spices sold in the open, sailing-dhows bobbing in the sea or just the weight of centuries of trade with India.

In early 1498, Vasco da Gama had been trying to get a good pilot to guide his fleet across the Indian Ocean but was having difficulty finding one. In Malindi his luck changed and the sultan provided him with an experienced pilot described as a ‘Moor from Gujarat’. There is considerable debate about the identity of this pilot and some scholars have argued that it may have been the famous Arab navigator Ibn Majid. In reality we know very little about the man except that Velho called him by the name Malema Cana.

Both the pilot and the weather proved to be good, and the Portuguese fleet reached the Indian coast in barely twenty-three days. The open harbour of Kozhikode (also called Calicut) was filled with vessels of different sizes and the beach was lined with shops and warehouses. Further inland was a large and opulent city. The Portuguese ships were a novelty and we are told that the locals rowed up to them, women and children in tow, to have a closer look.

The ruler of Calicut was the Samudrin or Lord of the Sea (often mispronounced as Zamorin). He lived in a large palace and was protected by ferocious warriors of the Nair caste. The majority of the people were Hindu, but the Portuguese initially thought of them as debased Christians. Their confusion may have been partly derived from the legends of Prester John and partly from the presence of communities of genuine Christians. They would correct their view later. The
Portuguese would have also noticed that maritime trade was dominated by a large and powerful community of Arab merchants who would not be pleased to see them.