Maritime trade was not new to India. As we have seen, the Harappans traded actively with Mesopotamia. In the Iron Age, centres like Dwarka may have maintained these links. We know that by the time of the Mauryans, Tamralipti was a thriving port with links as far as Sri Lanka. We also know that the empire had diplomatic and trade links with the Greek kingdoms of the Middle East. However, it was from the second century BC that we see trade with both the Graeco–Roman world and South East Asia jump an order of magnitude. A Tamil epic from this period, the Silapaddikaram, tells us about the story of two lovers—Kannaki, daughter of a captain, and a merchant’s son Kovalan. This how the epic describes the great port of Puhar (or Kaveripatnam):2
Great and renowned kings envied the immense wealth of the seafaring merchants of the opulent city of Puhar
Ships and caravans from foreign lands poured in abundance rare objects and diverse merchandise
Its treasure would be untouched by the entire world, bound by the roaring seas
The literature of this period is full of references to trade. This is especially true of the Sangam anthologies. These collections of early Tamil poetry appear to have been put together in a series of ancient conferences. Exact dates are not available, but they probably took place between the third century BC and the sixth century AD. Madurai appears to have been the venue for most of these gatherings. However, it is said that the tradition began in an even earlier city, also called Madurai, that was built along the coast and that, like Dwarka, was swallowed by the sea.
This collection of poems was almost entirely lost and forgotten by the mid-nineteenth century. Luckily, a few scholars like Swaminatha Iyer dedicated their lives to painstakingly collecting the old palm-leaf manuscripts from old temples and remote hamlets. In the process, Iyer uncovered ancient religious practices that have survived in isolated pockets in a continuous chain to this day. Still, a significant portion of the corpus appears to have been lost, probably forever.
Sadly, much of the scholarship around Sangam literature is focused on trying to use the corpus to discern the roots of pristine Dravidian culture, unsullied by ‘Aryan’ influences from the north. This is ridiculous at many levels. First, the society described in the poems is full of trade and exchange with the rest of India as well as foreign lands. It is a world that is busily absorbing all kinds of influences and clearly revelling in it. Looking for signs of a pristine past misses the point about the people who composed the anthologies. Secondly, the composers of the Sangam poems clearly show strong religious and cultural links with the rest of the country. This includes knowledge of Buddhist, Brahminical and Jain traditions that are of ‘northern’ origin. Even when ‘local’ gods like Murugan (Kartik) are mentioned, they are depicted not as separate but as obviously part of the overall cultural milieu.
The point is that by the late Iron Age, the people in southern India were not just aware of the rest of Indian civilization but were comfortably a part of it. Goods and ideas were flowing along the coast as well as the Dakshina Path. For some odd reason, Indian historians see cultural influences flow only from the North to the rest of the country. The reality was of back-and-forth exchange. We see this in how the ‘northern’ Sanskrit language evolved over the centuries by absorbing words from other languages. Contrary to popular perception, Sanskrit was never a ‘pure’ language and its success was largely due to its ability from the earliest times to absorb ideas and words from Tamil, Munda and even Greek3. Many of the words that are generally considered as Sanskrit words used in modern Tamil are actually ancient Tamil words that found their way into Sanskrit. We will see how such exchange continued into subsequent centuries as with the spread of Shakti worship emanating from the east or with Shankaracharya’s ideas from the far south. Of course there are significant regional variations, but these are small compared to what is shared with India’s wider civilization.
Instead of using it to split hairs over regional differences, I would say that Sangam literature is far more remarkable for the extraordinary continuities it shows us that remain alive today. For instance, one of the Sangam poems gives us a glimpse of Madurai as it was under Pandyan king Neduchelyan. We are told of the stalls near the temple selling sweetmeats, garlands of flowers and betel paan. The bazaars were full of goldsmiths, tailors, coppersmiths, flower-sellers, painters and vendors of sandalwood. It is astonishing, two thousand years later, how well this would describe a temple-town of today.
THE WORLD OF THE PERIPLUS
The world described above was at the heart of a mercantile network that extended from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea. The single most important factor that allowed this boom in trade was an understanding of monsoon-wind patterns, a discovery that Greek sources credit to a navigator called Hippalus. The discovery allowed merchant fleets to sail directly across the Arabian Sea rather than hug the coast. As a result, Greek, Roman, Jewish and Arab traders flocked to Indian ports even as Indian merchants made their way to the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and even down the East African coast. We know a significant amount about these trade routes because an unknown Greek writer has left us a detailed manual called the Periplus Maris Erythraei.4
According to the Periplus, the port of Berenike was a key hub in the trading network. It was located on the Red Sea coast of Egypt and had been established by the Ptolemies, the Greek dynasty that was founded in Egypt by one of Alexander’s generals. Archaeological excavations in the nineties have confirmed its location.5 Goods from India landed here and were then taken overland to the Nile. Then they were transported down the Nile in boats to Alexandria. There were other routes as well. Some fleets, for instance, sailed all the way up the Red Sea to Aqaba. Goods would then have been transported by camel and donkey caravan through desert towns like Petra to Mediterranean ports like Tyre and Sidon.
There is a story that Cleopatra, when defeated by the Romans, had hoped to escape with her family to India. When Octavian attacked Egypt in 30 BC, she sent Caesarion, her seventeen-year-old son by Julius Caesar, to Berenike with a great deal of treasure. Before she could escape, however, she was captured in Alexandria and famously committed suicide by snake-bite. Meanwhile, Caesarion had reached Berenike and could easily have escaped to India. Unfortunately, he was convinced by his tutors, almost certainly bribed, to return to Alexandria for negotiations. Octavian promptly had his cousin murdered. Cleopatra’s Alexandria, like Dwarka and old Madurai, now lies under the sea.
The Periplus tells us that ships sailing from Berenike to India went down the Red Sea to Yemen and then, dodging pirates, to the island of Socotra. The island had a mixed population of Arab, Greek and Indian traders. Even the island’s name is derived from Sanskrit—Dwipa Sukhadara (Island of Bliss). This may explain why many Yemenis carry genes of Indian extract. From here, there were two major routes to India. The first made its way north to Oman and then across the Arabian Sea to Gujarat. Ships were advised to make this journey in July to take advantage of the monsoon wind.
There were many ports in Gujarat but Barygaza (modern Bharuch) appears to have been the most important. The port-town is at the estuary of the Narmada river. Treacherous shoals and currents made it difficult for ships to sail up the river. Therefore, the local king had appointed fishermen to act as pilots and to tow merchant ships to Barygaza port which was several miles upriver. The author of the Periplus almost certainly visited the area because he describes in great detail the impact of a ferocious bore tide in the estuary.
Imports into Barygaza are listed by the Periplus and include: gold, silver, brass, copper, lead, perfumes and ‘various sashes half a yard wide’. Italian and Arabian wine was also imported in large quantities. The Indian love of imported alcohol is clearly not new. Furthermore, the manual informs us that the local king ‘imported’ luxury items such as good-looking women for his harem. Exports included spikenard, ivory, onyx stone, silk and, most importantly, cotton textiles. Cotton textiles have remained a major export from this area till modern times.
The second route to India was a more southerly one that went across from Socotra to the Kerala coast. The most important port in this area was Muzaris (or Muchheri Pattanam) that is mentioned frequently in both Graeco–Roman and Indian texts. A variety of goods were traded in Muzaris but the most important item of export by far was pepper, a spice that is native to the southern tip of India. It must have been exported in very large quantities because it was commonly available as far as Roman Britain.
For a long time historians had debated the exact location of this great port of antiquity. Excavations between 2004 and 2009 have identified it with a village called Pattanam, 30 km north of Kochi. Archaeologists have dug up a large number of Roman coins, amphorae and other artifacts in the area. It would remain a major port till it was destroyed by a big flood on the Periyar river in 1341 AD. The main trading hub then shifted to Kochi, but the Muzaris area retained enough strategic importance for both the Portuguese and the Dutch to maintain a fort there. When I visited the site in October 2011, the fort was being excavated by the Archaeological Survey. The oldest extant structure, however, is the Kizhthali Shiva temple that is said to have been built by the Chera dynasty in the second century BC. The dragons carved into the steps in front of the shrine strongly reminded me of the temples of South East Asia. Has this style made its way from Kerala to Java or the other way around?
During ancient times, an overland trade route from Muzaris and other Kerala ports made its way through the Palghat Gap (a gap in the Nilgiri mountain range near Coimbatore) to inland cities like Madurai or further on to ports on the eastern coast. Some Greek and Roman products would then have been re-exported to Bengal and South East Asia.
According to another ancient Greek geographer, Strabo, around 120 ships made the year-long trip to India and back in the first century AD 6. This probably excludes Indian merchant ships that also made the trip in reverse. We know that, for most of this period, India ran a large trade surplus with the Graeco–Roman world. This resulted in a constant one-way flow of gold and silver coins. Roman writer Pliny (23–79 AD) wrote: ‘Not a year passed in which India did not take fifty million sesterces away from Rome.’ This is corroborated by the fact that many hoards of Roman coins have been found in India. In a world where money was based on precious metals, this one-way flow of gold and silver would have been equivalent to severe monetary tightening. At one point, the drainage of gold became so serious that Roman Emperor Vespasian was forced to discourage the import of Indian luxury goods and ban the export of gold to India. Nonetheless, as a result of centuries of trade surpluses, India accumulated a large store of gold and silver. It is estimated that even today 25–30 per cent of all the gold ever mined is held privately by Indians even though the country itself has very few gold mines of its own.
Over the centuries many groups of people came to India’s western coast to trade or find refuge. Their descendants continue to live here and, in many instances, preserve ancient customs and traditions to this day. Not many people realize that India is host to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. It is believed that the earliest Jews came to India to trade in the time of King Solomon but, after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 AD, many refugees settled in Kerala. St. Thomas the Apostle is said to have landed in Muzaris at around this time and lived amongst this community. One can visit the spot where the saint is said to have landed. The descendants of his converts survive as the Syrian Christian community.
For fifteen centuries, this Christian community continued to observe old practices, including the use of Syriac, a dialect of the Aramaic language. Aramaic is the language that would have been used by Jesus Christ himself and it is astonishing that it survived in isolation for so long in India7. Unfortunately, the Portuguese tried to forcibly eradicate Jewish customs, including the language, and replace them with Catholic ones in the sixteenth century. Nonetheless, some ancient traditions live on in the Syrian Christian community.
As one can see, the legacy of the ancient trade-routes is still very much alive and is yet another example of India’s astonishing ability to maintain civilizational continuities. If Cleopatra had made good her escape, we would probably have a group that directly traced its origins to the Egyptian queen and Julius Caesar. It is still possible to experience the atmosphere of those times in the older parts of Kochi (Cochin). Pepper, ginger and other spices are still warehoused and traded in the bylanes. Deals are sometimes negotiated using a system of hand signals, hidden from onlookers by a cloth, that evolved centuries ago. Sitting in the toddy-shop, I watch modern ships ply in the harbour. I imagine myself as Hippalus, the ancient Greek mariner, enjoying his first drink after months at sea. Not far is ‘Jew Town’ where a tiny Jewish community lives clustered around a sixteenth-century synagogue. The Jews must have been held in high esteem by King Rama Varma for he allowed the construction of the synagogue right next to his palace. Sadly, the community has been sharply depleted in recent decades by emigration to Israel.
TO THE ISLAND OF GOLD
Even as the western coast traded with the Middle East and the Graeco–Roman world, the eastern coast of India saw a similar boom in trade with South-East Asia and all the way to China. There were dozens of ports all along the coast including the great port of Tamralipti in Bengal, the cluster of ports around Chilka lake in Orissa (recently renamed Odisha), the Pallava port of Mahabalipuram and the Chola port of Nagapattinam. Note that I am generalizing about a very long period of time and the relative importance of the various ports waxed and waned over the centuries.
From these ports, merchant fleets set sail for Suvarnadwipa (the Island of Gold or Sumatra) and Yavadwipa (Java). Some of them sailed on further to what is now South Vietnam. It is here, thousands of miles from the Indian mainland, that we see the rise of the first Indianized kingom in South East Asia. Chinese texts tell us of the Hindu kingdom of Funan that flourished in the Mekong delta in the second century AD.8 According to a legend told both by Chinese sources as well as by local inscriptions, the kingdom was founded by the Indian Brahmin, Kaundinya, who married a local princess of the Naga (Snake) clan. Together they founded a dynasty that ruled Funan for a hundred and fifty years. The Naga or snake motif would remain an important royal symbol in this part of the world.
The capital of Funan was Vyadhapura, now the Cambodian village of Banam and its main port was Oc Eo. In the early twentieth century, French colonial archaeologists found the remains of a large urban agglomeration of houses built on stilts along a network of canals extending 200 kilometers. There were irrigation canals as well as big canals that were navigable by ocean-going vessels. This is why it was possible for Chinese travellers to talk about sailing across Funan on their way to the Malayan peninsula.
Over the next thousand years, Funan’s legacy would evolve into the great Hindu–Buddhist kingdoms of Angkor in Cambodia and Champa in Vietnam. Strongly Indianized kingdoms and cultures evolved in other parts of South East Asia as well. In Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, the Srivijaya kingdom prospered on trade between India and China. In Java, a succession of Hindu kingdoms culminated in the powerful Majapahit empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Significantly, Indian civilization exerted this influence on South East Asia almost exclusively through trade and, with the exception of the Chola raids on Srivijaya in the eleventh century, there is no record of Indian military intervention in the region. Contrast this with successive Chinese emperors who repeatedly tried to impose a tributary relationship with these kingdoms. Although they sometimes succeeded in gaining temporary submission, often backed by military threats, they failed to match India in making civilizational inroads till the voyages of Admiral Zheng He in the fifteenth century.
The cultural impact of this era lives on in South-East Asia. It may be most obvious in the Hindu island of Bali, but, throughout the region, the influence of ancient India is alive in the names of places and people as well as the large number of Indian-derived words used in everyday
speech. The national languages of both Malaysia and Indonesia are called ‘Bahasa’, and both are full of Sanskrit words. Indeed, the name itself is derived from the Sanskrit word bhasha meaning language. From Myanmar to Vietnam, Buddhism remains the dominant religion. To this day, the coronation of the king of Buddhist Thailand and other royal ceremonies must be done by Hindu priests. There are more shrines to the god Brahma in Bangkok than in all of India.
India’s influence is civilizational rather than narrowly religious, and it extends all the way to the Korean peninsula. The prestige associated with ancient Indian civilization, for example, is recalled in the national myth of Korea. According to the Samguk Yusa,9 Princess Huh Hwang-ok of Ayodhya sailed all the way to Korea to marry King Suro in the fourth century AD. They had ten sons and together founded Korea’s earliest dynasty. The Gimhae Kim clan claims to be direct descendants of this union and remains influential (former President Kim Dae Jung was from this clan).
It is amazing how the essence of a civilization can survive over large distances in space and time. Watching the Ramayana performed in the Javanese style against a backdrop of the ninth-century Prambanan temples in Java, one is struck by how the landscape of a far-off time and a faraway land is evoked. The stone temples transform themselves from scene to scene—sometimes they recall the rocky outcrops of Kishkindha, sometimes Ravan’s palace in Lanka. A couple of hours’ drive away, the sunset seen from the top of the Buddhist stupa at Borobodur retains its magical effect even if Buddhist chants have now been replaced by the Islamic call to prayer.
Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography Page 10