Ocean of Churn by Sanjeev Sanyal- Book Notes

Note: Whenever I read any book, I take notes to make sure I don't miss or forget its key learnings. These notes are a way for me to come back and read them to refresh them in my mind. I hope you find it useful as well

Link to book - The Ocean of Churn

• The influence of Indian civilization on South East Asia is obvious to anyone who has travelled around the region and it is increasingly well documented. The impact that South East Asia had on cultural and historical events in India is less appreciated. The evidence, however, suggests that the influence flowed both ways.

• Nalanda in Bihar, Few people realize that the university was partly funded by the Sri Vijaya kings of Sumatra.

• Conversely, the oldest living Jewish community in the world is to be found in the Indian state of Kerala, although its numbers have dwindled recently due to migration to Israel. Thus the churn of people continues.

• When Vasco da Gama led the Portuguese fleet into the Indian Ocean in 1497–98, it had already been a highly interconnected ecosystem for a very long time. Its economic importance can be gauged from how both the Chinese and the Europeans, who were not directly a part of this ecosystem, made great efforts to gain access to

• Indeed, the discovery of the Americas by Columbus was an unintended consequence of the desire to find a trading route to the Indian Ocean. History is full of such unintended consequences. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Europeans gradually came to dominate the Indian Ocean.

• Dutch 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.

On author’s view on how to read history

• I view the world as a Complex Adaptive System—a chaotic place where the flow of events is influenced by the constant and often unpredictable interactions between a host of factors and independent agents.

• An interesting derivative put forward by historians like Niall Ferguson is to explore the counterfactuals or ‘What ifs’. One of the implications of the complex-adaptive system framework is to recognize that once a particular path has been taken, all later events are influenced by it (this is called path dependence). It does not matter if this particular path was highly improbable to start with—once the turn is taken, it is hardwired into history and all subsequent events derive from it.

On Matrilineal customs across SEA

• Matrilineal societies are those that mark lineage through the mother and female ancestors.

• The tradition can be so deeply engrained that it often survives major sociocultural changes. Thus, the Minangkabau of Sumatra have mostly retained their matrilineal family structure to this day, despite having adopted Islam and the constant pressures from orthodox clerics.12

• The effective founder of the Angkor empire in Cambodia, Jayavarman II, was from Java, Indonesia, and most likely acquired the throne through marriage. In AD 877, the throne passed to Indravarman I who was Jayavarman’s queen’s nephew.13 The offices of Brahmin priests in ancient Cambodia, similarly, passed from uncle to nephew down the maternal line.14

• Along the south-western coast of India, for example, the custom probably evolved as a result of long-distance maritime trade which meant that the male population was constantly churning while the women were more rooted. This is why the Muslim community of the Kerala coast is still called Mappila or ‘son-in-law’ in memory of the Arab traders who came here from pre-Islamic times. Interestingly, the eastern coast of India did not develop similar customs despite being just as actively engaged in maritime trade with the matrilineal societies of South East Asia.

History of Human Race

• The Origin of Continents and Oceans, published in 1915. Wegener argued that today’s continents had once been part of a gigantic supercontinent and had later drifted apart like icebergs.

• First, it broke up into two large land masses—the northern continent of Laurasia (which included North America, Europe and Asia) and the southern continent of Gondwana

• Incidentally, the name Gondwana is derived from the Gond tribe of central India.

• The collision pushed up and created the Himalayas. As a result, the seabed that had existed between India and Asia was thrust into the sky. This explains why fossils of marine animals can be found high up in the mountain range.2

• The coastlines, for instance, have moved as the sea level has changed due to the periodic warming/cooling of our planet. Since the peak of the last Ice Age 18–20,000 years ago, the sea level has risen by 120 metres as the ice sheets have melted. This process flooded the coasts and, as we shall see, had a major impact on early human history. The sea level began to stabilize about 7000 years ago (i.e. 5000 BC) and remained broadly unchanged between AD 0 and AD 1800, but it has again begun to gradually rise since the nineteenth century.4

• Modern humans appeared in the East African Rift Valley about 200,000 years ago. Being an exceedingly modest lot, and despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, we would come to name ourselves Homo Sapien, that is, ‘wise man’.

• There is evidence to suggest that this dwarf species may have survived till as recently as 12,000 years ago.

• They migrated north, and archaeological remains found at the Skhul and Qafzeh caves in Israel suggest that Homo sapiens reached the Levant around 120,000 years ago.

• Most of the evidence now suggests that a small number of people, perhaps a single band, crossed over from Africa to the Arabian peninsula near what is now Yemen about 65–70,000 years ago. All non-Africans, despite their superficial differences, are said to be descendants of this tiny tribe.7

• Svante Pääbo and his team at the Max Plank Institute, Liepzig, finally cracked the puzzle when they discovered that around 1–4 per cent of the DNA of all non-Africans is derived from Neanderthals.

• This means that the Neanderthals did not entirely die out but live on within

• Neanderthals lived in a cold climate and were light-skinned and may also have had light hair.

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

• An imaginary line called the Wallace Line, that runs between the Indonesian islands of Bali and Lombok, separates the two ecosystems. Although the two islands are barely 35 kms apart, the channel between them seems to be deep enough for animals from mainland Asia (such as the tiger) to make it to Bali but not Lombok even when sea levels were at their lowest. The ancestors of the Australian aborigines, therefore, must have acquired the ability to build rafts that could cross seas that other human species could not.

• However, they have left behind paintings and handprints in a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia.

• The cycle of cooling started about 30,000 years ago and temperatures kept falling till the Ice Age peaked about 18–20,000 years ago. At the glacial maximum, one third of the Earth’s land surface was covered in ice (compared to less than an eighth today) and half of the oceanic surface.19

• Researchers have recently uncovered the remains of a 23,000-year-old farming settlement near the Sea of Galilee in Israel.

• The path of history is a lot more messy with different people adopting different technologies at different times, sometimes skipping a phase and occasionally retracing.

• One important question is, why did people bother to switch to agriculture? By all accounts, agriculture did not improve the lives of people. It was risky business that required the upfront investment of a lot of effort while the returns were uncertain—the rains could fail, wild animals could destroy the crops and neighbouring tribes could steal the produce.

• Moreover, cultivation yielded a narrow variety of food compared to that available to hunter–gatherers. Most importantly, living in concentrated villages in close proximity to animals increased the likelihood of spreading disease. Analysis of human remains from Neolithic farming sites repeatedly shows that farmers were less healthy and had much shorter lifespans than their hunter–gatherer ancestors. This may explain why the Nile oasis people went back to hunting in the Sahara grasslands as soon as climate permitted them. Whatever the original reason humans took to farming, it had one advantage—it produced more calories per unit area. A sedentary lifestyle may have also reduced the gap between births. This allowed for a big increase in human population even if the individual now had a lower quality of life.

The Merchants of Meluhha

• We now know that farming emerged independently in many parts of the world and that the Indian Ocean rim had multiple clusters. Thus, the story of the Indian Ocean rim is about the evolution of these clusters and their long-distance interactions from a very early stage.

• Mehrgarh, in the Bolan valley, is the best documented site and may have been occupied before 6000 BC (i.e. 8000 years ago).Barley was the earliest crop at the site.

• One concentration of Neolithic farm settlements have been found along the fringes of the Vindhya range in central India, just south of the modern city of Allahabad.

• Interestingly, the central Indians were eating both wild and domesticated rice. It is currently believed that rice was domesticated in China and it is possible that the crop made its way to India via South East Asia.

• After a relatively benign period lasting several thousand years, the savannah grasslands that covered the Sahara and Arabia began to dry out again around 4500 BC.

• Meanwhile, the Indian subcontinent witnessed the growth of settlements along two major rivers and their tributaries. One of the rivers is the Indus and the other is now the dry riverbed of the Ghaggar. Satellite photos and ground surveys confirm that the Ghaggar was once a mighty river that emerged from the Himalayas near modern-day Chandigarh, then flowed through Haryana, Rajasthan and Sindh before entering the sea through the Rann of Kutchh in Gujarat.

• After decades of debate, it is now accepted by most serious scholars that the Ghaggar is the same river that the earliest Hindu texts refer to as the Saraswati.

• This is why this civilization is now called the Indus–Saraswati civilization rather than the Indus Valley civilization. It is also known as the Harappan civilization after Harappa, one of its largest cities.

• The earliest recognizable Harappan site at Bhirrana in Haryana, on the banks of the Saraswati–Ghaggar, has been carbon-dated to 7000 BC.7 This makes it at least as old as the sites in Baluchistan which were once considered the oldest in the subcontinent.

• The second phase, often dubbed the ‘mature Harappan period’, lasted from 2600 to 2000 BC. This is the period that saw the rise of major cities like Mohenjodaro, Harappa, Dholavira, Kalibangan and so on. Some of these settlements already existed in the previous phase but they now expanded by an order of magnitude. Recent excavations suggest that the largest of these cities was Rakhigarhi, Haryana, which is also in the Saraswati–Ghaggar basin. After 2000 BC, however, the archaeological evidence shows a steady decline—cities are abandoned, civic management deteriorates and there are signs of economic stress.

• First, western India was much wetter than it is today. Not only was monsoon rain stronger, the Rann of Kutchh received fresh water from both the Saraswati and the Indus.

• In fact, the Indus used to flow into Kutchh till as recently as the colonial period when a major earthquake in 1819 diverted the river. The fortress of the semi-abandoned town of Lakhpat still stands guard over the channel through which the Indus used to enter the Arabian Sea.

• There is evidence that by 2600 BC, the Saraswati began to dry up. We do not yet understand the exact factors that caused this, but tectonic shifts in northern India may have caused the Sutlej to shift to the Indus and the Yamuna to the Ganga.

• In addition to internal trade, there is plenty of evidence that the Harappans had strong economic links with the Middle East.

• 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 (Bahrain had already made the shift a few years earlier).

• We have some idea of what the Harappans exported—carnelian beads, weights and measures, different types of wood, pots of ghee (clarified butter) and, most importantly, cotton textiles. The cotton plant was domesticated in India and cotton textiles would remain a major export throughout history. Oddly, we are not sure what the Harappans imported in exchange. Nothing of obvious Persian Gulf origin has ever been found in any Harappan site. Perhaps they imported perishables like dates and wine.

• The traditional view was that the Rig Veda was composed by so-called Aryans who came to India from Central Asia around 1500 BC. The problem is that the date is entirely arbitrary and there is no archaeological or genetic sign of a large-scale invasion/migration.

• As discussed more fully in my previous book, Land of the Seven Rivers: A Brief History of India’s Geography, the Sapta Sindhu was a relatively small area covering the modern-day state of Haryana and a few adjoining parts of Punjab and Rajasthan. This was the original homeland of the Bharata tribe that, according to the Rig Veda, defeated an alliance of ten tribes on the banks of the Ravi in Punjab. They then expanded their empire to the east by defeating a chieftain along the Yamuna. Thus, the Bharatas created the first known empire in the subcontinent and gave Indians the name by which they still call themselves. The text also suggests knowledge

• There is an additional piece of evidence that one needs to consider. The Rig Veda repeatedly mentions the Saraswati River as the greatest of rivers.16 It is clearly the most important geographical feature of the Vedic terrain. Forty-five hymns are dedicated to the river while the Ganga is barely mentioned twice. One of the hymns clearly places the river between the Yamuna and Sutlej—exactly where the dry riverbed of the Ghaggar is located. Importantly, the hymns describe a river in full flow and, unlike later texts, there is no mention of the river drying up. This would suggest that the text was certainly written before 2000 BC and most likely before 2600 BC—which would imply that we may be dealing with an early Harappan text.

• A study of an old lakebed in Haryana by scientists from Cambridge University found conclusive evidence that the summer monsoon abruptly became weaker 4100 years ago in north-west India.

• In Mesopotamia, the Akkadian empire also collapsed around 2100 BC.

• North-west India probably experienced something similar as monsoon rains failed. The Saraswati, already in decline, seems to have stopped flowing altogether. Post-Vedic texts tell us of how the river ‘disappeared’ underground. There is evidence that the Harappans tried to adapt to drier conditions by switching from high-yield wheat and barley to drought-resistant millets. The problem was that the new crops had yields that could only support small rural communities but not large urban centres.

• The ANI and ASI populations suddenly go through a period of rapid mixing from around 2100 BC onward.

• The mixing of these two genetic pools is responsible for the bulk of India’s present-day population.

• 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. As a recent study put it: ‘The most remarkable aspect of the ANI–ASI mixture is how pervasive it was, in the sense that it has left its mark in nearly every group in India. It has affected not just traditionally upper-caste groups, but also traditionally lower- caste and isolated tribes, all of whom are united in their history of mixture in the past few thousand years.’

• Then, around AD 100 (a new study suggests AD 50022) the mixing abruptly stopped as different castes and tribes became strictly endogamous. The reasons for this are hazy, but castes do seem to be quite fluid in the oldest Indian texts and become much more rigid in later writings (although endogamous, the relative positions of most castes continued to be fluid into modern times). A fuller discussion on caste is beyond the scope of this book, but genetics has broadly confirmed the assertion by Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar that the Indian caste system was a case of ‘superimposition of endogamy on exogamy’.

• They found a number of iron artefacts, including weapons, that dated from around 2400–1800 BC. This is arguably the oldest systematic use of iron in the world. Far from being a military advantage exercised by Central Asian marauders, it appears that iron weaponry would have been an indigenous technological advantage.

• Interestingly, the Vedic–Mitanni god Mitra would remain a popular deity in the Middle East and, centuries later, would witness a major revival in the Roman empire (where he would be known as the solar god Mithras). The cult of Mithras would become very widespread in the late Roman period and, for a while, would provide serious competition to early Christianity. The pagan Romans used to celebrate a big festival called Saturnalia that went on for a week from 17 December. At the end of the festival, on the 25 December, the Mithras cult would celebrate the feast of Sol Invictus or Unconquered Sun. Many scholars believe that when the Christians came to dominate the Roman empire, they simply took over the popular pagan festival (after all, the actual birth date of Jesus Christ is not known).29 Mind you, not everyone agreed with this choice and the Orthodox Church still celebrates Christmas on 7 January. The Puritans would later disapprove of the unseemly heathen celebrations that clung to the festival and would try to ban Christmas in North America and Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; they obviously thought that Merrie Olde England was a bit too merry.30 Nevertheless, the 25 December holiday has survived as a day of festivity for most Christians and even non-Christians. 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!

• Recent genetic studies show that a bit more than 4000 years ago, a band of Indians turned up in Australia and contributed their DNA to the aborigines. This finding confounds the earlier belief that there were no new arrivals to the island continent between the initial migration of Melanesians 45,000 years ago and the arrival of the Europeans.

• Till just a decade ago, it was common for scholars to dismiss indigenous oral histories as mere fantasy but latest research shows that they often contain folk memories of real events.

• It is fascinating that the Iron Age epic Mahabharata hints at the matrilineal streak in India’s north-east. It tells us how the exiled prince Arjun visited the kingdom of Manipur. There he met the warrior princess Chitrangada and married her.

• However, note that the marriage took place on the explicit condition that Chitrangada would not have to follow Arjun back home as she and her children were heirs to the throne. Again notice the easy acceptance of a male outsider combined with the rootedness of the local female. The story does not end here. Ulupi, the queen of a neighbouring Naga tribe,40 also falls in love with Arjun and kidnaps him. The epic then tells us of how Arjun is eventually restored to Chitrangada.

• A number of sites in the central Gangetic plains have shown that iron implements were being used by 1700 BCBy 1300 BC, the use of iron had become commonplace across north and central India. Some of these Iron Age cities, such as Varanasi, have survived as urban centres till today. It is during the Iron Age that two major highways came to connect the subcontinent. The first is an east–west road called Uttara Path (i.e. Northern Road) that ran from eastern Afghanistan, across the Gangetic plains to the ports of Bengal. This road would be repaired and rebuilt throughout Indian history and survives today as National Highway 1 between Amritsar and Delhi and as National Highway 2 between Delhi and Kolkata.

• In the sixth century BC, Gautam Buddha would preach his first sermon at Sarnath, the spot where the two ancient highways met. To this day, two of India’s most important highways (NH2 and NH7) meet here.

• The Mahavamsa, an epic written in Pali, tells the founding myth of how the Sinhalese came to Sri Lanka. If true, this expedition would suggest that the ancients had gone around the Cape of Good Hope a good two thousand years before Vasco Da Gama!

• He next marched into the plains of Punjab where he and his local allies defeated Porus (probably relates to the Puru tribe who had lived in this area since Vedic times).

• Alexander’s brief incursion into the Indian subcontinent had an unintended consequence. A scholar called Chanakya and his protégé Chandragupta Maurya took advantage of the political confusion caused by the invasion to carve out a power base in India’s north-west. After several attempts, they defeated the Nanda king of Magadh and created the foundations for the powerful Mauryan empire. In 305 BC, Chandragupta defeated Seleucus Nikator, the general who had taken over most of Alexander’s Asian possessions.

• Chandragupta abdicated in 298 BC (or 303 BC according to another source) in favour of his son Bindusara who ruled till 273 BC. Bindusara had inherited an empire that was already very large—from Afghanistan to Bengal.

• Ashoka is said to have personally decapitated 500 of them.12 Having consolidated his power, he was finally crowned emperor in 270 BC.

• The reader will be surprised to discover that the popular narrative about this conversion is based on little evidence. Ashoka would invade Kalinga in 262 BC whereas we know from minor rock edicts that Ashoka had converted to Buddhism more than two years earlier. No Buddhist text links his conversion to the war and even Ashoka’s eulogists like Charles Allen agree that his conversion predated the Kalinga war. Moreover, he seems to have had links with Buddhists for a decade before his conversion. The evidence suggests that his conversion to Buddhism was more to do with the politics of succession than with any regret he felt for sufferings of war.

• The Ashokan inscriptions at Dhauli are engraved on a rock at the base of a hill. Almost all tourists drive right past it to the white-coloured modern stupa at the top of the hill. So I found myself alone with the inscriptions and the translations put up by the Archaeological Survey of India. What will strike anyone reading them is how they specifically leave out any sign of regret. The silence is deafening.

• The Ashokavadana recounts how Ashoka once had 18,000 Ajivikas in Bengal put to death in a single episode. If true, this would be the first known instance of large-scale religious persecution in Indian history (but, sadly not the last).

• He then ordered that he would pay a gold coin in exchange for every decapitated head of a Jain.

• In addition to the references of his continued cruelty, we also have reason to believe that Ashoka was not a successful administrator. In his later years, an increasingly unwell Ashoka watched his empire disintegrate from rebellion, internal family squabbles and fiscal stress.

• As one can see, Ashoka does not look like such a great king on closer inspection but a cruel and unpopular usurper who presided over the disintegration of a large and well-functioning empire built by his father and grandfather. At the very least, it must be accepted that evidence of Ashoka’s greatness is thin and he was some shade of grey at best.

• We know that Bindusara was in touch with Alexander’s successors in the Middle East.

• Ashoka too maintained the links with the Greek rulers of the Middle East.

• The Arthashastra tells us that Chanakya preferred coastal and river routes over those crossing the high seas as he considered them too dangerous.

• One of Ashoka’s sons or grandsons, Jalauka, carved out an independent kingdom in Kashmir where he promoted Shaivite Hinduism.

• Around 193 BC, a remarkable military leader called Kharavela came to the throne of Kalinga. We know about him because of a long inscription at Hathigumpha, or Elephant’s Cave.

On East Coast of India

• Odiya–Bengali seafarers had been visiting and settling in Sri Lanka from the sixth century BC.

• It is in the Mekong delta that we witness the establishment of the first Indianized kingdom of South East Asia around the first century BC. The Chinese called it the kingdom of Funan. There is an interesting legend about how this kingdom was founded. It is said that an Indian merchant ship was sailing through the region when it was attacked by pirates led by Soma, daughter of the chieftain of the local Naga clan. The Indians fought back and fended off the attackers led by a handsome young Brahmin called Kaundinya.

• Princess Soma had been impressed by Kaundinya’s bravery and had fallen in love! She proposed marriage and the offer was accepted. This union is said to have founded a lineage that ruled Funan for many generations.

• We have no way of knowing if this legend is based on true events but slightly different versions of the story are repeated in inscriptions by both the Chams of Vietnam and the Khmers of Cambodia—the royal families of both claim descent from Soma and Kaundinya. It is also repeated in contemporary Chinese records.1 Notice how Kaundinya acquired his throne through marriage to a warrior princess. Moreover, it was the princess who made the proposal. Given that royal legitimacy had been acquired through the female line, we find that matrilineal genealogies would be given a great deal of importance over the fifteen hundred years that these Indianized kingdoms flourished in this part of the world.

• While Kaundinya is not a common first name, it is the name of a gotra (i.e. male lineage) of Brahmins who still live along the Tamil–Andhra–Odisha coastline. Perhaps this is not a coincidence.

• Sumatra (called Swarnadwipa, or Island of Gold in Sanskrit texts).

• If the sailors started from Odisha in mid-November, it is estimated that they would reach the islands of Java/Bali by mid-January. They would now have two months to conduct their business before they started their return journey in mid-March. This would allow them to get back to Sri Lanka in time to catch the early South-West monsoon winds in May that would take them home.3

• This is why Indians were known as ‘keling’ by the Malays and Javanese from ancient times although the term has acquired a somewhat derogatory connotation in recent times. That era of maritime exploration and trade is still remembered in Odisha in folklore and festivals. The festival of Kartik Purnima takes place in mid-November when the winds shift and begin to blow from the north. This marks the time of year that ancient mariners would have set sail for Indonesia. Families, especially women and children, gather at the edge of a waterbody and place paper boats with oil lamps in the water. I witnessed the ritual on a beach near the temple town of Konark.

• A fair is held every year in Cuttack called Bali Yatra which literally means ‘The Journey to Bali’.

• The most important Indian export was cotton textiles which would continue to be in much demand across the Indian Ocean rim till modern times.

• Indian imports included Chinese silks, via ports in Vietnam, and camphor from Sumatra.

• 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. Trade links with South East Asia unsurprisingly led to cultural exchange. Within a few centuries we see the strong impact of Indic civilization on the region—the Buddhist and Hindu religions, the epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, the Sanskrit language, scripts, temple architecture and so on. Despite the later impact of Islam, European colonial rule and postcolonial modernity, the influence of ancient India remains alive in place and personal names, commonly used words, and in the arts and crafts. Buddhism is still the dominant religion across Myanmar to Vietnam, while Hinduism survives in pockets such as Bali.

• One commonplace example is the custom of chewing paan (betel leaves with areca nuts, usually with a bit of lime and other ingredients). While it is common across the Indian subcontinent, the areca nut, called ‘supari’ in Hindi, is originally from South East Asia and was chewed across the region and as far north as Taiwan. Paan is still widely consumed in India but, in recent years, has become less popular in the urban areas of South East Asia. Still, the leaf and nut continue to play an important cultural role and are used in many ceremonies.

• Most of the early known history of the far south of the Indian peninsula, what are now the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, is about the rivalries between three clans—the Cholas, Cheras and Pandyas. The Cholas had their heartland in the Kaveri delta, the Pandyas were further south near Madurai and the Cheras along the Kerala coast. Their relative strength waxed and waned over time but it is amazing how the same three clans battled each other over fifteen centuries (c. 300 BC to AD 1200)!

• 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. Even the nearby souvenir stalls sell an eclectic mix of Hindu and Buddhist icons.

• Socotra is a fragment left over from the break-up of the supercontinent of Gondwana and its long isolation has left it with unique flora and fauna.

• The island’s name is derived from Dwipa Sukhadhara, or ‘the Island of Bliss’ in Sanskrit. It is telling that an island so close to Arabia had a Sanskritic name

• In exchange, one of the most important products ancient Indians imported was wine—and we are told that Italian wine was preferred over the Arabian and Syrian stuff;

• The text lists a number of ports down the coast but arguably the most important was Muzeris (or Mucheripatanam as the Indians called it) which was the source of black pepper. We are told of how Arab and Greek ships flocked to the port.

• The reason that the port of Muzeris was going through such a boom in international trade during the period The Periplus was written is that mariners had worked out in the previous century that they could use monsoon winds to sail directly between Socotra and southern India without hugging the coast.

• It is curious that it took a Greek to work out how to harness the monsoon winds in the Arabian Sea when the Indians had been using them for generations in the Bay of Bengal to visit South East Asia.

• Thus, India became home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world.

• We know, for instance, that it was fashionable for wealthy Roman women to consult Indian astrologers.

Arabian Knights

• The Gupta empire had its origins in the eastern Gangetic plains, in what is now Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, where the dynasty’s first emperor, Chandragupta I, established his power base. However, it was his son Samudragupta (AD 336–370) who dramatically expanded the empire.

• In a series of military campaigns he established direct or indirect control over nearly all of India.

• 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.

• Although the Guptas were staunch Hindus they followed a policy of religious tolerance. A Chinese text tells us that the Sri Lankan king Meghavarna sent a mission to Samudragupta to request permission to set up a monastery and rest house for Lankan pilgrims visiting Bodh Gaya. Permission was granted and a 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.

• 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).

• As mentioned in the previous chapter, the early history of the southern tip of India is dominated by the rivalries of three clans—the Cheras, Pandyas and Cholas. The Sinhalese kings of Sri Lanka sometimes participated in this, usually as allies of the Pandyas.

• we know, the term ‘Naga’ was often used to refer to people with oriental features in North-East India or in South East Asia (i.e. the Sundaland diaspora). The Pallavas are known to have links with kingdoms in South East Asia that used the serpent as a symbol or called themselves the serpent people. As mentioned in Chapter 1, for instance, the remains of the Kadaram kingdom in Kedah, Malaysia, are concentrated in an area that is still called the Valley of the Serpents. Similarly, the multi-headed cobra was the symbol of royalty among the Khmer. It raises the possibility that the Naga princess who helped found the Pallava dynasty was from South East Asia—maybe a descendant of Princess Soma and Kaundinya! Perhaps this explains the especially close links between the Pallavas and the Indianized kingdoms of that part of the world.

• Simha-Vishnu had a younger brother Bhima who sailed to a distant land and became a ruler after marrying a local princess. Five generations later, when Simha-Vishnu’s direct line died out, the Pallavas would bring back a twelve-year-old descendant of Bhima to sit on the throne. The boy would become Nandi Varman II whom readers will recall from the beginning of this book. It is interesting that his inscriptions emphasize that he was a ‘pure’ Pallava.

• At the height of their power, the Pallavas controlled Tamil Nadu, southern Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and parts of Sri Lanka. Their capital of Kanchipuram and their main port in Mahabalipuram were impressive cities that the Pallava kings adorned with large Hindu temples.

• Modern-day tourists visiting Mahabalipuram usually see the rock-cut caves and the Shore Temple. They will often ignore a modern lighthouse on a hill behind the ancient monuments. However, maritime history buffs would be rewarded if they walked up to it because they will come across the remains of a Pallava-era lighthouse built around AD 630 where a fire was kept burning every night in order to guide ships to the port.

• old legend that there were originally seven temples on the shore. It was said that the city’s wealthy citizens grew so arrogant that the gods sent a great flood to punish them. The flood swept away all but one of the temples, the lonely Shore Temple that we see today.

• Then, in December 2004, a deadly tsunami hit coastlines across the Indian Ocean. Before the tsunami came in, the sea first withdrew and, for a few minutes, exposed several stone structures off the coast of Mahabalipuram. Later investigations by the Archaeological Survey of India have confirmed that there are indeed several temples and man-made structures that lie submerged off the coast.5 Moreover, studies of the area have found evidence that this coastline has been hit by tsunamis repeatedly and it is possible that the flood mentioned in the legend relates to a tsunami.

• Given the close political and commercial links between the Pallavas and these kingdoms, it is not surprising that the dominant source of Indian influence in South East Asia shifted from Odiya to Tamil during this period. For instance, the South East Asians adopted the Pallava version of the Brahmi script. This is why the scripts used to write Khmer, Thai, Lao, Burmese and Javanese-Kawi are derived from the Pallava script.

• Since the 1930s, archaeologists have discovered evidence of a number of Hindu shrines and at least two large temples in and around the port city of Quanzhou. These include stone carvings depicting mythological tales related to the gods Vishnu and Shiva that look identical to those found in southern India during the same period. In the nearby village of Chedian, locals still worship the image of a goddess who is clearly of Indian origin (the villagers see her as a form of the Chinese goddess Guanyin).

On Origins of Islam

• Having secured his base, the Prophet sent out messengers to the chieftains of neighbouring tribes asking them to join his cause. The Prophet died in AD 632, just two years after he had conquered Mecca.

• The power struggle culminated in the Battle of Karbala in AD 680 where Muhammad’s grandson Husain ibn Ali and his followers were massacred by a much larger army sent by Umayyad Caliph Yazid.

• 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.

• Few people realize that India is home to the second oldest mosque in the world—the Cheraman mosque in Kerala. If the claimed date is accurate, it was built by Arab merchants before the Prophet had conquered Mecca.16 The mosque is located an hour’s drive north of Kochi in the general area of Muzeris, highlighting yet again the importance of this ancient port.

• The constant circulation of merchants and sailors meant that a significant part of the male population in Kerala was transitory while the female population was more rooted. Over time, it seems to have led to matrilineal social arrangements. The Nairs of Kerala and the Bunt of the Karnataka coast, both warrior clans, developed matrilineal customs.

• An initial exploratory expedition was repulsed but in AD 711, a more substantial military force was sent out from Iraq under the leadership of a young general called Muhammad bin Qasim. The campaign is recounted in the chronicles of Ferishta and in a text called Chachnama.

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

• when the caliph called the elder princess to his bed, she told him that she was no longer a virgin as Muhammad bin Qasim had already raped her. 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 Gurjara–Pratihara empire ruled over much of north India at that time and its armies easily fended off the Arabs.

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

• The two faced each other at the Battle of Talas in AD 751 in which the Arabs decisively defeated the Tang army. Thus, Central Asia came into the Islamic sphere of influence rather than the Chinese.

• The text tells us that in the early tenth century, a small group of Zoroastrians left their homes in Khorasan, north-eastern Iran, and set out to look for a country where they could practise their religion in peace. They made their way south to the port of Hormuz from where these families sailed for India.

• However, they still felt insecure and decided to head for a small Hindu kingdom on the Gujarati mainland around AD 936. The text says that the ruler of the kingdom was Jadi Rana

• Jadi Rana received the refugees warmly and listened patiently to their request for a place to settle. While he was sympathetic to their predicament, he was hesitant to let so many foreigners settle in his lands. There is a well-known legend, probably apocryphal, that the king asked one of his servants to bring a bowl filled with milk to the top. The message being that the bowl would overflow if any more milk was added. The leader of the Parsis, however, responded by adding some sugar to the milk. The dissolved sugar sweetened the milk but did not cause it to overflow. Thus, the account goes, the Parsis convinced the king.

• The Qissa contains a somewhat different narrative that is likely to be more accurate. According to this version Jadi Rana asked the Parsis to explain their religion and rituals to him. He must have been struck by the obvious similarities between Zoroastrian and ancient Vedic rituals. The newcomers also composed sixteen Sanskrit slokas to explain their beliefs (these have been preserved). The king must have been satisfied by the explanations for he decided to give the Parsis refuge provided they accepted the following conditions in perpetuity: that they would give up arms; that they would adopt Gujarati as their language; that their women would wear the local dress; and finally, that all marriage ceremonies would be held in the evening (the last condition is particularly sensible, in my view, as morning weddings can be a real drag on the feasting).

• The Qissa tells us that the settlement in Sanjan flourished till the fifteenth century when the town suffered an attack by a large Turkic army led by Alf Khan, general of Sultan Muhammad.

Merchants, Temples and Rice

• Jayavarman II, came to the Khmer throne. It was he who founded the Angkor empire, though not the city by which the empire is now known.

• The only thing we know for sure is that he was very devoted to the Hindu god Shiva. It is also likely that his claim to the Khmer throne was acquired by marriage to a Khmer princess.

• Matrilineal descent was a very important component of royal legitimacy in Angkor. This is explicit in the inscriptions of the Angkor monarchs. For instance, when Indravarman built a grand Shiva temple at Bakong, he dedicated statues to Jayavarman II and his queen, his own parents and his maternal grandparents.

• Khmers ruled much of what is now Cambodia, Thailand and Laos. The empire now needed a grand capital and Yashovarman I laid out the first city in Angkor and named it after himself Yashodharapura. He also built a number of large Hindu temples. This includes the Preah Vihear temple, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, built on a mountaintop on the Thai-Cambodian border which is now the focus of a bitter dispute between the two countries.

• Hindus venerate Buddha as an incarnation of Vishnu.

• Readers will recall that the matrilineal Khasis are genetically and linguistically related to the Khmer.

• The next Chola ruler was Rajaraja’s son Rajendra who assumed the throne in 1014.

• The ground situation, however, suddenly changed in 1016 when the Sri Vijaya and their allies defeated the Javanese and sacked the Mataram capital. This left the Sri Vijaya in control of both sea routes. We have evidence to suggest that it soon exploited this situation by exacting exorbitant tolls on merchant ships.

• For instance, a study of temple records by Kanakalatha Mukund shows that temple lending was mostly directed to corporatized bodies like guilds and village councils rather than individual merchants. The 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.

• 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!

• The key to their prosperity was their role in procuring two commodities from the African hinterlands—slaves and gold. So many African slaves would be transported to the Middle East that a revolt by them in AD 869 would take over much of southern Iraq, at the heart of the Abbasid empire. Known as the Zunj Revolt, the rebels would briefly run an independent state that included the port of Basra.

• Slavery would remain alive in the Middle East till 1962 when Saudi Arabia became the last country to abolish the practice.

• It was commonly argued by colonial-era scholars that India was not even a country but merely a geographical term and that Hinduism was not a religion but a collective noun for a bunch of unconnected pagan cults. The subtext was that, therefore, there was nothing wrong in keeping India under colonial rule or denigrating Hinduism. It is amazing how many of these racist ideas have remained alive even after the end of the colonial era. 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.

• Turkic invaders from Central Asia pushed out the Hindu Shahi rulers of Kabul and then began to make raids into India. Led by Mahmud of Ghazni, the Turks made as many as seventeen raids between AD 1000 and 1025 and destroyed and pillaged many of the prosperous cities and temple towns of north-western India. Perhaps the most infamous of these was an attack on the revered temple of Somnath in Gujarat. Fifty thousand of its defenders were put to the sword and some twenty million dirhams worth of gold, silver and gems were carried away. Somnath would be destroyed and rebuilt many times, but Mahmud’s attack is still remembered most vividly. The temple that stands on the spot today was built in the 1950s. Its symbolic importance can be gauged from the fact that it was one of the first projects initiated by the Indian Republic.

• An alliance led by Raja Suheldeo Pasi defeated a large Turkic army led by Mahmud’s nephew at the Battle of Bahraich in 1033 (one version of oral history suggests Suheldeo was himself killed in battle). For a century and a half after this defeat, the Turks seem to have kept out of the heartlands.

• So when Prithviraj Chauhan, ruler of Delhi, fended off a raid by Muhammad Ghori in 1191, he allowed the invader to return home to Afghanistan! Ghori returned the following year to defeat and kill Prithviraj.

• Around 1200, Bakhtiyar attacked and destroyed the famous university of Nalanda. Most of the Brahmin scholars and Buddhist monks were put to death and its library was torched.

• In 1235, the great city of Ujjain, a major Hindu religious and cultural centre in Madhya Pradesh, was destroyed by the Delhi Sultanate.

• If the Turks were feeling smug about their successes in India, they were about to get a taste of their own medicine. The Mongols led by Chengiz Khan attacked and devastated the Turkic homelands in Central Asia in 1220–22.

• Interestingly, till they converted to Islam towards the end of their rule, the Mongol rulers of Iran were Buddhists or shamanists. This Buddhist episode in Iranian history is now almost forgotten.

• Chengiz Khan captured the Yanjing (modern Beijing) capital of the northern Jin kingdom in 1215.

• The rapid and simultaneous collapse of three established civilizations is difficult to explain merely on the basis of the tactical superiority of Turko-Mongol cavalry.

• The popular perception in India is that the Hindus were unable to deal with a younger and more vigorous Islam. This too is inaccurate because Hindus had been dealing quite successfully with Islam for five centuries before Muhammad Ghori broke through.

• Whatever the reasons for the success of the Turks in India, the systematic destruction of temples did not just hurt intellectual and cultural life but also had a long-term paralysing impact on finance and risk-taking. As already discussed, temples acted as banks and their destruction meant that Indian merchant networks suddenly lost their financial muscle. Thus, we see a distinct decline in the importance of seafaring Indian merchants in the Indian Ocean rim from this point. The Indian merchant class became much more shore-based while the space they vacated was steadily taken over by Arabs and the Chinese. In other words, the Arabs and the Chinese recovered faster from the Turko-Mongol shock. In contrast, Indian Hindus imposed on themselves caste rules that discouraged the crossing of the seas. Why did a people with such a strong maritime tradition impose these restrictions on themselves?

when they attempted to invade Odisha in 1247, the Turks were soundly defeated by Narasimha Deva

• It is likely that the famous Sun Temple in Konark was built by Narasimha Deva I to celebrate this victory.

• This is how Sultan Alauddin Khilji obtained the Koh-i-Noor diamond. An attack by the Turks on the city of Madurai further south ended the ancient Tamil dynasty of the Pandyas in 1311.

• Moroccan traveller called Ibn Battuta also visited India.

• When Ibn Battuta visited India, the throne of Delhi was occupied by Muhammad bin Tughlaq.

Treasure and Spice

• Under the vigorous leadership of Kertanagara, the Javans extended their control over nearby islands like Bali and Madura. This expansion was briefly interrupted by a civil war when Kertanagara was assassinated by a vassal who usurped the throne in 1292. The murdered king’s son-in-law, Kertarajasa, was organizing a revolt against the usurper when a Mongol fleet arrived from China with a large expeditionary force. Kertarajasa entered into an alliance with them and used them to recover the throne. If the Mongols were expecting the new king to become a grateful tributary, however, they were mistaken. Kertarajasa next turned on the foreigners and drove them away. He also established a new capital at Majapahit, the name by which his empire would be remembered.

• In medieval Java too, the matrilineal succession was important, but it was probably more like the Kakatiyas of south India, the female line being used when the direct patrilineal line did not produce a suitable male heir. Note how this is quite different from a purely patrilineal system where, in the absence of a son, the throne would pass to a nephew or male cousin even if distantly related.

• The Majapahit, however, became alarmed when the Chinese sent an embassy to crown the ruler of Malayu in 1377. This was clear interference in the Majapahit sphere of influence, and would have been seen as an attempt to create an alternative power centre. The Ming ambassadors were diverted to Java and killed. This resulted in a distinct cooling of diplomatic relations, and trade between China and South East Asia declined.1

• At the beginning of the fifteenth century, a new Ming emperor came to the throne and took the title Yongle (meaning Lasting Joy). At the very beginning of his rule, he decided to fund a series of grand voyages meant to project China’s power in South East Asia and in the India Ocean rim.

• Between 1405 and 1433, the Chinese fleet would make seven voyages that would visit Sumatra, India, Sri Lanka, Oman and the eastern coast of Africa. No one who saw the fleet would have been left unimpressed. Leading the expedition were large junks called ‘treasure ships’ that had nine masts and were 400 feet long (i.e. 122 metres). To put this in context, Columbus’s flagship, Santa Maria, was only 85 feet long (i.e. 26 metres). They carried costly cargoes of porcelain, silk, lacquerware and other fine objects to be exchanged in trade or as gifts for local rulers.

• The admiral who helmed these voyages was the unlikeliest person to lead such an expedition—a Muslim eunuch of Mongol origin called Zheng He who began life in landlocked Yunnan!

• Calicut had emerged as the largest port on India’s west coast after Muzeris had been destroyed by a flood in 1341.

• The fleet then headed back home. Off Sumatra, however, they engaged and destroyed the fleet of the Chinese pirate who had occupied Palembang. The survivors were taken back to China and executed. Except for this skirmish, the first voyage had been one of information gathering. From now, the Chinese would use the Treasure Fleet to move the chess pieces on the geopolitical landscape of the Indian Ocean.

• The second voyage set sail after only a few months. Its purpose was to return various ambassadors to their home countries but also to install a new ruler in Calicut.3 The ruler of Calicut, drawn from the matrilineal Nair warrior clan, was known as the Lord of the Seas or Samudrin (often misspelled as Zamorin). The Chinese records suggest that they succeeded in installing their candidate.

• In the early fifteenth century, the Chinese were looking to strengthen the Thai as a way to further weaken the declining empire of Angkor.

• He tells us that the Chinese envoys really enjoyed their Thai sojourn because the women, including married ones, were quite happy to eat, drink and sleep with them without restraint. In fact, the Chinese found that husbands were pleased when they slept with their wives as they took it as a compliment saying, ‘My wife is beautiful and the man from the Middle Kingdom is delighted with her.’ The mystery is how the ship captains managed to convince the sailors who went onshore to return to their ships.

• For instance, when the admiral visited Sri Lanka during the third voyage, he found that the island was in a state of civil war. The Chinese would capture at least one of the claimants to the throne and take him back to Nanjing to meet the Ming emperor. It appears that the sacred Tooth Relic was also taken to China.

• The Chinese would similarly intervene in a war of succession in the kingdom of Samudra in Sumatra.

• However, the intervention with the most far-reaching historical implications was the support for the new kingdom of Melaka (also spelled Malacca) as a counterweight to the Majapahit of Java.4 The founder of Melaka was a prince called Parmeswara who claimed descent from the Sri Vijaya.

• Interestingly, Melaka was now encouraged to convert to Islam. Although Zheng He and many of his captains were Muslim, this should be seen mainly as a geostrategic move to create a permanent opposition to those troublesome Hindus of Java.

• Whatever the original motivations, Melaka prospered under Chinese protection while the Majapahit were steadily pushed back. This is the origin of the steady Islamization of South East Asia.

• The Confucian mandarins were increasingly suspicious of the power being accumulated by the eunuch lobby. So after Yongle died in 1424, the mandarins would steadily undermine the navy which was controlled by the eunuchs.

• After one last voyage in 1431–33, the treasure ships were allowed to rot and the records of the voyages were deliberately suppressed. China would withdraw into an isolationism from which it would emerge only in the second half of the twentieth century. For a while it may have seemed that the Indian Ocean would revert to the Arabs but, as often happens in history, the flow of events took an unexpected turn due to the arrival of a completely new player—the Portuguese. Their arrival sped up the dissolution of an old order that was already crumbling.

• As already mentioned, the Chinese had helped Melaka emerge as a rival to the Majapahit empire. A Muslim alliance led by Melaka was soon encroaching into western Java and the empire would steadily lose control over its spice ports.

• As the empire crumbled, many members of the Javan elite accepted Islam. Those who refused to convert, withdrew to the island of Bali in the early sixteenth century, where they have kept alive their culture to this day.

• A small Cham community survives in Vietnam although many converted to Islam in the sixteenth century. Nonetheless, the tiny Balamon–Cham community (numbering around 30,000) still preserves a form of ancient Shaivite Hinduism in remote villages in southern Vietnam.

• As we sipped strong local coffee at a Ho Chi Minh City cafe, Prof. Sakaya, himself a Cham Hindu, told me that it is their belief that when they die, the sacred bull Nandi comes to take their soul to the holy land of India.7 Again, the question arises—why did these long-surviving Indianized kingdoms in South East Asia simultaneously collapse? Chinese intervention may have played a role but it is arguably not the full story. By studying tree rings, researchers have found evidence that severe droughts and floods may have caused the complex hydraulic networks of Angkor to collapse in the fifteenth century.8 Java and Champa were also rice-based societies and it is likely that they too suffered from the same climatic fluctuations. Thus, it is possible that nature had a role to play in the collapse of these kingdoms.

• One of the intriguing aspects of the medieval world is the success with which the Arabs blocked information about the Indian Ocean from reaching the Europeans.

• He also embellished the widely held medieval European belief that there was a powerful Christian king called Prester John in India who would be a willing ally against the Muslims.

• In the fifteenth century, some Europeans began to look for ways to break the Muslim stranglehold on trade with Asia. One option was to find a sea route to the Indies by sailing around Africa. The Portuguese took the lead and began to systematically sail down the west coast of Africa. In 1487, a captain called Bartholomew Diaz finally reached the southern tip of Africa. Most history books give the impression that the Portuguese then waited for a full decade before sending a fleet under Vasco da Gama to further explore the route.

• After years of preparation, a Portuguese fleet under Vasco da Gama set sail in 1497 for India.

• The fleet set sail on 8 July and arrived at the Cape of Good Hope by early November.

• The crossing took less than a month and the fleet arrived at Calicut (Kozhikode, Kerala) on 14 May 1498.

• Vasco da Gama even stopped to pray at a Hindu temple under the mistaken belief that the Hindus were heretical Christians!

• The Arab merchants of Calicut were understandably unhappy to see their monopoly being broken. They even arranged to kidnap da Gama before he could return to his ship but the Samudrin intervened and had him freed. The prosperity of Calicut depended on free trade and he had to ensure that the principle was upheld even if he felt uneasy about the newcomers.

• However, the human cost of the expedition had been great—two-thirds of the crew had perished during the voyage, including Vasco da Gama’s brother.

• Despite the loss of some ships along the way, the fleet arrived in Calicut in September 1500 and demanded that the Samudrin expel all the Arabs and trade exclusively with Portugal. The Indians, understandably, were not keen on such an arrangement.

• Thus began the European domination of the Indian Ocean.

• As had happened in the case of Malindi, the Portuguese would exploit a local rivalry in order to establish themselves.

• In order to gauge the potential profits, note that pepper that made its way to Venice by the traditional Rea Sea route would cost sixty to a hundred times its price on the Kerala coast. With the discovery of the new route, it was clear that Venice was ruined.

• Within a couple of decades they had sacked or occupied many of the important ports in the western Indian Bookmark

• Ocean region—Muscat, Mombasa, Socotra, Hormuz, Malacca and so on. Even by the standards of that time, they established a well-deserved reputation for extreme cruelty. For example, when Vasco da Gama returned on a second voyage to Calicut, he refused to negotiate and simply bombarded the city for three days.

• The Ottoman Turks were the most powerful Muslim empire of that time and had taken Constantinople (i.e. Istanbul) in 1453, thereby ending the last vestige of the Byzantines.

• 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.

• Under the command of Afonso de Albuquerque, the Portuguese attacked and took Goa from the Sultan of Bijapur in 1510.

Nutmegs and Cloves

• The sixteenth century had belonged to Spain and Portugal and, when their crowns merged, it would have seemed that the combined empire would be unassailable for a long time.

• The English decided that it was time to stake a claim on the spice trade. A fleet of three ships was sent out under the command of James Lancaster in 1591.1

• The English did not even pretend to trade but simply plundered Portuguese and local ships before heading back. On the way home, however, disaster struck—two of the three ships were wrecked

• Thus ended the first attempt by the English to insert themselves into the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, the Dutch also sent out a number of fleets and these consistently returned with valuable cargoes. English merchants watched this with envy and decided that it was worth another shot and Queen Elizabeth I was petitioned for a royal charter. It was granted on New Year’s Eve in 1600 and set up as ‘The Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’; we know it now as the East India Company.

• Both of these entities would grow to become among the largest and most powerful multinational companies ever seen.

• In 1610, an English ship made its way to the nutmeg-growing Banda islands.

• When the ship arrived at the main island of Neira, it found that the VOC had already set up shop and had forcibly imposed a monopoly on the locals. Faced with Dutch hostility, the English decided instead to trade with two tiny outlying islands—Pulau Ai and Pulau Run—where the locals had so far resisted Dutch pressure.

• The local chiefs were so afraid of the VOC that they threw themselves under English protection. Thus, Ai and Run became the first colonies of the English East India Company! It is a measure of the commercial importance attached to these islands that King James I would proudly proclaim himself ‘King of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Puloway and Puloroon’.

• This brings us to one of the most important findings of history—never invest in real estate based on past performance.

• The English East India Company had initially focused on South East Asia rather than on India.

• Given that the English were famous for their woollen broadcloth, one is puzzled as to why the EIC had such difficulty selling their wares in the steamy Spice Islands; perhaps a badly run advertising campaign for woollens. As a result, the English found that they had to constantly cough up bullion in exchange for spices. This was the same problem that the Romans had faced fifteen hundred years earlier.

• The EIC discovered, however, that South East Asia had an insatiable demand for Indian cotton textiles and that one could make a profit by participating in intra-Asian trade. Soon they also found a market for Indian textiles back in Europe. Indian cotton would become so popular that wool producers would force the imposition of tariff and non-tariff barriers on their import. Thus, more than black pepper, textiles were the reason that the EIC decided to build permanent establishments on the Indian mainland.

• The English soon set up warehouses in Machilipatnam on the Andhra coast, Hugli in Bengal and Surat in Gujarat—all modest establishments. Sir Thomas Roe led an embassy to the court of Mughal emperor Jahangir. However, as business grew, the EIC decided that it was necessary to build fortified settlements that could be defended against both Indian rulers as well as European rivals. The first of these was Madras (now Chennai). As already mentioned, a small strip of coastline was acquired from the local ruler in 1639 by the EIC agent Francis Day. It was an odd choice as it was neither easily defensible nor did it have a sheltered harbour. Ships had to be anchored far from the shore and boats had to ferry people and goods through heavy surf. It was not uncommon for boats to overturn and cause the loss of life and property. Contemporary gossip had it that Day chose the site as it was close to the Portuguese settlement at San Thome where he kept a mistress. Thus, we must thank this unnamed lady for the location of one of India’s largest cities.5 The English built a fortified warehouse on the site and grandly christened it Fort St George. However, it was initially a modest affair and the fortifications that one sees today were built in the eighteenth century. Visitors should definitely make a trip to the museum which contains a reasonably good collection of old maps, photos and cannons; it also explains how the fort evolved over time. The rest of the site is today a random mix of colonial-era buildings and government office blocks. Some of the old buildings are re-used in curious ways—for instance, the old armoury is now the canteen and one can sip coffee in a long, dark windowless hall with thick walls designed to withstand heavy bombardment. If you wander to the back of the fort, you will find that significant stretches of eighteenth-century ramparts have survived despite the neglect. I found a group of construction workers damaging a part of the old wall as they built a new toilet facility—symbolic at many levels.

• However, as business grew, the EIC decided that it was necessary to build fortified settlements that could be defended against both Indian rulers as well as European rivals. The first of these was Madras (now Chennai).

• small strip of coastline was acquired from the local ruler in 1639 by the EIC agent Francis Day.

• The English built a fortified warehouse on the site and grandly christened it Fort St George.

• In 1690, the EIC’s agent Job Charnok returned to a site that he had identified on the westernmost channel of the Ganga and bought the rights to three villages from the local landlords, the Mazumdars, for Rs 1300.6 This is how Calcutta (now Kolkata) was founded.

• Thus, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta each developed a thriving ‘black town’ where the Indians lived.

• The French East India Company, a relative latecomer, would build a number of outposts including a major settlement in Pondicherry (now Puducherry).

• Pondicherry would remain a French possession till the 1950s and still retains a strong flavour of French influence. Nevertheless, my favourite example of a European settlement from this era is the Danish fort in Tranquebar. Yes, even the Danes were in the game. Tranquebar (or Tharangambadi) is south of Pondicherry and very close to the old Chola port of Nagapattinam. It was here that Danish admiral Ove Gjedde built Fort Dansborg in 1620, well before the English and French forts.

• The EIC officially allowed some private trade in order to compensate for the low salaries it paid, but its agents often misused the company’s infrastructure and networks to further private deals. Thus, the company bore the costs and individuals pocketed huge profits. 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.

• Thus, an Indian father’s determination to protect his beloved daughter led to the demise of the Portuguese in Oman.

• The Battle of Colachel was a turning point and Dutch power in the Indian Ocean would go into steady decline. Not till the Japanese navy defeated the Russians in 1905 would another Asian state decisively defeat a European power.

• After the death of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1707, the empire had quickly unravelled and a large part of it was taken over by the Marathas. They had begun their rebellion against the Mughals as mountain guerrillas but were quickly developing capability in other forms of warfare. In 1712, Kanhoji Angre was appointed the Surkhail or Grand Admiral of the Maratha navy.

• The reason Angre was able to impose his will on the Europeans was that the Marathas had learned to challenge them at sea. A favourite tactic was to use smaller but fast and manoeuvrable vessels to approach a European ship from astern in order to avoid the cannon broadside.

• By the middle of the eighteenth century, with the Portuguese and Dutch in decline, the British had emerged as the strongest naval power in the Indian Ocean. However, the directors of the EIC would have still baulked at the idea of a land empire beyond a few fortified bases along the coast. It was the French, their main rivals, who first attempted to control inland territory. The key person behind this new strategy was Joseph Francois Dupleix, the Governor of Pondicherry. Note that at this time, the British and the French were at war in Europe but their companies in India had initially refrained from attacking each other. This changed when a British fleet plundered French ships in the Straits of Malacca in 1745. Dupleix immediately requested support from the French naval base in Mauritius. When reinforcements arrived the following year, the French marched on Madras and captured it without much difficulty. The EIC now complained to the Nawab of Arcot who was the Mughal governor of the area (although by this time the Mughal empire was rapidly dissolving). The Nawab arrived in

• Anyone with even a passing interest in Indian history would have heard of the Battle of Plassey in 1757 where British troops led by Robert Clive defeated Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal.

• One of the most decisive victories in history was not much more than a skirmish.

• Despite their success in Bengal and control over the sea, the British were far from being the masters of India. The Marathas would remain the biggest threat to their hegemony for another half a century till they were finally defeated in the Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817–18.

• The East India Company also had to contend with the hostility of a number of other rulers such as Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore. 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. Tipu Sultan came to the throne in 1782 on the death of his father Hyder Ali. Hyder Ali had usurped the throne of Mysore from the Wodeyar dynasty that he served as a military commander.

• Still, given his record of brutality towards fellow Indians, it is difficult to think of him as a great freedom fighter. At best, he belongs to the shades of grey that mark a lot of history.

Diamonds and Opium

• By the late eighteenth century, trade with China was the only profitable part of the EIC’s operations. However, the Chinese insisted on being paid in silver coins in exchange for tea, porcelain and other products coveted in Europe. As the trade gap grew, the British faced the same precious metals shortage faced by ancient Romans when trading with India.

• The system of triangular trade was born: The British sold cheap mill-made textiles to the Indians and bought opium from them at artificially low prices. The opium was then sold to the Chinese in exchange for goods that were sold back in Europe. It solved the EIC’s silver problem but destroyed the Indian economy.

• Cheap textiles made on an industrial scale by British mills devastated the old artisan-made textile industry. The shock was so great that a century later, the leaders of India’s independence movement would choose the hand-turned spinning wheel as their symbol of protest. Meanwhile, farmers in EIC-controlled areas were forced to grow opium (along with indigo that was used as a dye) and sell it to company agents at artificially low prices. The adverse terms of trade impoverished the farmers but what made it worse was that they were often not free to grow food crops; a small fluctuation in weather conditions resulted in devastating famines.

• After surveying the area, Raffles identified Singapore as a good place to set up a new outpost that would ensure permanent British control over the passage. Using an internal squabble within the royal family of Johor, Raffles managed to gain control over the island in 1819. Crucially, he declared that Singapore would be a free port: ‘Our object is not territory, but trade; a great commercial emporium, and a fulcrum, whence we may extend our influence politically as circumstances may hereafter require.’5 The idea of a free port under British protection was immediately attractive and within a few weeks, thousands of Malays and Chinese had shifted from Malacca to Singapore.

• Thus, Singapore was a bubbling mix of cultures right from the beginning.

• Although trade had been booming since the eighteenth century, Chinese authorities strictly restricted trade with the Europeans to a single port—Canton (i.e. Guangdong) in the Pearl River delta. Here business was controlled by a cartel of wealthy Chinese merchants known as the Hongs. During the trading season (September to January), Europeans were allowed to stay in the port in lodgings leased out by their Hong counterparts. Situated deliberately outside Canton’s city walls, these ‘factories’ included warehouses and living quarters. Outside of these months, the foreigners were expected to either go home or withdraw to the Portuguese enclave of Macau.7 In other words, the Chinese government kept the Europeans at arm’s length.

• Ultimately the Manchu emperor was forced to accept the humiliating conditions of the Treaty of Nanjing by which several ports were forced open for foreign trade and the British gained control of Hong Kong. War reparations, including compensation for the confiscated opium, were also paid. It is worth mentioning that when the Chinese were fighting British-led Indian soldiers along the eastern coast, they were simultaneously fighting Indian soldiers in Tibet! After establishing control over Ladakh, the famous general Zorawar Singh decided to march the Dogra army into Tibet in 1841. He pushed his way up to the sacred Mansarovar Lake but, despite his meticulous planning, was ultimately unable to sustain his supply lines through the harsh terrain. This allowed the Tibetans, along with Chinese reinforcements, to counter-attack. Zorawar Singh was caught defending an untenable position and was killed.

• The Dogras were now pushed back to Ladakh where they, in turn, defeated the Tibetan–Chinese army. At this point both sides seem to have been exhausted and peace was concluded under the Treaty of Chushul but this stretch of border between India and China remains disputed to this day.

• Given the importance of Indian soldiers in policing the growing empire, the British were able to pay attention to China only after the revolt had been brutally suppressed.

• One can see how Indian soldiering was of such importance in world history.

• The Revolt of 1857–58 in India exposed its inability to govern the empire it had created. The Court of Directors met one last time on 1 September 1858 at the company’s headquarters at Leadenhall Street. A few weeks later, its colonies were taken over by the Crown.10

• The Indian brokers and agents were known as ‘shroffs’ (derived from the Hindi word ‘saraff’ used variously for agent, broker or money changer). The term ‘shroff’ survives in Hong Kong but is now used mostly for parking-ticket collectors—one of those odd artefacts of history! Arguably the most successful of the Parsi merchants of Bombay was Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy. He was born in 1783 and is said to have moved from Navsari to Bombay when he was still a boy. Bombay was a much smaller settlement than Calcutta but, with the Maratha threat receding, it was witnessing rapid growth.

• For instance, the Rajabhai Clock Tower, one of Mumbai’s most iconic buildings, was built with funding from Premchand Roychand and is named after his mother.

• David Sassoon, Jamsetjee and Premchand were all migrants who had made it big in the city. Mumbai’s slums are still full of migrants who think they too can do it. This is why Mumbai slums are not places of hopelessness as one may expect but full of industry and enterprise despite all the squalor.

• Combined with steam power, the Suez Canal soon changed the logistics of Atlantic–Indian Ocean trade as ships no longer had to make the long and arduous journey around Africa.

• One of the less anticipated effects of the Suez Canal was the flood of young, unmarried European women who headed for India and other colonies in search of husbands.19 Known as the ‘fishing fleet’, these women were drawn from all segments of society. Depending on their class background, they would marry British civilian and military officers, merchants, clerks and so on.

• A key factor driving this churn of people was the shortage of labour in sugar-growing colonies after the British abolished slavery in 1833. Within a year, there were fourteen ships engaged in transporting Indian indentured workers from Calcutta to Mauritius.20

• Soon Indian indentured workers were being transported to faraway places like the Caribbean and Fiji.

• By the 1840s, the authorities began to encourage women to sign up so that self-perpetuating Indian communities could be created which in turn would reduce the need for constant replenishment from the mother country.

• For example, Ghura Khan was British Guyana’s subagent at Buxar and paid his recruiters Rs 5 to Rs 8 per month plus Rs 5 for a man and Rs 8 for a woman (evidently women were more difficult to recruit).

• Indentured workers and soldiers were not the only Indians on the move. The late nineteenth century saw Indian merchant and financial networks come alive again after a hiatus of centuries. Tamil Chettiar merchants and moneylenders spread across South East Asia.

• One of the largest of these firms, established by Muthiah Chetty in the early 1900s, was headquartered in Kanadukanta in Chettinad, Tamil Nadu, but with offices in Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaya and French Indo-China. Similarly, Gujarati traders and moneylenders established themselves along the coast from South Africa to Oman.

• By the end of the nineteenth century, their numbers not only equalled that of the white population but they were successfully competing with the Europeans as accountants, lawyers, clerks, traders and so on.

• This led to a series of discriminatory laws aimed at protecting the interests of the whites. This was the milieu to which a young lawyer called Mohandas K. Gandhi arrived in 1893. He was brought to South Africa by a well-established Gujarati businessman Dada Abdoolah to assist in a personal matter. However, he was soon part of a movement to oppose anti-Indian laws. In 1894, the Natal Indian Congress was established with Gandhi as its secretary. Thus began a journey.

• Within just a year of the first claims being made in 1867,

• By 1871, there were more people in Kimberley than in Cape Town!

• Interestingly, Mohandas Gandhi also participated in the war by organizing a group of local Indian civilians into the Natal Indian Ambulance Corps that provided support to the British forces.

• Cecil Rhodes did not live to see the end of the war as he died in March of that year. He would leave most of his estate for the creation of the famous scholarship that now bears his name.

• 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.

• The takeover of Africa had been so quick that colonial governments often struggled to keep up with it. For example, the British-held territory of Nyasaland (now Malawi) had a budget of just 10,000 pounds per year. This was just enough for ten European civilian officers, two military officers, seventy Sikh soldiers of the Punjab regiment and eighty-five porters from the Zanzibar coast.28 This was all the resources available to run a territory of 94,000 square kilometres with a population of one to two million. Ignoring for a moment the morality of the colonial enterprise, one must admire the sheer scale and audacity of

From Dusk to a New Dawn

• The twentieth century began with the Indian Ocean rim firmly in the grip of European powers.

• The first hint of the turning tide was the Japanese victory over the Russians in 1905. This was the first time that Asians had scored a decisive victory over a European power since Marthanda Varma’s victory over the Dutch.

• They even managed to get Indian political leaders like Mahatma Gandhi to support the recruitment drive. Gandhi would initially recruit for non-combatant roles but would later help with the recruitment of soldiers.3

• The returning revolutionaries now agreed to work with Mahatma Gandhi on a movement of non-violent non-cooperation.

• 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

• 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.

• The choice of names shows how the success of the original Irish Republican Army (not to be confused with later versions) had inspired Indian revolutionaries of that time.

• It was during this period that Sachin Sanyal came in contact with a young, rising star in the Congress party—Subhash Chandra Bose, later to be known simply as ‘Netaji’ (literally, The Leader). Sanyal would be sent back to prison a few years later and many of his followers would be killed or executed, but Subhash Bose would leverage the international networks pioneered by the revolutionaries in his attempt to build an armed revolt against the British during the Second World War.

• It culminated in the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of 18–23 February 1946.20 The episode was triggered by a minor altercation in Bombay over the quality of food being served to sailors but, given the overall mood, it blew quickly into a full-fledged revolt. The sailors stopped obeying their officers and took control of a number of ships and shore establishments. Remember that the sailors were not novices; this was just a few months after the war and the British were dealing with battle-hardened veterans.

• 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).

• 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.

• This is not to suggest that Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress did not play an important role but merely to point out that India’s freedom struggle was made up of many streams.

• 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

• 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.

• Finally, the United States threatened the Dutch with cutting off Marshall Plan aid and forced them to accept a provisional government with Sukarno as President and Mohammad Hatta as Prime Minister on 27 December 1949.

• The sequence of events was triggered by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser who nationalized the Suez Canal Company. The British, with support from the French and the Israelis, invaded Egypt in order to take control of the canal. Although the invaders succeeded militarily, they faced severe criticism from the United States and the Soviet Union and were forced to withdraw meekly. The episode can be said to mark the end of Britain’s reign as a world power.

• Perhaps the most determined attempt to retain colonial possessions was made by the French in Vietnam.

• Next door in Cambodia, almost two million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1978 in a brutal attempt to create a communist agrarian paradise.

• There are still two prominent Hindu temples in the middle of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). They have been maintained quite well by the government. There was a lady official deputed to act as the priest at the Mariamman temple when I visited it in 2015.

• The first subregion in the Indian Ocean rim to witness rapid economic change was the Persian Gulf. Commercially viable oil was first discovered at Well Number One at Masjid-e-Suleiman, Iran, in 1908. Bahrain was producing oil by 1932 followed by Dammam in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait by 1938.30 By the 1970s, the wealth accumulated from oil exports had transformed the economic and social fabric of the region.

• Lee Kuan Yew, now Prime Minister, knew that he needed to quickly find a new economic engine for his city state.

• He decided to ask multinational companies to set up their manufacturing hub in Singapore by offering them rule of law, ease of doing business and low taxes. This was not only a break from his early socialist rhetoric, but was very different from what other newly independent countries were doing at that time (and much more in tune with the ideals of Stamford Raffles).

• When Lee Kuan Yew passed away in 2015, he left behind a city that was arguably the most advanced in the world.

• Far from it, modern Singapore is the result of constant adaptation and tinkering in order to deal with a complex and evolving world.

Written on October 14, 2020

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