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

by Sanjeev Sanyal

The Indian Ocean, nonetheless, remained the key arena of world affairs. We can gauge this from how the Dutch considered it a victory when they forced the English in 1667 to hand over the tiny nutmeg-growing island of Run in the East Indies, now Indonesia, in exchange for a much larger island in North America’s eastern seaboard. That island was Manhattan.

Even when earlier history is mentioned, it is treated either as background material or in terms of the medieval European yearning for Asian spices, as if the people of the Indian Ocean were sitting around lazily growing spices for export until the Europeans turned up and made things exciting.

Given all this mixing, forget racial purity, it seems most of us are not even pure Homo sapiens!

Trade with India had a big influence on the Persian Gulf area. For instance, Harappan weights and measures became the standard across the region. The locals also copied the Harappan seals. This was the beginning of a long commercial and cultural relationship that, despite booms and busts, continues to this day. Till as recently as the 1960s, the Indian rupee was used as legal tender in Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE! For a while, the Reserve Bank of India even issued a special Gulf rupee for use in these countries. It was only when the Indian rupee sharply devalued in June 1966 that these countries began to issue their own currencies

Genetic markers also suggest that this mixing went on for more than two thousand years, so much so that there are no ‘pure’ ANI and ASI any more.

The Bronze Age largely bypassed southern India, perhaps due to the paucity of copper ores in the region. Then, late in the third millennium BC, they did something amazing—they invented iron technology! The traditional view is that iron was introduced to India by invaders from Central Asia. Archaeological finds over the last two decades suggest instead that India was the likeliest place where iron was first mass produced.

Thus, one of the unintended consequences of early Iron Age migrations seems to be that the world has come to celebrate the birthday of an ancient god from Haryana!

A few Western writers like Charles Allen have patronizingly written how ancient Indians were somehow foolish to have had little regard for a great king such as Ashoka. On a closer look, it appears that they knew what they were doing. What is more worrying is how easily modern Indians have come to accept a narrative based on such minimal evidence.

The availability of eastern luxuries transformed Roman tastes but the problem was that the empire ran a persistent trade deficit with India. This deficit had to be paid in gold and silver coins. Roman writer Pliny (AD 23–79) complained bitterly that, ‘Not a year passed in which India did not take fifty million sesterces away from Rome.’ In a world where precious metals were used for minting coins, this was equivalent to severe monetary tightening. The Romans initially tried to solve the problem by curtailing trade but eventually they would resort to debasing their coins (i.e. reducing the content of gold and silver). This would eventually cause distortions and inflation in the Roman empire. Interestingly, the Indians continued to accept the debased coins although they recognized the higher quality of the older, high-content coins which continued to circulate in the Indian Ocean long after the reigns of emperors who had issued them. Notice the similarity with the modern world where China runs a persistent surplus against the United States and accepts dollars in exchange. Everyone accuses the US of printing too many dollars but China keeps accumulating them as reserves. In this way a symbiotic imbalance keeps the world economy going despite the distortions it causes. Indeed, such imbalances have been at the heart of most periods of global economic expansion and can be surprisingly persistent.17

It is remarkable how certain cultural traits have survived from Neolithic times.

It is quite extraordinary that two adventurers from faraway Odisha were at the heart of a rivalry that would later come to be seen as Tamil–Sinhala conflict.

So here we have an impossible combination of a Malay prince ruling over a Tamil kingdom founded by an Odiya adventurer in the north of Sri Lanka!

Colonial-era histories would repeatedly stress that black Africans did not have a history till the Europeans arrived: ‘They have stayed, for untold centuries, sunk in barbarism. . . . The heart of Africa was scarcely beating.’19 Indian readers will recognize the parallels with the colonial-era ‘Aryan Invasion Theory’ about how Indian civilization was a gift from white-skinned invaders from the north.

Some of these ideas take forms that look benign but are startlingly insidious when examined. Take, for instance, popular fictional characters like Tarzan and Phantom who are white heroes ‘protecting’ the locals. The underlying message is that the natives are incapable of looking after themselves. A lingering justification for intervention—both overt and covert.

Interestingly, Venice provided the Turks with inputs from their spies in Portugal and even put a team of gunners at the Sultan’s disposal. Clearly, economic interests trumped all other differences.

The southern half of the Indian peninsula, however, was home to a remarkable Hindu empire remembered today by the name of its capital—Vijayanagar. Built on the banks of the Tungabhadra River, it was then the largest city in the world.

Dutch got Pulau Run in the East Indies in exchange for the somewhat larger island of Manhattan in North America. This brings us to one of the most important findings of history—never invest in real estate based on past performance. I can visualize how seventeenth-century real estate consultants, armed with two hundred years of data on nutmeg production, would have made the case that the Dutch got the better deal!

This is how Elihu Yale, the Governor of Madras, amassed a large personal fortune before being removed from his post on suspicions of corruption. Part of this ill-gotten wealth was used to fund the university that bears his name. Thus, one of North America’s leading universities is built on money garnered through dodgy deals in the Indian Ocean.

Tipu is often portrayed as a great patriot in Indian history textbooks for having opposed British colonization but his record is not so straightforward. While it is true that he fought the British, he was constantly trying to subjugate other Indians—the Marathas, the Nizam of Hyderabad, Travancore, the Kodavas of Coorg to name just a few. He was also considered a usurper by many of his own subjects.

It is somewhat ironic that I owe most of my education to Francis Xavier and Cecil Rhodes. I attended a high school named after the former and my years at Oxford were financed by a scholarship named after the latter. I am quite aware that in both cases I was not the intended beneficiary. This brings us to the tricky question of how to judge individuals from history—do we judge them by their intentions or by the consequences of their actions? Do we judge them only by the standards of their times or by some absolute yardstick? I do not claim to know the answer but these are questions that scholars of history constantly grapple with.

Ignoring for a moment the morality of the colonial enterprise, one must admire the sheer scale and audacity of it. National borders across the continent are still marked by the arbitrary straight lines drawn on a map by various European powers to mark out their acquisitions. These boundaries made no geographical or cultural sense on the ground, but this would not have bothered European colonizers who had convinced themselves that Africans had no history or culture.

Denying a people’s history and culture is an obvious way for a colonizing power to present everything preceding their arrival as the age of darkness and ignorance.

On 22 September, the Emden unexpectedly appeared off the coast of Madras and proceeded to bombard the port. The raid lasted for barely half an hour but the 125-odd shells set ablaze oil containers and threw the city into chaos. The ship then disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. Although the damage was limited, the raid had a major psychological impact on the city and for a generation the word ‘Emden’ would be used as Tamil slang to denote maverick cunning or resourcefulness.

the United States could no longer remain neutral. On 6 April, President Wilson declared war on Germany. The fate of the Central Powers was now sealed. Thus, a small mistake by a secret agent in the Persian Gulf had a big influence on the course of world history; the flapping of a butterfly’s wings had caused a hurricane.

Most conventional history books and textbooks give the impression that India’s independence movement was a uniquely peaceful one led by Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. The role of the revolutionaries is usually left out or mentioned as a footnote.

It looked like the British authorities had finally been cornered but, just as some form of victory seemed imminent, Gandhi unilaterally suspended the movement. The proximate reason for the decision was an incident in Chauri-Chaura where a mob of protesters set fire to a police station and killed several policemen. Gandhi argued that this incident had violated the principle of non-violence but it caused a permanent schism with the revolutionaries who saw it as hypocrisy. Why did Gandhi have to make such a fuss over a single incident of violence, they argued, when he had been recruiting soldiers for the British just a couple of years earlier? What particularly incensed the Indian revolutionaries was that only a few weeks earlier the Irish had managed to force the British to sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty paving the way for an independent Irish Republic. If a tiny country like Ireland could gain freedom under the nose of the British, why did a large and faraway country like India have to wait?

From an Indian perspective, the tragedy of these battles was that Indian soldiers fought and died bravely on both sides, sacrificing their lives for someone else’s empires.

Unfortunately for the mutineers, they received no support from the Indian political leadership of the time. Both the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League asked them to surrender.21 Subhash Bose was missing, and the senior revolutionary leaders Har Dayal, Rash Behari Bose and Sachin Sanyal, who had tried so hard to trigger exactly such a mutiny, were no longer alive. Lacking political leadership, the sailors eventually surrendered. Despite various assurances, large numbers of sailors would be court-martialled and dismissed (note that none of the dismissed would be reinstated by the governments of Pakistan and India after Independence).

The Indian soldier was one of the bulwarks of the British empire and once his loyalty had been undermined, the British empire began to unwind not just in the Indian subcontinent but worldwide.

It is quite telling that the role of the revolutionaries in India’s freedom struggle is barely presented as a footnote in official Indian histories. Having come to power in 1947, the Indian National Congress would ensure that story would be told in a way that focused exclusively on its own role.

The dominance of the Congress party’s narrative was helped by the fact that it fitted the face-saving British account that they had peacefully granted freedom to India at the end of a successful ‘civilizing’ mission.

Amidst the chaos, a daredevil pilot from Odisha called Biju Patnaik flew secret missions into Java and rescued two key Indonesian rebel leaders from being captured (he would later go on to become the chief minister of Odisha).25 Prime Minister Nehru, meanwhile, organized the Asian Conference in New Delhi that pressured the UN Security Council to take action against the Dutch. It is remarkable that the first foreign policy action taken by newly independent India was to support Indonesia’s freedom movement. It was as if an ancient civilizational kinship had been suddenly rekindled. It was also appropriate that someone from Kalinga had played an important role in the sequence of events. It is said that Sukarno named his daughter Megawati, meaning ‘Goddess of the Clouds’ in Sanskrit, in honour of Biju Patnaik’s heroics in the sky.

In contrast to the oil-driven success of the Gulf states, nevertheless, the most remarkable economic transformation in the Indian Ocean rim was arguably achieved by a tiny, crowded island with so few natural resources that it even had to import water: Singapore.

As I look back to that period, I realize how easily the country could have gone into a spiral of violence and retribution. The South Africa we see today owes much to the philosophical evolution and personal example of one man. It would have taken very little for the country to have turned out as another Zimbabwe or even another Somalia. It is Nelson Mandela’s extraordinary achievement that he was able to somehow reconcile the country’s many internal contradictions and carry people along with him. Equally commendable is the fact that, unlike many leaders of newly freed countries, he did not yield to the temptation of holding on to power till his death or starting a dynasty. He became President in 1994 and stepped down in 1999 after just one term.