The Story of India

by Michael Wood

  The Periplus names twenty ports on the west coast of India, but the most important in the south – Pliny calls it primum emporium Indiae (the first market of India) – was Muziris. This was the place where Greek navigators, beginning with Hippalos himself, made their landfall after the long direct voyage from the Red Sea. A recently discovered papyrus contract between a second-century ship-owner and an Alexandrian merchant tells us about the organization of the Muziris trade, showing how they mixed their cargoes, with several merchants bearing the costs and insurance for one voyage, ‘the loan repayments as per the deal agreed at Muziris’. From the Indian side the town is recorded in Tamil poetry as Muchiri-pattanam – a pattanam being a ‘trading port’ in southern speech. A softly perfumed and much sought-after place it was too, one imagines, fanned by what the Greek sailors called the tropical zephyrus. A haven for lotus-eaters, maybe: a place so home from home that the Greek and Roman colonists even erected a temple to their own gods, with a special niche for the deified emperor Augustus. (So British Calcutta was by no means the first Indian city to erect statues of an emperor from the West!)

  The town is marked on a beautiful, coloured Roman map called the Peutinger Table, but the location of Muziris has never been identified. We know it must have been close to Cranganore, north of Cochin, and that it lay 20 stades (2 miles) inland from the mouth of a big river, most likely the Periyar. The trouble is that rivers here alter their courses, and the Kerala coastline is notoriously prone to change, creating new shores out of sandbars and floating islands, which over time become long strands of dry land covered with forest, separating the sea from the intricate filigree of lagoons in the Kerala backwaters. But in 2005 archaeologists from Kerala found Muziris exactly where it should be. The site is now 4 miles inland, behind a double line of tranquil backwaters, and it lies by an old bed of the Periyar river, which has shifted a couple of miles up the coast since Roman times. The main mound is 650 yards across, in a shady grove of palms, bananas and jackfruit, festooned with twining pepper vines. Coins of Nero and Tiberius have been found near by, and a preliminary excavation has revealed that the mound is stuffed with Roman amphorae, broken terracotta pots, Mediterranean glass ornaments and precious stones. On top stands a very ancient brick shrine of the goddess ‘2000 years old’ according to a local man. Her name is Pattana Devi, and her village is Pattanam, no doubt the site of the famous port known to the Greeks and Romans as Muziris.

  COSMOPOLITAN INFLUENCES

  The town of Muziris had a quay and warehouses, with Arab and Jewish quarters. It was a foreign enclave, perhaps resembling those Roman trading ports in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean that are specified in the ancient gazetteers and geographies as ‘designated ports’ – that is, places set up under treaty with the local rulers. The native town must have sprawled among the palm groves near by, rather as the British in their day laid out their ‘Black’ and ‘White’ towns.

  So Kerala has long been a cosmopolitan place. No wonder, then, that this coast is so rich in traditions. The Arab trade with Kerala began long before Islam, and the earliest mosque in India is said to be the pretty old wooden prayer hall at nearby Cranganore, where the imam tells a story that the mosque was built by Muslim merchants, companions of the Prophet, who traded here even in the Prophet’s lifetime. The Jewish community has been here at least from Roman times, originally sailing down the Gulf from Charax, near Basra, bringing with them their Iraqi rituals, and even the ancient board game excavated in third millennium BC Ur, which until recently was still played by old Indian Jewish ladies in Cochin. The Jewish trade with southern India in spices, pharmaceuticals and dyes can be traced through the Middle Ages in the fascinating traders’ letters that have survived from the geniza, the storeroom of the Jewish synagogue in Old Cairo. During the nineteenth century Baghdadi Jewish families, such as the Sassoons, built spice warehouses in ‘Jewtown’ in old Cochin. Even today there are still a few Indian Jews in the vicinity of Muziris, with a lovely pillared synagogue in the forests close by at Chendamangalam.

  Near Eastern Christians also settled here on the Malabar coast very early on. Exactly how early is not clear. The Apostle Thomas is supposed to have landed at the Periyar river around 50 AD with the aim of introducing Christianity to India, and a gleaming white Syrian Christian basilica stands on the spot today. The earliest Greek traditions place him – more plausibly perhaps – up in the Indo-Greek court at Taxila in the Punjab. But Muziris was a major trading place for the merchants of the eastern Mediterranean in the first two or three centuries AD, and the landing of a Roman-Jewish traveller on the Periyar river around the time of the Periplus is certainly plausible. It is an idyllic spot where, no doubt, many Jews, Christians and Arabs from Palestine made their landfall in the heady days of the Roman spice trade, and as evensong drifts over the swaying cocoa palms by the church of Mar Thoma (St Thomas), who would wish to doubt it?

  Today red-and-green-painted passenger ferries chug across the estuary from one landing point to another; the evening catch is landed; and ladies in billowing lemon or scarlet saris skip on to the landing stage and hurry home with their shopping. It is easy to imagine foreigners settling here of all places in India, servicing the annual influx of Western boat crews. Here they could enjoy their home comforts – wine from Arezzo or Kos, Italian olive oil and fish paste (imported in the amphorae found all over the site of Muziris) – happily melding their own gods with the native ones. Is that how an Indian ivory statuette of the goddess Lakshmi found its way to Pompeii, where it was buried in the eruption of AD 79? Tamil poetry of the later Roman period talks of the Greeks as mercenaries, merchants and even sculptors in southern India. It was the beginning of a long love affair.

  The spice trade between India and the Mediterranean lasted until the fourth century, when it was taken over by the Persians, and then by Arabs and Arabic-speaking Jews in the seventh century after the advent of Islam. But it left many remains, both in material traces and in ways of seeing the world. Roman coins have long been found in the antique dealers trays in Cochin, Trichy and Karur. Even today it is the custom in southern Indian marriages to give the bride a necklace of small gold coins, as it was in ancient times when the coins bore the heads of Trajan and Hadrian. Another Indian borrowing is even more curious: it is an Indian source that claims a Mediterranean origin for the oil lamp – the ‘Yavana [Greek] light’. If true, how delightful that one of the greatest pleasures in southern Indian temples today should come from the homely terracotta lamp found over so many Roman sites, from Hadrian’s Wall in chilly northern England to balmy Muziris: the wise maiden’s lamp of first-century Palestine still burns as the flame at puja time in India’s tropical south.

  MADURAI: THE FIRST GREAT CIVILIZATION OF THE SOUTH

  The early train from Quilon climbs away from the sea coast of Kerala and winds eastwards through the forested hills of the Western Ghats. At Tenkasi Junction we head north by road into the plain of Madurai, passing through Srivilliputtur, where the magnificent gate tower of the Vishnu temple soars 250 feet over the little town. Bursting with sculpture, its giant medieval halls are carved with scenes from the Mahabharata, the national epic. For travellers arriving from Kerala the temple is their first glimpse of classic Tamil architecture, as characteristic of India’s south as the Gothic cathedral is of Europe.

  Marco Polo spent two months here in 1273, and he found it ‘the most noble and splendid province in the world’. Approaching Madurai in the early morning before the onset of the heat, you can see why. The sky is clear and the air fresh, and apart from a gentle haze over the city, you can see all the way to the giant brown rock of Tirupparakunram, the home of the god Murugan, whose hill shrine there has been celebrated in Tamil poetry and song since the Roman period. We skirt the city and reach our lodgings, an old British house on the wooded edge of Pasupatimalai (wild beast hill). From there a magnificent view opens out over the whole of the Vaigai plain, like a natural theatre widening out into the blue haze in the direction of t
he Bay of Bengal 50 miles or so eastwards. From the Kerala coast we have crossed the bottom of the Indian peninsula. This plain was the heartland of Pandyan civilization, the southernmost of the three great historical cultures of Tamil Nadu, and the mightiest power in southern India at the time of the Roman spice voyages. Down below us, at the heart of this ancient and renowned city, are the towers of the great temple of Minakshi.

  Madurai is one of most fascinating places in India. The second city of Tamil Nadu after Madras, it is a thriving commercial city of a million people, with textile mills and transport workshops. Auto-rickshaws buzz up the narrow lanes around the temple like angry hornets in a cacophony of horns. Today the city is as famous as it was in ancient times for its busy commerce and its craftsmen quarters with goldsmiths and tailors. New buildings are going up everywhere, but the modern city is still shaped by its ancient layout and by the ritual calendar of a traditional civilization. The streets form a series of concentric circles around the temple, a layout that has always determined the city’s topography and that probably goes back to at least Roman times. The inner streets are named after the Tamil months, and were part of the pattern of the city from its earliest days. This is city planning as laid out in the religious Shastras. The idea of a sacred city is an ancient one, but most, such as the Forbidden City of Beijing, exist only as museums. Here in Madurai it is still a vibrant, living entity.

  At the heart of the city is the great temple with its huge gate towers and labyrinthine corridors. In my experience, it’s a building hard to beat anywhere in the world for sheer atmosphere. It’s a Shiva temple, but is actually dedicated to Shiva’s wife, who is still regarded as the real patron of the city. Here she is called Minakshi, ‘the fish-eyed goddess’, a very archaic name, which probably goes back deep into the cultural and linguistic prehistory of the south. The goddess of the city is mentioned in Tamil poetry as far back as the Roman period, but her name and attributes may point to a more distant connection with the culture of the Bronze Age and before.

  The culture here grew over many centuries, and to sketch its background we need to go back for a moment to the aftermath of the Indus cities, the age of the Rig-Veda in the north. Here in the south the first recognizable culture begins in the Pandyan lands on the coast, 50 miles south of Madurai at the mouth of the Tambrapani river. Excavations here at Adichanallur over a century ago found a large, megalithic settlement dating back before 1000 BC, with clear links to later Tamil culture. Particularly striking was evidence for worship of a male god, whose emblems were a leaf-bladed lance and a peacock – very like the Tamils’ favourite god today, Murugan, the ‘red one’, the lord of the hills. There were even signs of devotees piercing their jaws with mouth-locks, a custom still practised. The excavation was reopened in 2005 with immediate and fascinating results. Archaeologists uncovered a mud-brick fortification wall faced with stone, a potters’ quarter, a smithy, a place for bead manufacture, and numerous high-status burials in a huge burial ground extending over some 150 acres. Among the most remarkable of the new finds were pieces of a burial urn beautifully appliquéd with raised motifs depicting a horned deer with raised tail, a crocodile, a crane sitting on a paddy stalk, a sheaf of standing paddy, and the tall, slender figure of a woman with palms spread out – perhaps the earliest examples of art in the south yet known.

  The finds at Adichanallur strongly suggest that some living Tamil traditions, such as devotion to Murugan, are very archaic indeed: so too, no doubt, is the bull-running festival, which draws 2 million people every year to Madurai and is mentioned in early Tamil poetry. The sensational find in 2006 of a votive stone axe head bearing four signs in the Indus script, unearthed on the Cavery river near the ancient town of Mayavaram, has added to these tantalizing hints. Deposited in the Iron Age, but probably an older heirloom, how it got there is a moot point. Did it come after the Indus age? Was it brought by migrants or by trade? Was the stone itself quarried in the north or the south? The find might even point to the ancient links with the northwest claimed in the oral traditions of some surviving clans and castes in the deep south, one of which (close to Adichanallur) in a poem of the Roman period is credited with an ancestry going back forty-eight generations!

  This Iron Age culture developed in the last centuries BC into an urban civilization with writing that was adopted after contact with the Mauryan Empire in the third century BC. The three historical kingdoms of the south – Cholas, Pandyas and Pallavas – emerge into the light of history at that time in the edicts of the emperor Ashoka. But already Megasthenes in 300 BC had information about the Pandyan kingdom, whose goddess, he was told, was ‘a daughter of Heracles’, and whose army could muster 500 war elephants, 4000 cavalry and (improbably) 120,000 infantry. Nevertheless, it is clear from Ashoka’s edicts that these were sizeable and powerful kingdoms. Lying beyond the Krishna river and the austere fissured plateau of the Deccan, it was never possible for the Mauryans to incorporate them into their empire. All of this helps us to understand the amazing cultural continuities of the south.

  WESTERN CONTACTS WITH EARLY TAMIL KINGDOMS

  The Pandyan kingdom was known to the Greeks from the first century BC, and Madurai later appears on Ptolemy’s world map. In return, Greeks appear in Tamil poems – as royal mercenaries living in some sort of colony, and walking around the streets gawping like tourists: ‘dumb mlecchas’ (foreigners). There are even fascinating references to Graeco-Roman sculptors working here, a picture coloured by hoards of Roman coins picked up in the city and across Tamil Nadu – further proof of commercial links with the Roman world, which we saw in Muziris. In 21 BC, during the reign of Augustus, a Pandyan embassy went from Madurai all the way by sea to Rome.

  The cultural pre-eminence of Madurai dates from this period. Tradition holds that the city was the centre of the sangam, or academy, of Tamil poets. In Tamil literature there are, in fact, legends of several still earlier, antediluvian sangams, but the one in the Roman period is real enough. Already in the second century BC this poetic tradition was the subject of linguistic analysis: the Tolkapiyam, the earliest Tamil treatise on grammar and poetics, presupposes older and now lost poetry. Only fragments of the corpus survive, among them the Purananuru, an anthology of 400 poems of love and war from the first century AD, which draws on the work of 150 poets. These are written-down performances of a class of poets, male and female, that was building on an oral tradition. The works include praise poems to kings on events, deeds and battles – robust, bloodthirsty and life-loving – completely different in tone from the great medieval tradition of Tamil devotional poetry that came to dominate popular culture in the south. Although already influenced by the Brahminical culture of the north, the picture they portray of the early Tamil kingdoms gives us a hint of the culture of pre-Aryan India. It is plainly no accident that the Tamil anthologies of the Roman period contain not only great poetry about war, but also about love; relationships between men and women are depicted with great psychological realism and sexual explicitness.

  What could my mother be to yours?

  What kin is my father to yours anyway?

  And how did you and I meet ever?

  But in love our hearts are as red earth and pouring rain: mingled beyond parting.

  Another fascinating aspect of this early Tamil literary tradition is that the city itself is a subject of poetry, a place of glamour, riches, luxuries and overseas contacts; of freedoms, social and sexual. Urban life opened up horizons, physical, cultural and mental, and there are great descriptions of crowded bazaars, temples and debating halls. The foreign presence is hinted at through mentions of Greek mercenaries and references to the consumption of foreign wines by Tamil kings and chieftains. A famous sangam poem, ‘The Garland of Madurai’, paints a brilliant image of the city in the days of the Pandyan king Nedunjeliyan. Then, it was said, the city could be smelt from miles away by the perfume of flowers, ghee and incense: ‘a city gay with flags, waving over homes and shops selling food and drink; the stree
ts are broad rivers of people, folk of every race, buying and selling in the bazaars, or singing to the music of wandering bands and musicians’.

  In one passage the poem describes the stalls around the temple, selling sweet cakes, garlands of flowers, scented powder and betel pan. In another it lists some of the craftsmen working in their shops – ‘men making bangles of conch shell, goldsmiths, cloth dealers, tailors making up clothes; coppersmiths, flower-sellers, vendors of sandalwood, painters and weavers’. All this could be today’s city, as Madurai has known an amazing continuity from that time to this: the Pandyan dynasty had its ups and downs, but a distant scion of the dynasty that ruled when Greeks and Romans were here was still ruling when the British Raj took over in 1805.

  THROWING LIGHT ON A LOST CLASSICAL CIVILIZATION

  Tamil literature is as rich as any in western Europe – only Greek and Latin are older. However, the Tamil literature of the late Roman and early medieval periods was largely lost until the nineteenth century, and some that was written by Jains and Buddhists was lost for good. As print took over, Western forms of education came to the fore and their European Christian canons of literary value deemed the old palm-leaf manuscripts to be no longer of worth, so they were destroyed. In the mid-nineteenth century the task of recovering those lost writings began when the scholar Swaminath Aiyar, a young student at the time, met a district magistrate who revealed that manuscripts of the ancient classics still survived. As Aiyar describes in his great autobiography (1941), over the next few decades he laboriously crisscrossed the south by train and bullock cart, gathering up ancient palm-leaf manuscripts before they were thrown out or burnt as rubbish. To his utter amazement, as he delved around temple towns such as Kumbakonum, he even stumbled upon living chains of tradition, such as the annual readings of ancient poems by the Tamil Jains, a tradition of expounding that I was astounded to discover even now (just) survives in some small Jain communities in rural Tamil Nadu.