Welcome you all on the behalf of team India
first, to our discussion of the day - The Maritime history of India. India first as you know is a public discussion
forum which was floated around 3 years back and it was floated because of lots of causes,
public discussion in JNU is going downhill. It is going to a path of anarchism which we
have seen in the last few weeks. So India first as a forum was aimed at reviving
the JNU legacy of debate and discussion, for which it is known and for and we at JNU, we
all know that history is a very hot topic for the JNU students. We always discuss the past and present and
future may be. But as the history we discuss in the campus,
we have always seen certain things in our discussion in history, the tribal History,
the Dalit history it's always that. In our discussion of History, the history
of Technology is always that. In our discussion of history India's interaction
with the world is all just that .As we know India has always been a trading civilization. Since the Harappan times India has been having
contacts with all the coordinates of the world from Roman Empire to Arabia to Africa to Southeast
Asia and this interaction has shaped India's civilization in a decisive manner. So to discuss on this issue we have with us
Sanjeev Sanyal, who hardly needs an introduction he's a leading financial economist and also
a best-selling author, his book Land of Seven Rivers-History of India's geography, is one
of the best-selling history books in India so I request Sanjeev to come and give his
(inaudible) Thank you Abhinav. I'm little concerned that I have been asked
to bring order to disorder, none of my students through my educational career would have believed,
none of my teachers in my educational career would have believed that I would be called
on to do something like that. The theme of my talk today is, the Maritime
History of India and the reason I think it may be interesting to many of you is that,
India is one of the great maritime countries in the world through history and unfortunately
much of the history that we learn in our textbooks is very much continental oriented, so if you
aren't a specialist, you could be forgiven for thinking that Indian History is really
about a series of dynasties who ruled Pataliputra, followed by a series of dynasties who ruled
Delhi, all the way to the present day. So my idea is to hopefully give you some flavor
of another another history and it's not just a theoretical sentimental view of History
because, it has genuine implications for the way we think about our world today. Because if you take continental sort of Delhi
centric view of Indian history you will get the impression that our, our neighbors, our
neighborhood is about China and Pakistan, but in fact if you think about a maritime
worldview, then our neighbors are Indonesia on one side, Oman on the other side. I'm not just taking into account of Sri Lanka
and Maldives, but even further out perhaps as far as Vietnam because that is sort of
in a sense the ecosystem of our history and so I'm going to give you a flavor of that. I don't have a very long period of time, I
don’t want bore you with a long monologue, so I will be necessarily selective in the
way I'm going through it, just to keep the story flowing, but hopefully I'll be able
to give you some sense of it. Incidentally what I'm talking about, is to
some extend derived from a book I will be publishing later this year on the, it's called
a Brief History of India's geography. It has a main title but we haven't decided
yet, but it's a brief history of India's geography. Now the landscape of the Indian Ocean that
we are going to deal with, one thing to remember about it, that is a living landscape, it is
not dead landscape, the coastlines are continuously changing due to tectonic as well as rising
and shifting shorelines and this is a very important thing to remember, as we go through
much of what I will speak about. If you came to this part of the world, the
Indian Ocean rim during the last Ice Age, which is more than eight, nine thousand years
ago when it ended, but really I did speak about 14000 years ago. The coastline that you would have seen would
have been ready very different. Much of the world's water was stuffed in these
massive ice sheets, that where covering much of the Northern Hemisphere, but also parts
of the Southern Hemisphere and the water level was as much as between 100-150 meters below
where it is now. So as a result, for example all of the Persian
Gulf was actually a flat plane, what you see now as Gujarat was well inside inland and
the coastline kind of was a straight line which kind of went down south. Sri Lanka was a part of Indian mainland and
all of the islands of Southeast Asia, almost all of them were part of one large land mass,
which we now call Sundaland. In fact the ancestors of the Australian aborigines
actually literally walked across all of Southeast Asia and then made a small hop across to Australia,
so that was a landscape. Now starting around 12000 years ago, these
melting glaciers and ice sheets began to fill out the these coastlines and from around twelve
thousand years ago, you have for example, the Persian Gulf getting flooded, the Indian
coastline getting flooded, ultimately Sri Lanka getting separated from India and so
on and it is possible that the memory of this event, because it's quite a catastrophic event
is remembered in the flood myths of almost all cultures across the world. So of course there's a story of Noah, but
also there is this Sumerian story of Gilgamesh. The Australian aborigines have a flood myth,
the Laotians in Southeast Asia have a flood myth and of course we also have a flood myth
the story of Manu and Matsya Avatar, the first of the avatar of Vishnu. So there are all these flood myths, very difficult
to tell exact history from it, but it is tempting at least to believe that it may be a memory
of these times. But certainly by about 5000BC or thereabouts
the coastline began to sort of resemble the coastline that we would be familiar with,
but it would still be somewhat different. I'm going to start with Gujarat, because my
story will start with Gujarat and the coastline of Gujarat during Harappan times that are
being quite different even from now. People think that sea levels rise in a sort
of linear way and then fall in a linear way, that's actually not how it works. Within those big falls and rises there are
lots of variations. So during Harappan times, sea levels were
in fact a little bit higher than they are right now and the Saurashtra peninsula, was
in fact an island and you could actually go from the Gulf of Khambhat, (through) past
Saurashtra into what was the Rann of Kutch because the Rann of Kutch was actually navigable,
in fact not only was it navigable, it had two major rivers flowing into it. There was the Indus, which originally used
to flow, in fact till the 19th century, use to flow into the Rann of Kutch and of course
there was this massive river, the Saraswati which also flowed into this and satellite
photographs clearly show that these two rivers flowed into it. Even today, you can with a little bit of messing
around, you can tell that there are these two old channels going into it and of course
weather was, climate was also quite different it was significantly wetter than it is now. So what is now Balochistan was Savannah type
area, much of early human migrations actually happened through Baluchistan. This is important remember because today it's
such impassable desert, that we tend to think of that you know people couldn’t simply
be going back and forth. If you wanted, in pre-modern times to go from
Iran to India you would actually have to go through Afghanistan that is in fact not the
case through much of History. So anyways, so you had this coastline and
in that coastline cities began to spring up in the 4th,then 3rd millennium BC where they
really begin to sprout out and the largest of this is, that we have so far discovered
is called, a city called Dholavira. Dholavira today is well inland in the Rann
of Kutch. As I mentioned the Rann of Kutch is now a
salt plain, which occasionally has is marshy in the monsoons so otherwise salt plain and
Dholavira is sort of like a hillock marooned in the middle of the salt plane. But in Harappan times, it would have been
an island and it developed then into a major port, but there were other ports as well and
one of the other ports was Lothal, which I'm sure all of you from your history books will
remember it had this dried docks and so on. But the map of Gujarat, that I just laid in
front of you, such as that in fact it should have been possible to go from Lothal to Dholavira,
by boat and similarly there was on the other side, on the Northern side, an entry from
what is now Dwaraka, where there was an, still an island there called Bet Dwarka, where also
a lot of Harappan artifacts have been found. So obviously, we are guessing, but it seems
like basically what was going on there was this network of ports in Gujrat, where they
were sailing back and forth out of it, those coming from the South would probably have
probably gone through Lothal, which was possibly a customs post, before you reach Dholavira
and there was probably another customs post for those people who coming in from the West
at Bet Dwarka and then they made their way to Dholavira, probably did some trading and
then perhaps some of these chaps made their way up North, through the Indus and while
the Saraswathi was flowing up the Saraswati as well. Now who were these chaps trading with
? Now we have very good evidence that, they were trading at least with the following places,
because a lot of seals and Harappan goods have been found all along these areas. one of them is Oman, there are lot of Harappan
artifacts found scattered all over Iran, further inland in Bahrain, across the straights in
Iran, in eastern Iran there is a newly discovered civilization called Jiroft, we don’t know
what they called themselves but the area is called Jiroft, so it's called the Jiroft civilization. It’s quite possible that given where their
location is, it is really far to the east of Iran and it is very very close to several
Harappan sites that have been found in Balochistan, that they may have been culturally some links,
not only cultural links, but they may even have been probably the same people who were
passing back and forth across what would I would call, the Indo-Iranian continuum and
then further out towards Mesopotamia, there were all these settlements going all the way
up the Sumerian settlements and in many of them seals and other Harappan artifacts have
also been found. In fact, they have even found the records
of people called the Meluha, who the Sumerians claimed to have been trading with, which sounds
like they were Indians. There were many indications they were possibly
the Harappans and there were even story about some settlements of Harappans living there. So the business of the Indians living in the
Middle East is not a new thing, (we have been) we have been going to the Middle East for
a long time and settling there. So that is kind of how things were happily
trundling along, till something really bad happened. Around about 2,000 BC and there's plenty of
evidence about this, around about 2000 BC there was a major climatic change worldwide
and this is clearly shown not just in pollen records and other scientific things its actually
shows through even an Acadian record where they have, tells us that this really bad droughts
was happening and roughly at this time, the Saraswati River which incidentally at this
point had already whittled down quite a lot, simply disappears and a large number of settlements
in and around that area simply begin to be abandoned. Incidentally the old kingdom of Egypt also
collapses at about this time and we suddenly see a dramatic drop in the number of Harappan
artifacts that show up in all these area. Clearly the trade systems in this was breaking
down. Now just as an aside we have never found any
Middle Eastern artifacts or even Central Asian artifacts in any Harappan sites. So this is very mysterious because although
the Harappans were clearly exporting stuffs, including people, it is entirely unclear what
on Earth they were importing. Anyway, with the collapse of these Harappan
cities we have clear signs that there was migration southward, towards the Narmada there
was also migration out towards the Gangetic plains. Some of these sites, many of these sites show
great amount of cultural continuity into what is called the later Harappan and then it fuses
later through to the Gangetic civilizations. But I'm not going to go into that because
my interest is maritime. Now what happens, and this is where now it
gets more interesting, because you will be probably quite familiar with much of what
I have just talked about. Now what happens is that, suddenly Central
and Southern India come alive. Now till this point for some reason (we) to
the evidence that we have Southern India doesn't really go through a Bronze Age, now Harappans
and all (these) these civilizations that I mentioned were all Bronze Age civilizations
and for some reason there wasn't much of a Bronze Age in Southern India and you certainly
have and about the time of the Harappan civilization was falling apart, the Iron Age suddenly appears
on Southern India, they simply skip the Bronze Age and go into the Iron Age and this is very
fascinating because the old idea was that, these iron implements and the iron age essentially
came to India, along with the so called Aryans coming thundering down from Central Asia and
it turns out that the earliest place where iron was actually found and used systematically
is, not even in Northern India but in and around what is now Hyderabad. In fact, just a year ago some of the oldest
iron implements anywhere in the world, have been found in fact inside Hyderabad University
campus and so that was basically what is happening but meanwhile a little further to the east,
you have an absolute explosion of maritime time activity that begins to now happen what
is now Odisha and West Bengal. The zone from the westernmost outlet of the
Ganga which is, the one that we now call Hugli all down the coast towards Chilika Lake. That coastline, just now bust out with activity
,in fact very very recently like literally a few weeks back, a major new site which is
over 1500 years old has been found just outside of Bhubaneswar, small town that has been found,
but there are many many smaller ports all along the coast. And the Odiya now begin to do these major
voyages. Firstly they begin to go slowly along the
coast, so some of these Odiya sailors and merchants make their way slowly down the coast
and certainly by about the 5th, 6th,century BC, they begin to turn up in Sri Lanka and
this is quite interesting because you would think that the people who would begin to populate
Sri Lanka would be the Tamils and the Keralite who are right next door and they possibly
did go to the Northern bits, but the first clear signs of what would we call “civilization”
so as to speak, turns up with these people who are clearly coming from significantly
further out. There were already some people living there,
the Veddas, major group of people suddenly begin to turn up and they're not just going
down south, they're also going down the other way, along the coast towards Southeast Asia
to a place where Isthamus of Kra ,this is basically the thin strip of land from which
Malaysia hangs off, now in Thailand and they're going over there and some of them just hop
across and then begin to sail across the Gulf of Thailand towards Vietnam, Southern Vietnam
and Cambodia. We now actually have some records, at least
in oral histories and some inscriptions and in old mythologies, of what was possibly going,
on in fact the founding myth of the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka is in fact the story of Prince
Vijaya who claim to be the grandson of a lion and a princess, bit of the story that I have
some suspicions about. He basically takes 400 or so of his followers
he's thrown out by his father by the way for behaving particularly badly and he makes his
way down the coast and he turns up in Sri Lanka and it is quite interesting that, these
people then begin to settle in. The majority population of Sri Lanka today
takes its roots back to this migration of people, of course this must have been many
migrations afterwards, but they take their roots back to this migration and they bring
with them very interesting cultural motifs, that are still alive. Let’s take for example the idea of lion,
now the lion is there in the Sri Lankan flag, but where did it come from? Now if you go to Odisha and wander around
in some of the more older sort of settlement of Odisha, one of the things that it will
strike you is that, many of them have got Narasimha temples, this is also true of Andhra
by the way. Even in Puri, the older Temple is not that
to Jagannath but to Narasimha. And even today when the “Bhog” is first
served, it's not taken directly to Jagannath, but it is actually taken first to Narasimha. So the worship of Narasimha, or some sort
of a veneration of the Lion was clearly very important part of the culture of that area,
which is all very odd, because that is all tiger territory now. But this also incidentally signs of that in
Bengal, which is also tiger territory but again, of course that veneration of Lion continues
to this day because, Durga’s vahan is a lion. So I cannot explain why it is that, may be
familiarity breeds contempt, so they didn't think much of the Tiger or maybe the climate
was different and there were more Lions there, I do not know, but it is the case that there
was plenty of lions in the iconography of this part of the world and that gets transferred
and survives to this day in the Sri Lankan flag. Now similar things begin to happen on the
other side, as these guys begin to trade with that Southeast Asia as well and it is quite
fascinating, the name they begin to give this and I'll come back to this they begin to call,
in the Indic literature the term Naga is very very commonly used for the people of the snake,
the people of the serpent and it seems to be systematically used for the people (of)
with oriental features, why because, as you will see, it is a very important part of the
iconography of Southeast Asia and how does this, what is the stories that, I remember
from this time that tell us about this. So there's a story which is very common in
the inscriptions of Cambodia, Vietnam and so on, much later the Ankor and Charme empires
rose but the story goes somewhat like this- There was an Indian Brahmin called Kaundinya
who was sailing past the coast of what is now Southern Vietnam and Southern Cambodia,
in the Mekong area and he was attacked, he was in the ship, he was sailing past with
his bunch of traders and he was attacked by these pirates and he being a hero chap, he
fought off the pirates and drove them away. Unfortunately, what happened is that the ship
was leaking as a result of this and he and his crew had to take it onto the shore and
in order to try and repair it. So when they were doing this, the local tribe,
(which) they were the snake clan, decided that they would they would attack them. So evidently, they were surrounded and yet
again Kaundinya, being a brave lad took out his sword and was defending himself. When the princess of the snake clan saw him
and fell in love, her name, there are many names according to different traditions, but
one of the names that is often used is-Soma, so Soma- the moon faced one, saw him and fell
in love and proposed marriage to him and so Kaundinya I suppose, he didn't have too much
of a choice, but he married her and started a dynasty, which led ultimately to the foundation
of these great, much much later, to the great Ankor and the Khmer civilization and of course
the Charme civilization in Southern Vietnam. What is fascinating about it also is, most
of these lineages were matrilineal, not matriarchal. They trace their lineage through their female
line, which is also reasonable because after all Kaundinya’s rise to, claim to royalty
was through his wife and it's quite interesting, this kind of continues to be remembered (through)
for the next thousand years plus, because you can clearly see that many of the kings
come to power, both in the Khmer and the Charme through the female line. So this remains embedded and this story then
becomes the sort of the key myth on which the much of Southeast Asian culture is built. It is matrilineal, but also the iconography
of the snake. So, and you see that everywhere, so in Northern
Malaysia, you have a major site (called) in the Bujang Valley, in a place what was the
kingdom of Kadaram. Now think about this it’s called the Bujang
valley, Bujang means snake, snake valley and this term comes up everywhere. Later on, much much later when the Cholas
would create ports to trade with Southeast Asia, what would be the port be called? It would be called Nagapattinam. So it is very very important iconography of
the snake and the importance of it, which I will show you. Now somewhere down the line Odiya discovered
that, this business of sailing along the coast was just too cumbersome and I suppose somebody
who went down and that it was much much easier, to in fact rather than try and go along the
coast to Southeast Asia, it would be much easier to actually sail down South using the
winter monsoon to Sri Lanka and use the currents, the equatorial current, to go across to Sumatra
and Java and so on. So now what happens, it's quite an interesting
change in the orientation of the Indian trade with Southeast Asia, earlier it was through
Thailand, Isthamus of Kra to Vietnam, now it's suddenly reorients going south to Sri
Lanka and then swinging across using the current to Java, to Bali, to Sumatra and so on and
there also you see this explosion of Indic culture happen at this time. Now what is interesting is while it is all
very obvious (in) if you go to Bali or Java etc. enormous amount of Indian influence clearly
suggests, shows you how much cultural flow was going back and forth. But very often (in our) in India we tend to
assume that this was due to much much later Tamil influence, that is not the case. The real great pioneers of the eastern Indian
Ocean are really the Odiya and it shows through many other things. The slang word to this day, used for Indians
in much of Southeast Asia is the world “Kling”. Of course now it has a slightly derogatory
meaning, but the word Kling or Kalinga obviously it derived from Kalinga, is the slang word
used or the word used, for Indians. The word for West in all Malay languages is
Bharath, so you can see that there is clearly memory on the Indonesian side (of) why they
have even named their country after India. So this is clear memory on the Southeast Asian
side. Now what is the memory that we have on our
side, of that period? Interestingly, it actually lives very much
in many many ways which till very recently, even though it's right in front of our eyes
we didn't fully appreciate. One of the biggest festivals of Odisha is
Karthik Poornima, now what happens in Karthik Poornima? In Karthik Poornima basically when the Poornima
happens, you are supposed to get up before sunrise and particularly the women and children
are supposed to go to the river or sea or the water body and put a small boat with a
Diya into it, into the river or water body. Now what is the significance of this? The significance of this is the following,
you see around about Karthik Poornima what happens, the winds change. They stop flowing from south to North and
begin blowing from North to South. So what is going on? So basically this is the point at which the
Odiya sailors use to go off on their voyage, so that was basically, what are they doing? The family is saying goodbye to the sailors
and the merchants, as they are setting sail and about at the same time in Cuttack, even
today there is a fair called Bali Yathra, which literally means the journey to Bali.
just think about this, this is real civilization memory right in front of our face and I have
witnessed this myself. Couple of years ago I went and witnessed a
fascinating event, on the beach in Konark, they in fact do these plays and there is a
story of Tapoi those of you who are Odiya may know the story, but it's a story about
a young girl, who was left behind with her sisters-in-law, when her brothers and father
go on this long voyage and how her sisters-in-law mistreat her and then she prays to Goddess
Manasa and you know the brothers come back just in time before really bad things happen
to her and rescue her. Anyways it’s a folktale, but it's quite
clear that this linkage with foreign travel with maritime trade is very very alive in
day-to-day cultural motifs and it is also shown in Konark Temple, by the way, one of
the big panels in Konark Temple is fascinating, there is a giraffe being handed over to the
king. So clearly they were not just trading with
Southeast Asia, there were also at some point clearly beginning to trade in the western
Indian Ocean as well. Of course, this Konark Temple is from much
later times than I'm talking about but nonetheless, I'm just point out that, this is not only
happening in the eastern Indian Ocean. You have similar stuffs going on in the Western
Indian Ocean as Indians begins to trade with the Roman Empire as well and the roots of
this Roman Empire and what was going on has been left to us in a manual called “The
Periplus Of The Erythraean Sea” this is a manual is fascinating, it's Greek, Greek
Egyptian manual and it clearly tells us the route it was taken by merchants coming from
the Roman Empire, to trade with India. So where did the start off? There were two starting parts, you could start
either in Alexandria or you could start off in Tyre or Sidon. If you started off in Alexandria, you could
go down the Nile a little bit and then there was actually a canal which connected the Nile,
across from what is now Cairo across (to the) somewhere near where the Suez is. So, the Suez Canal you see today is not the
first version of this Suez Canal, even thousands of years ago there was a canal. The problem was of course it was a sandy area,
so every time it was a real problem keeping it clean, but there were several attempts
to keep it going, there was another route you could go furthered up down the thing,
to the first cataract and then also there was another path to a place called Bernica,
you could ,you have to cross by camel from the Nile to the coast, there was another route
and then there was another route which I mentioned which was from Lebanon and what is now Israel
area, across through the desert, through the ruins, now Petra, that was why Petra was so
rich because it was a caravan route and then it reached a place called Aqaba. Anyway, whichever way you came, you ended
up in the Red Sea and then you basically made your way down the Red Sea trading on either
side of the thin narrow sea. You traded your way down it. Incidentally the word Erythraean Sea, in Greek
Erythraean literally means red and that's what it really means. Anyway having made that they then came up
to Yemen and from Yemen they made a short hop across to a small island called Socotra. Now why is it called Socotra? Its origins are incidentally Dweepa Sukhadara
-the island of bliss and it was full of Indians and Arabs and it was a major trading point,
there even today all kind of graffiti left by Indians sailors, in some of the caves there. and from there you had a choice, now the old
route was then to go North to Yemen along the Baloch coast and then you went across
to Gujarat and so on and then made your way down south. Now somewhere in the 1st century AD, some
smart guy called Hippalus, discovered that you didn't have to do this rather circuitous
route, you could again use the monsoon winds and sail, right across to Kerala and very
quickly a major port appeared in Kerala called Muchiri or Muziris, which is just a little
north of modern-day Cochin in and around actually a village called Pattnam, found a lot of archaeological
stuff from there from that period. So this was suddenly, by certainly, the early
Roman period or even before the empire was still a republic, major trading routes were
being set up. This was a period after the destruction of
the Great temple of the Jews, significant Jewish population also came and began to settle
along this coast and so on. So what were these guys trading with each
other? Now the Periplus tells us that the Indians
were exporting among other things, Cotton, which was very highly prized, especially from
the Gujarat area cotton, Iron and Steel goods, because, as I mentioned even while iron was
an Indian invention, even in much later times Indian metallurgy was considered a very high
quality, so there was all kind of steel and iron products and if you were coming from
the Muchiri area, they were trading spices, black pepper was particularly important but
also large number of spices that were brought in from Southeast Asia, were then made its
way too Muchiri and then the Indians then, so these Indonesian spices made it to Indians,
which was then passed on to the Romans and so and so forth. So this was what the Indians were exporting. So what were the Indians importing? Now among other things Indians were importing
Italian wines and very importantly it turns out they were importing women for the royal
harems. So this leads us to one of the most important
conclusion that we can draw from learning ancient Maritime history which is, that even
in ancient times page-three parties used to involve foreign liquor and foreign escorts. Now this period, so such a lot of trade that
had caused a major problem, which was this, although the Indians were importing lots of
women and wine, they were still running a large current-account surplus. Now how do you in an ancient world pay for
a current account surplus? You'll pay for it essentially in gold and
the Romans were handing out so many millions of gold coins, that became a real problem
because if you are pushing out lot of gold to some other country, then you don't have
enough gold in your own country to print coins and the Roman Empire by the 2ndcentury AD
had a serious crisis and you have in the Senate, you know people like Pliny and others really
arguing, you know they have a real problem, don't have enough to gold print our own coin,
you need to do something about these Indian chaps, so emperor Vespasian decided that he
was going to introduce some sort of a ban on trade with India and he tried very hard
initially, the problem was of course both the Indians and the Jews, very quickly figured
out various smuggling routes and that whole thing failed. So after a while they opened up trade again,
but the Romans now decided that the way they were now going to deal with it was to reduce
the amount of gold in their coins. So they began to debase their currencies. Now what did the Indians do in response? The Indians kept accepting these coins, so
if you go to archaeological sites across India along the coast, you have lots of coins and
depending on which period you go to, the amount of gold keeps diminishing. Of course it goes up and down depending on
the time, but by and large the amount (of coin) the gold content keeps declining. Now look at how this exactly looks like the
world today. The Chinese keep running a surplus and Americans
keep running a deficit. How do the Americans pay for it? It’s by printing dollars. We keep complaining that this is going to
lead to bad things, but the Chinese keep accepting them, and Americans keep printing them. In fact they can't print enough, because they're
not printing enough because the dollar is still appreciating. So this unfortunately is the way the world
works it was true of Roman times, its true of today. So this is another discussion, but one of
the reasons I keep saying that, you know equilibrium as a basis for economics is complete bunkum,
there's never been an equilibrium and never will be. Anyway, all this good stuff was going on,
then around about the 6th , 7th century, the balance of power began to shift and of course
it culminates suddenly, of course it starts out initially with the Arabs becoming more
involved but of course, with the sudden rise of Islam, the Arabs become very very powerful
and so the entire western part of the Indian Ocean suddenly comes in the control of the
Islam, Islamic Khilafat and they impose them for the next thousand years or so a little
less than thousand years, and almost total information blackout towards Europe and this
is the reason that, the likes of the Vasco da Gama and Columbus would have so much trouble
,trying to find out information about India, because although in ancient times the Europeans
knew a lot about India, they were blacked out for a significant period of time, but
that does not mean that, the Arabs themselves didn’t take advantage of the situation,
they were heavily trading with India. Not many people realize that the second oldest
mosque in the world is in India. In fact not very far from the site of Muchiri
or Muziris, it’s called the Cheraman mosque, it was built while the prophet was still alive,
in fact before he had even conquered Mecca, he was still in Medina and very likely (the
people) the merchants who have built it, may have personally known the Prophet. So it's quite amazing that India actually
has, one of the oldest Mosques in the world, the second oldest mosque in the world. It is also as I said, has the oldest continuous
Jewish Community world which are also roughly from the same area. It also has one of the oldest Christian population
in the world which is also incidentally in and around the Muziris area. There is some controversy over whether or
not St. Thomas actually came to India or not, but it's fair to say that early Christians
did come to India and settle in India very very early on. Much of their literature was written in Syriac
which is similar to Aramaic, which was the language which Jesus himself would have used,
so this community and I'm telling you, this is just one small couple of districts in Kerala,
similar stories can be told all the way along the coast up north, various communities, various
points in time came. Of course the other famous community that
would come and settle here would be the Zoroastrians or the Parsis and so on. So this is why because there was such a lot
of trade going back and forth, these ancient communities had a footprint in India and when
many of these communities got wiped out in their homeland, India somehow managed to carry
on a memory of it and with the destruction of the Syrian Christian Community, just the
in the last 2 or 3 years in Syria, it is fair now to say that, the Syrian Christian Community
in India, is now officially the oldest continuous Christian Community in the world. So that's quite an amazing history to have. Now meanwhile a lot of trade was happening
on the Eastern side as well. Now very often the ideas that Indians have
is that, the influence of India always goes out towards Southeast Asia, that is not the
case, it was not as if the Southeast Asian was sitting around and saying aaah!! The Indians have arrived and let's take some
“Gyan” from them (and). Not at all .They were doing their own thing
too, so the Indonesian for example in the 8th, 9th, 10th centuries began to do their
own explorations. In fact the first human beings to colonize
Madagascar, just off the coast of Africa were actually Indonesian. It’s quite surprising because Madagascar
is it's actually right next to the origin of the human species, but somehow the Africans
did not colonize Southeast Asia, it was the Indonesians who did so. But they were also interacting with India
and there was lots of give n take. Nalanda University, of which we are very proud
was partly funded by the Sumatran Kings, the Shri Vijayan Kings of Sumatra. So foreign funded universities is not a new
thing in India. But even some of the most famous Kings of
India may in fact have been of Southeast Asian origin and of course there's a huge influence
in the Northeast, which I'm not even getting into, because it's not a matter of time Maritime
influence but it can be a subject of another session, but even in Southern India, one of
the greatest Kings of India, was a guy called, the Pallava king called Nandivarman II. Now the story of Nandivarman II is quite fascinating,
because Nandivarman II has left us the story on the panels of the Vaikunda Perumal temple
in Kanchi, where it says that, somewhere in the beginning of the 8th century, the king
of the Pallavas died out, and there was real panic because he died early and dint have
children and the Chalukyas were going to turn up and take over the place. There was basically chaos, so a grand assembly
was called, of all the Chieftains and scholars etc. and they decided that they were going
to go and hunt for another line of the Pallavas that had many many years ago gone o off to
a distant land. So there was a (king ), a younger brother
of a Pallava king a century earlier, who had gone off to a foreign land, married the local
princess and had become the king and his lineage evidently was still alive somewhere, so very
hurriedly (you know they )a group of learned Brahmins were put together and they were put
on a boat from Mahabalipuram and was send off to someplace to get this king and they
turned up at this court of this king (or) and they asked for one of his sons, he had
four sons, this descendant of Bheema, and the first three refused to come, but the youngest
one who was only 12 years at that time agreed and that young boy then got in and made his
way back to Kanchi and he was anointed as Nandivarman II and (he became the), became
a great king and many of the temples of the Pallava period (are from) because of Nandivarman’s
contribution. Now who was this Nandivarman and where did
he come from? Now if you go to this temple and you wander
around, you find something very odd about all the faces that are there, carved on the
walls. A very significant proportion of them are
clearly oriental, there are even Chinese faces there. Yes, Vaikunda Perumal temple in Kanchi (answering
the audience). Now my guess, he doesn't mention it, but there
are many signs that the Pallavas brided themselves, of being of having their female lineage, of
that of the Nagas. In fact it's there in some of their inscriptions. So while we do not know where the Pallavas
themselves came from. The fact that they had this great pride in
this female Naga lineage, suggest that they had, at least from the female side a Southeast
Asian origin and this is interesting because, of course the Pallavas have enormous influence
on Southeast Asia. You know their scripts of many countries even
today are derived from Pallava script like Thai and so on. So clearly they had a lot of influence and
there is, in fact even an inscription on Nandivarman II, in Malaysia and it's very interesting
where it is, it’s in the Bujang Valley, the valley of the snakes. So my guess is that he was possibly from Cambodia,
Malaysia area and he came in the 8th century and took over this Kingdom and it's quite
amazing that today you know we would not imagine that one off the great Kings of Southern India
was actually from that part of the world. Now history, of course kept going and there
a somewhat better-known episode happens, which is the rise of the Chola Empire and the great
raids that the Cholas did, in Southeast Asia, in the 11th century. Now why did the Cholas, were the Cholas doing
raids on the Southeast Asia, in the 11th century? We don't know for sure, but one of the reasons,
very likely reasons and there is some circumstantial evidence to back it up is, that it is very
likely that, the Cholas and the Song Empire of China were trading heavily with each other. There are in fact lots of remains of Hindu
temples along the coast of China from roughly that period and it seems like the Sree Vijaya,
may have been kind of getting in the way and asking for too much toll. Now like all Indians, when faced with high
tolls, they go berserk. You see that every day on Indian highways. So not surprisingly they got up and said we
must do something, so they got all their friends together at Nagapattinam, sailed across and
beat those chaps up and it clearly says at Kadaram, there was the , you know the king
of Kadaram was defeated, his elephants and all his various treasures were taken away
and they were brought back. But this does not seem to have caused too
much problems, because a little bit later, the Chola seem to have built a fairly strong
alliance with Shree Vijaya and the kingdoms of that area and this is an interesting thing
that is going on here. In the context of understanding the geopolitics
of that area, you see the way we think about the history of Sri Lanka and southern tip
of India is that there was a Sinhalese Tamil conflict. Now we tend to be colored in this because
of much more recent episodes off separatist movement in Northern Sri Lanka. What actually was happening for almost all
of history, except this recent episode was in fact the Pandyas of Madurai and the Sinhalese
of Sri Lanka were in a pact against the Cholas who were from the, further up the Cauvery
basin and the Cholas seem to have had allies who are in Southeast Asia. So basically this was the geopolitics of the
time. The Pandya-Sinhalese alliance against the
Chola-Southeast Asian Alliance and you can see that it goes back and forth quite a lot,
but it's quite fascinating that the geopolitics of that area, was driven by these very complex
alliances. Now the question is, what was the basis, what
was the (the) (structures) economic structure that was allowing all these trade to go back
and forth? Now you may get the impression that it was
all heroic traders and merchants who were putting their money on, life on (on) line
and were trading with, making these great voyages. But in fact it was a lot more sophisticated
than that. Many of these voyages actually happened, not
by individuals going back and forth but through corporatized guilds. they are almost like companies, and many of
them were caste based companies, most of them there in fact not caste based companies, some
of them had names like the 500 and so on and said they all were most likely corporates
multinational corporates and many of them lasted hundreds of years, who were doing this
trade going back and forth. Some of them hired mercenaries to back up
and protect their trade routes and they were very powerful and there were several of them
in Southern India and what is even more fascinating is that much of the financing of this, was
done by the temples. Now the general impression is that the temples
were rich because the Rajas were all handing over large amounts of money to these temples,
but have been the seed money, but one of the reasons many of these temples have such a
lot of gold was that in fact, they functioned as Banks and we have copper plate, lots of
copper plate remains of contract between the guilds. So there were merchant guilds, there were
artisan guilds and they had contracts. Then there were contracts between the merchant
guilds and the financiers, which were the temples and that was the kind of structure
in which much of this was going on. But then around about the starting with the
11th century but really taking off in the (12th century) 13th century really. This whole structure suddenly came undone,
in India, of course there was the Turkish conquest and that completely threw the whole,
it was not just political control, but one of the things that seem to have happened was
that the destruction of temples, really messed up the financing of this whole network. So I have for many many years have wondered
why after the Turkish conquest there is a dramatic decline of Indian, particularly Hindu
merchants who are selling back and forth. The historical explanation is oh! you know
it was because of caste restrictions and you know because of these Brahmins are bad chaps,
didn't allow any way to cross the seas and all that but that of course makes no sense,
for the simplest reason, that the upper castes were some of the biggest beneficiaries of
this trade, there were the merchant class of course, but the ruling classes, the Kshatriya
classes at various points in time benefited from the revenues, but the biggest beneficiaries
of course were the Brahmins themselves, because they were enormously (high) highly regarded
in Southeast Asian courts and many of them sailed across, I mentioned, in fact one of
the pioneers Kaundinya himself was a Brahmin. So there was no real reason for them to perhaps
suddenly stop and I think a large part of this perhaps had to do a collapse in the network
of financing that was holding the whole thing together. There is also a similar collapse, just a few
years later in the Middle East, and this happens interestingly just like when the Turks were
invading India and conquering it, about the same time Islam itself was in enormous crisis
because just 20-25 years after Muhammad Ghori came to India, you had the Mongols, who were
sacking large parts of Iran and then ultimately sack Baghdad and so on. So the whole network, the whole set up suddenly
just was in complete crisis and it was just about recovering from this, a century later,
when suddenly very large ships turned up, this is in the early 1400 led by a eunuch
Chinese General called Zheng He and he brought these massive ships, these ships were really
enormous, I mean they're modern, they're modern scales. This huge series of treasure ships, that came
in the early 1400, have made voyages across through Southeast Asia to India making its
way to Africa and there was a series of them, led by this General Zheng He, who was a eunuch
incidentally and it was not incidentally a voyage of discovery, because many of these
routes that that I was talking about was very well-established as I mentioned earlier. What they were trying to do, was really showing
who was the boss and so the Chinese came to this part of the world and they were going
around essentially one by sheer scale overawing the locals. But very quickly they also begin to meddle
with the politics of this area, so they captured one of the claimants to the throne off Sri
Lanka and took him back and brought him back and then tried to place him on the throne,
they have or may have changed the Zamorin or Samuthiri of (of) in Kerala, (they may
have) of Calicut, Kozhikode is the correct word or maybe I think not the correct pronunciation
anyway. So they may have interfered there, so they
were messing around with the politics of various places using their muscle, (but one) possibly
the biggest influence of that, however was in Southeast Asia and the Islamization of
Southeast Asia, which as I will show you was really a Chinese project. Now remember after the 12th,13th century the
Hindus of India became less much important in the trading networks outside of India,
but the Southeast Asian Hindus particularly of Java were very very active. In fact it was really in the 13th, 14th century
where you have this massive expansion of the Majapahit Empire based out of Java and basically
took over fair section of what is now Indonesia, even parts of now what is Malaysia and they
were the guys, who when Zheng He was making these great voyages were looking on all of
this very very suspiciously and in fact, in couple of occasions, they captured some of
the Chinese envoyers and decapitated them, just to send the signal. It didn't go down very well with the Chinese,
who then began to encourage an alternative Center of power, in a place called Malacca
which is in Malaysia, just north of Singapore. They had a king called Parameswara, who they
encouraged to convert to Islam, they in fact, Parameswara also visited the Chinese Emperor
and they give him a lot of money and then as consequence of, with Chinese backing, the
kingdom of Malacca became increasingly more powerful and the Majapahit began to withdraw. The next two centuries, there was a dramatic
shift in the religious composition of Southeast Asia, but the Chinese themselves didn’t
hang around to benefits from this, because while they may have been very successful with
these great voyages, with these big ships, as always what really gets you not meant military
power but politics back at home. Now what happened is that, the Emperor who
was backing Zheng He died and the next Emperor was essentially under the influence of the
Confucians Lobby in the court and they were very suspicious of the Eunuch Lobby, who were
mostly, they were particularly in the trading business. So the Confucians essentially came up with
the idea that the rest of the world had been, you know had been engaged with and nothing
of great value had really come back from these great voyages, rest of the world was clearly
too backward, to be engaged with. So the great treasure fleet was essentially
left to rot and the records of Zheng He’s great exploits were actually suppressed. It's only really in the 20th century that
we began to rediscover them and so that was essentially the end of Chinese Naval power
in the 15th century, which opened up the space for Vasco da Gama, who turned up at the end
of the 1400. Now much of this is well-known and I'm running
out of time, so I'm going to skip through a bit here. As you all know Vasco da Gama came to Calicut
and very quickly, within a decade or little more than a decade, the Portuguese created
a bunch of these, what should I say, staging points, outpost all along Southeast Asia. They also established a reputation for extreme
cruelty. Now this is not a time where people got easily
scared of cruelty, I mean these are the people who have just gone through the Turks and Mongols,
but even in that context the Portuguese were thought to be way off the charts. Now just to give an example, Vasco da Gama
would routinely and other Portuguese, Vasco da Gama himself did this, would take ships
taking Muslims for the Hajj (across, to) from the Indian coast to Arabia and they would
simply set the ship alight, in mid ocean with all the people on them, just to create terror
in the minds of the people who were not listening to them. So very very quickly they began to establish
these outposts and using Maritime power and cannons which they had, they established this
network and for about the first, I would say hundred, 1300 and 1400 years or so, the Portuguese
were the great maritime power in the Indian Ocean. This does not mean that they didn't get any
resistance at all, they did, there was the Sultans of Gujarat, who tried to get the Turks
to send in ships, to try and fight them, to fight the Portuguese. There was a great battle just off Diu, in
which the Portuguese essentially destroyed the Turkish fleet but there were other indigenous
attempts as well and one of the most the successful of them is almost entirely forgotten today,
was actually a warrior Queen called Abbakka, she and her daughter and granddaughter for
almost 80 years resisted the Portuguese, from their kingdom, in an outpost called Ullal,
which is very very close to Mangalore and this Warrior Queen, she was a queen, of course
remember this coast has a very strong matrilineal, and occasionally matriarchal tradition and
she using Coastal ships, she used to essentially trap Portuguese ships, occasionally sinking
them, capturing them on several occasions defeating the Portuguese, the first queen
Abbakka was herself captured and killed but her daughter and then her granddaughter kept
up the war. Now the oral histories of that coast line
have lots of stories about Abbakka, in fact there are dance drama and Yakshagana and other
performances done in the name of Abbakka, but there are almost no histories written
about her, certainly not in English, I believe there are some in Tulu, which is the language
off that area, but it is quite shocking that, we Indians do not remember these stories of
resistance, we were much rather, actually know a lot about the European side of the
story, oddly enough the European themselves do mention occasionally Abbakka. But we very rarely talk about it. So I think one of the things that I want to
do to through this attempt to at least document some part of our maritime histories to bring
out some of the stories. Now the Portuguese control on the Indian Ocean
however did not last much into the 1600 because the Dutch, and many other people forget the
Dutch East India Company arrived in the scene and through the 17th century, they became
the dominant power, maritime power in the Indian Ocean. The Dutch East India Company was so powerful
that it could essentially dictate terms to everybody else including the English East
India Company and on several occasions, you know defeated them, sank their fleets and
did other bad things to them. By the late 1600, 1700, they had basically
taken over what is now Indonesia, they have taken over Sri Lanka and they were beginning
to eye India, particularly the Kerala Coast, which was the source of black pepper. When they came up against a very tiny kingdom
ruled by a chap called, Marthanda Varma, Martha Varma again unless you happen to be from Southern
Kerala you probably have never heard of him, but Marthanda Varma decided that he was going
to take on these guys and he trained his soldiers to take on European fighting tactics and he
defeated the Dutch in a major battle in a place called Colachel, which is very close
to Kanyakumari, just north of Kanyakumari and he completely decimated them and if it
hadn’t been for Marthanda Varma, I would have been given this lecture to you in Dutch. Now following this defeat, he somehow also
managed to convince the Dutch Commander to switch sides to him and he then began to train
his army, using European tactics and European guns. So using this Dutch De Lannoy, was his name
and he basically got very tiny kingdom, but very quickly uprooted the Dutch from all along
that coastline and the shock of that was so large that essentially from this point onwards
the Dutch East India Company went into decline and opened up the space for the French and
then ultimately the English East India Company. Now I'm going to stop here because A) I think
it might be fun to have a conversation and secondly my throat is beginning to hurt.
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There are other lesser known young brathas who are trying to help. Let's help them too.
Here is one: https://www.reddit.com/r/Chodi/comments/gpgkun/this_virat_bhrata_deserves_more_likes_on_youtube/
One more, we need to teach our children while they are young: https://www.reddit.com/r/Chodi/comments/gls4jy/bhratas_and_bhaginis_please_share_with_nri_abcd/
Just found a link to a video on another post, which explains the sheer volume of trade between ancient Egypt and later the Roman empire with India. 1000s of Tons of spices were imported a year. Fascinating.
Roman History specific to Indian trade