The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History

by Sanjeev Sanyal

The maritime links to Kartik Purnima are remembered in many other ways. A fair is held every year in Cuttack called Bali Yatra which literally means ‘The Journey to Bali’.

islands of Indonesia would have been a source of cloves, nutmeg and other spices. Many of the spices thought to be ‘Indian’ by medieval Europeans were actually from Indonesia except black pepper which grows along the south-western coast of India. Till the late eighteenth century, the world’s entire supply of cloves came from the tiny islands of Ternate and Tidore in the Maluku group.

Spices

the Buddhist and Hindu religions, the epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, the Sanskrit language, scripts, temple architecture and so on.

One should not be under the impression that influences always flowed unidirectionally from India to South East Asia. Far from it, Indian civilization was enriched in many ways by influences from the east. One commonplace example is the custom of chewing paan (betel leaves with areca nuts, usually with a bit of lime and other ingredients).

Cultural flow was not unidirectional

ironically, Sangam literature is full of ‘northern’ influences. Far from being Dravidian purists, ancient Tamils credited the sage Agastya, a northerner, with formalizing Tamil grammar. The great Tamil kings similarly took great pride in building linkages with the epics.

One of the texts also makes the first definite reference to a naval battle where Chera king Udiyanjeral defeated an unspecified local adversary and took a number of Greek merchants captive. The captives were later freed upon providing a large ransom.8

Upulvan, or Vishnu, is still worshipped by the Sinhalese as the guardian deity of Sri Lanka and virtually all major Buddhist temples have shrines to Hindu deities (called ‘devalas’). This is even true of the holiest of holies, the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy. As any visitor will notice, pilgrims entering the temple must first pass a number of Hindu shrines before reaching the main building.

Hindu deities in Buddhist temple

In this treeless, barren landscape, man must live by the fruits of the sea.

Food habits

We know that a group of Christians fleeing persecution in the Persian empire came to India under the leadership of Thomas of Cana in AD 345. Seventy-two families settled near Muzeris and were given special trading privileges by the local Hindu king.15 A few centuries later, early Muslims would build the Cheraman Masjid, the world’s second oldest mosque, in the same general area. It is a testimony to the importance of ancient Muzeris that these early Jewish, Christian and Islamic sites are all located within a very short distance of each other.

Abrahamic religions

The availability of eastern luxuries transformed Roman tastes but the problem was that the empire ran a persistent trade deficit with India.

Roman trade deficit with India

‘Not a year passed in which India did not take fifty million sesterces away from Rome.’

fashionable for wealthy Roman women to consult Indian astrologers.

shipping lines provided the infrastructure for all kinds of people to move back and forth across the seas.

as demonstrated by Delhi’s famous Iron Pillar, they even had the technology for rust-resistant iron.

However, it was his son Samudragupta (AD 336–370) who dramatically expanded the empire.

where he defeated in turn the rulers of Odisha and Andhra, and eventually Pallava king Vishnugopa of Kanchi.

southern kings were allowed to rule their kingdoms as tribute-paying subordinates.

Samudragupta’s son Chandragupta II (also called Vikramaditya), who reigned ...

We also have rock inscriptions mentioning Chandragupta Vikramaditya in the remote Hunza valley, in Gilgit–Baltistan to the far north, suggesting that Gupta armies had pushed beyond the Kashmir valley into the Pamirs.

With peace established over such a large territory, the Gupta era witnessed an extraordinary economic and cultural boom, and is often referred to as the ‘Golden Age’ of classical India.

Golden age

grand monastery was built; its magnificence was later described by the Chinese scholar–pilgrim Xuan Zang in the seventh century. The famous Nalanda University was also established under Gupta rule.

Interestingly, he adds that the king lived his personal life strictly according to Hindu rules and rituals.

All he tells us about Java is that it had an overwhelmingly Hindu population and very few Buddhists (this was not entirely true given the evidence of Borobudur).

It also tells us that by the fifth century, there was a well-established sea route from Bengal to Sri Lanka and onward to China via South East Asia.

Intriguingly, there is an oral tradition in India that Husain’s party included a group of Hindu mercenaries who were also killed in the battle. This is why the Mohyal Brahmins of Punjab still join Shia Muslims in the annual ritual mourning of Muharram.

Having loudly farted at his own wedding, he fled social embarrassment by sailing off to India where he settled in the port of Calicut (Kozhikode) in Kerala.

The Arab merchants also took on local wives and their descendants, the ‘Mappila’ Muslims, are now a quarter of Kerala’s population.

Ferishta tells us that every Brahmin male above the age of seventeen was decapitated and all their women and children were enslaved.18

Massacre of Karachi's brahmins

Facing starvation, they eventually decided to commit ‘jauhar’—the Hindu equivalent of the last stand. The gates were thrown open and the queen led the survivors out for a final charge and they were all massacred. Many of the remaining non-combatants committed suicide. In this way, the Arabs conquered Sindh.

Last stand on conquest of Sindh

The caliph flew into a rage at this insult and had the general executed by having him sewn up in animal hide. When his corpse was presented to her, the brave princess confessed that she had lied in order to have her revenge. The veracity of this extraordinary tale of revenge is difficult to ascertain. Arab sources independently confirm that Muhammad bin Qasim was executed soon after his conquest of Sindh but they do not mention the princesses.

Indeed, Hindu rulers seem to have made counter-raids and continued to rule over Afghanistan till the end of the tenth century.

When the Arabs conquered Persia in the seventh century, the majority of Iranians were Zoroastrian. After the conquest, however, more and more people converted to Islam. Faced with growing persecution, some of the remaining Zoroastrians fled to India where their descendants survive

Parsi

similarities between Zoroastrian and ancient Vedic rituals.

fire temple was built using a flame brought from Iran.

South East Asia remained a patchwork of Hindu–Buddhist kingdoms that were heavily influenced by the Indian civilization.

It was under Indravarman I that the Khmers began to build the complex hydraulic network of canals and lakes that allowed a major expansion in rice cultivation.

Canals for agriculture

Suryavarman II. It is he who built Angkor Wat, still the largest religious building in the world and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its sheer scale must be seen to be believed but, in order to imagine what it looked like in its heyday, one must remember that the towers were originally covered in gold leaf!6

Suryavarman Ankorwat

This should not be surprising as Hinduism and Buddhism remain closely related and their adherents routinely visit each other’s shrines. Just as Cambodian Buddhists worship Vishnu, Hindus venerate Buddha as an incarnation of Vishnu.

The maternal line was again important as he derived his legitimacy from the fact that his mother was Suryavarman I’s granddaughter.

idea was to illustrate the importance of matrilineal systems in the history of South East Asia.

commerce in the marketplace was mostly conducted by women. By paying rent to the local authority, they could set up a stall by displaying their goods on a mat laid out on the ground.

While women shopkeepers are not unusual, their dominance in the marketplace is particularly visible in the north east Indian states of Meghalaya and Manipur. Just wander around the local markets in Shillong or the Ima Keithel market in Imphal to understand what I mean.

The Sri Vijaya seem to have used Chinese protection to build up their own strength.

Many Middle Eastern countries and especially Pakistan in South Asia does this to US now

Kadaram (now Kedah province in Malaysia).

The Five Hundred was founded by Karnataka Brahmins but would later be dominated by Tamil Chettiars.

Unlike their Sumerian and Egyptian contemporaries, Vedic Hindus had preferred simple fire altars to grand religious structures. This changed in later times as temples became the centre of social and cultural life.

Why and when Hindu temples started getting big

temples were key to the financing of trade, industry and infrastructure building.

In reality, the network of large and small temples had a close relationship with merchant and artisan communities as well as the village/town councils;

This continued until the British arrived.. reference from Dharamphal 's book

temples lent money to village/town councils for infrastructure investment and to merchant and artisan guilds for business. Interest rates usually ranged from 12.5 to 15 per cent per annum. An eleventh-century inscription clearly shows that there was an active credit market.

sophisticated network of multinational guilds financed by large temple banks.