The Indian Ocean

by Michael Pearson

  I was told of one man of Siraf who was so accustomed to the sea that for nearly forty years he did not leave his ship. When he came to land he sent his associates ashore to look after his business in all the towns, and he crossed over from his boat to another, when the vessel was damaged and needed to be repaired.49

  Yet such people must have been uncommon. For most sailors in the Indian Ocean the monsoon regime meant that there was considerable 'down time', as they waited for the change in the winds, and this time would be spent in port.

  The best studied truly aquatic people today are the famous Marsh Arabs of the Tigris-Euphrates delta, occupying the vast palustral triangle between An-Nasiriyah, Al-'Amarah, and Basra. The classic account is by the colourful and somewhat anachronistic Wilfred Thesiger. He lived in the marshes off and on from 1951 to 1958, and loved it despite the mosquitos, snakes, very large wild pigs (some the size of a donkey, weighing over 300 lbs), fleas, and flooding each year. The area was also riddled with disease: dysentery was endemic, also bilharzia, yaws, hookworm, eye infections, and tuberculosis. He spent so much time with them because

  They were cheerful and friendly and I liked the look of them. Their way of life, as yet little affected by the outside world, was unique and the Marshes themselves were beautiful. Here, thank God, was no sign of that drab modernity which, in its uniform of second-hand European clothes, was spreading like a blight across the rest of Iraq.50

  This was a totally aquatic society. 'The ground looked solid but felt very soggy. Actually it consisted of a layer of roots and decomposed vegetation floating on the surface.' Some of the islands were only a few square yards, others an acre, some tethered, some floating about.51 The houses were built on these reed platforms floating on the water, and all transport was in boats, usually very small. As Thor Heyerdahl noted, 'A Marsh Arab can rarely walk more than a couple of steps before he has to enter his canoe.'52 When it floods they just add a few more layers of reeds on the floors of their houses so they can keep dry. Once Thesiger was treating patients, and there were so many of them that 'the weight of my patients submerged the floor. I finished treating them ankle-deep in water. My host assured me that it did not matter, but nevertheless he seemed relieved when I moved on.'53

  This way of life goes back perhaps 5,000 years. Yet even when Thesiger was there in the 1950s the oil boom in Iraq had begun, and many Madan, as the Marsh Arabs call themselves, had moved off to Basra and Baghdad in search of fortune. As he noted: 'Soon the marshes will probably be drained; when this happens, a way of life that has lasted for thousands of years will disappear.'54 Gavin Young was a bit of a protégé of Thesiger, and first visited the marshes with him. He spent a considerable time there in the early 1970s, but by then things had already changed dramatically. There was a tourist invasion, with guests living in floating house boats or government guest houses or tourist bungalows, and people got about in motor launches rather than canoes.55 Much marsh land was being reclaimed for rice cultivation, and there were even then schemes to control the flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates and so reduce further the size of the marshes, or even drain them completely. Since Young's time this process has continued; Saddam Hussein may have the political aim of ending the marsh sanctuary of his Shia political opponents, but in any case the marshes would be doomed regardless of who ruled in Baghdad.

  Tourists have invaded other aquatic areas also, such as the backwaters of Kerala in southwest India. These lie behind a coastal sand spit, and again their inhabitants can be seen as moving beyond amphibious to aquatic. The area consists of narrow strips of land, with flooded rice paddies all around. The men fish: indeed when Frater was travelling along them in 1987 he was surprised to see heads sticking up out of the water. These were the bottom walkers, who trawl by hand, walking along the bottom of the shallow waters.56 The women work in the neighbouring paddy fields, and indeed many of the paddy fields are reclaimed to make islands. Some islands are substantial with stone levees or dykes, locally called bands. Others are less substantial, having only earthen bands which can collapse, especially during the monsoon. Transport and commerce, and getting to school, is by water, mostly in tiny dugouts.

  A Dutchman in 1689 left us an enchanting picture of this society:

  So pleasing that it is really worth seeing how nicely the embankment on all sides has been divided into small and some large village-plots by trees and houses, and how everywhere around these villages there are beautiful large and small islands, planted with grain, as far as the eye can gaze. Everything looks so pretty and green that every view pleases the heart and every time, through the beautiful tincture and perspective, the sight is equally enjoyable. And not least pleasing are the many small dikes, galley and other creeks, the cattle grazing here and there, fences of long reed around the houses and mats very finely braided. Many different kind of crafts from one piece of wood float to and fro, some only one fathom long, in which men are standing upright, carrying some goods.57

  Today many of the rice boats which for centuries have moved large cargoes of rice around the region have been converted into luxury house boats for western tourists and Indian yuppies and dot.com millionaires.

  In other places we find floating markets, extremely venerable, yet today also tourist attractions. The Bangkok one is a compulsory sight for any visitor. Long before this, in 1833 an American traveller had some perceptive comments to make. He had come up river from the mouth, and reached the town:

  We now threaded our way among junks, boats and floating houses, jumbled together in glorious confusion, and totally concealing the banks from our view. Hundreds of small canoes, some not larger than clothes-baskets, were passing to and fro, many of them containing talapoins or priests, paddling lazily from house to house, collecting presents of provisions. The occupants of the floating houses were taking down the shutters which formed the fronts, exposing their wares for sale: printed calicoes, paper-umbrellas, sweet-meats, fruits, pots, pans, etc being placed in situations the best calculated to attract the notice of the passers-by. This occupation was carried on entirely by the women, the men being either seated on the platforms smoking their segars, or making preparations to take a cruise in their canoes.

  Later he noted that:

  The best shops are built on wooden floats on the river; indeed when the waters are out, they flood the whole town, the only communication between the different dwellings being by means of boats. At this period of the year, when the river becomes swelled by the rains, whole streets of floating houses, together with their inhabitants, sometimes break adrift from their moorings, and are carried down the river, to the utter confusion of the shipping. These floating streets, nevertheless, possess their advantages. A troublesome neighbour may be ejected, house, family, pots and pans, and all, and sent floating away to find another site for his habitation. A tradesman, too, if he finds an opposition shop taking away his custom, can remove to another spot with very little difficulty.58

  It is tempting to see these people as typical maritime folk, but better simply to locate them at one end of a continuum which goes from totally landed to totally seabound. And indeed the careful reader will have noticed that not even all these people are purely aquatic. Most people located in the countries around the Indian Ocean, even on its shores, were not and are not in any true sense maritime people. Location is not the only signifier; one can live with the sound of surf in one's ears and not be maritime, one can even travel by water and still not be aquatic. Take the priests at the Vivekenanda temple on an island just off Kanya Kumari in the extreme southern tip of India. They travel frequently by water to the mainland, but are in no sense maritime. Nor are the pilgrims that the priests serve. How complicated it can get: what, for example, of female fisherfolk, who never go to sea yet exist to service those who do and to market their product?

  Indeed, one could take this further and claim that by and large events at sea are not very significant. Braudel wrote of the famous battle of Lepanto in 1571: 'All one can say is th
at after all Lepanto was only a naval victory and that in this maritime world surrounded and barred by land-masses, such an encounter could not destroy Turkey's roots, which went deep into the continental interior.'59 Battles at sea are far less sanguinary and destructive than those on land. Armies on the land kill many people including non-combatants, especially in this century, and destroy crops and infrastructure. All naval battles do is kill a few sailors. It has been claimed that the decline of landed empires affects port cities and sea trade detrimentally, something we will have to examine later. But no one would claim that losses at sea affect production on the land. Maritime empires can take part in, and even try to control, trade, but land empires can control production – a very important difference.

  Normative statements in both Hindu and Muslim cultures reflect a profound hostility to or distrust of the sea. The Manusmriti imposes penalties for anyone who would dare to cross the Black Water. While it is true that some Hindus travelled by sea anyway, it is obviously significant that Indian coastal traders and fisherfolk are usually from lower castes. As for Muslims, aphorisms abound. 'Merchants who travel by sea are like silly worms clinging to logs.' 'Wars by sea are merchants' affairs, and of no concern to the prestige of kings.' And the Caliph Umar was advised that

  The sea is a boundless expanse, whereon great ships look tiny specks; nought but the heavens above and waters beneath; when calm, the sailor's heart is broken; when tempestuous, his senses reel. Trust it little, fear it much. Man at sea is an insect on a splinter, now engulfed, now scared to death.60

  Yet Muslims overwhelmingly ignored these warnings and played a dominant role in Indian Ocean trade for a millennium.

  An experienced captain once said 'I love going to sea. I do not love the sea out there. That is not my friend. That is my absolute 24-hour-a-day sworn enemy.'61 Dr Johnson predictably had something oratorical to say on the matter: 'Why, sir, no man will be a sailor, who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for, being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.'62 However, Dr Johnson was a rare man among the English, for he was a landlubber. He was born in Lichfield, one of the few cities in England more than 100 miles by road from the coast and was 52 before he saw the sea. Most Englishmen did have some sea knowledge or even experience, as Conrad pointed out as he began his story Youth, 'This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak – the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning.'63

  More soberly, we can ask how many people actually make a living from the sea, or work in occupations connected with it. This could become a very large discussion indeed, but I will merely point out that the Indian censuses of 1891, and 1901 demonstrate that the numbers engaged in anything to do with the sea are infinitesimal as compared with agriculture. In 1891 61 per cent of the Indian population were identified as being in 'Pasture and Agriculture', while the total from even a very generously defined maritime category is still well under 1 per cent. The figures for 1901 are similar.

  As is only appropriate, we will give Braudel the last word. He ended his classic work with these words:

  the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century was overwhelmingly a world of peasants, of tenant farmers and landowners: crops and harvest were the vital matters of this world and anything else was superstructure, the result of accumulation and of unnatural diversion towards the towns. Peasants and crops, in other words food supplies and the size of the population, silently determined the destiny of the age. In both the long and the short term, agricultural life was all-important. Could it support the burden of increasing population and the luxury of the urban civilization so dazzling that it has blinded us to other things? For each succeeding generation this was the pressing problem of every day. Beside it, the rest seems to dwindle into insignificance.64

  * * *

  Chapter 3

  The beginning of the ocean

  Most human cultures have myths associated with the beginning of life, such as those found in Sumerian, Hindu and Buddhist literature (we will discuss Islam in the next chapter). The Sumerians believed that the founders came to the Tigris-Euphrates valley from the sea to the south. Sea travel was intricately tied in with the gods, especially Utu, the Sumerian sun god: 'The ship bent on honest pursuits sails off with the wind, Utu finds honest ports for it. The ship bent on evil sails off with the wind, he will run it aground on the beaches.'1 In Buddhist cosmology four of the land masses which supported human habitation were located in the Great Ocean, though some other Buddhists, just like the Greeks, thought there were several seas. The Buddha, however, was disinclined to speculate on how the world was created, or how long it would last.

  Hindu thought similarly was less certain about creation than was Judeo-Christian doctrine. It tended to be less concerned with the sea, reflecting no doubt the land orientation of the Aryans. In the famous 'Hymn of the Primeval Man,' an early Hindu creation myth from the early first millennium BCE which is part of the Brahmanas, Primeval Man, that is Prajapati, was dismembered to make the world. The four varnas came from parts of his body, the moon, sun and wind from other parts, and air, sky, and earth from others again. What is significant is that there is no mention of the sea. However, in later Hinduism there are mentions of the universal flood which destroyed the world, and also of the cosmic ocean.2 In the Puranas the origin of life is traced to the sea, and the sea is seen as a store of riches such as diamonds, pearls and rubies. Life's journey was like a journey across the ocean, necessary but full of trials and travails. Traditionally there are seven seas, which are joined but have distinctive qualities. They are generally seen as dangerous and unknowable: one who crossed the sea was often called a yati, that is one who has renounced the world and is prepared to lose one's life.3

  The central Hindu god Vishnu has several associations with the sea. He is often depicted as rising from the sea. In temple images he may appear reclining on the coils of the serpent Shesa, asleep on the cosmic ocean during the times between the periodic annihilation and renewal of the world. He also played a central role in one of the recurrent central events in Hindu mythology, the continuing struggle between the gods and the demons. On one such occasion the Indian gods had lost much of their power. They gathered on Mount Meru, the navel of the world, to discuss how to gain the amrita, or elixir of immortality, which was hidden deep in the ocean. At Vishnu's suggestion they decided to churn it out. As they did this, fourteen precious things come out, including the sun, moon, Vishnu's wife Lakshmi, Chandra the moon god, and Varuna, the goddess of wine.4 Dhanvantari, the physician of the gods, rose up out of the waters carrying in his hands the supreme treasure, the amrita. After various false starts, it was finally consumed by the gods, who consequently were restored in strength.

  Later Hindu thought, as in the Laws of Manu, and the Dharmasastra, takes a much less sanguine view of the ocean. It is called the kala pani, the Black Water, which it is forbidden to cross for fear of suffering serious pollution in caste terms. Many writers have claimed that this meant that Hindus are forbidden to travel by sea. However, the Sastras are really much more flexible than this, and these prohibitions are to be seen as precepts rather than strict rules. This is demonstrated by the way Hindus have crossed the ocean since time immemorial, even if the sea does not play a major role in Hindu thought. Lower caste people especially were relegated to occupations which higher castes found polluting, so that coastal trade and fishing was typically, then and now, done by folk very low in the hierarchy.

  Some recent Indian surveys have strained to endow India with a major maritime past, and to find the sea and ships occupying a central role in the early Indian literature. It has been claimed that the very earliest, the Rig Veda, shows Indians had a proud maritime past. Many references, some of them apparently rather ambiguous, are found in such other texts as the Ramayana, Arthasastra and Mahabharata.5 While by no means que
stioning the bona fides of these enthusiasts, the fact is that in terms of mythology Indian examples pay scant attention to the sea.

  How did the Indian Ocean reach the shape which we described in Chapter 1? About 250 million years ago a rift opened in the one existing continent, Pangaea, creating Laurasia to the north and Gondwanaland to the south. Some 100 million years ago Gondwanaland in turn broke up to form South America, Africa, India, Antarctica and Australia, thus opening a connection between the early Indian Ocean and the early south Atlantic Ocean. The latter two drifted apart about 65 million years ago.6 The Indian Ocean was close to its present form from this time. However, even once a water mass recognisable as the Indian Ocean had appeared, there were and still are variations. River deltas, those of the Zambezi, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Ganga, the Irrawaddy, and the Mekeong, are notoriously unstable areas. About 15,000 years ago sea levels were 100 metres or more lower than today.7 Today global warming is causing a threateningly rapid rise in sea levels.

  Humans first went to sea in the Indian Ocean. Recent archaeological work, which supports the Out of Africa theory of human origins, found a coastal settlement on the Red Sea coast of Eritrea where people were using boats at least 125,000 years ago. These humans ate from the sea: oysters and shellfish.8 It seems that at the other end of the ocean there also were very early voyages, which led to the peopling of Australia and New Guinea. This was a momentous event, as for the first time humans settled land outside of the Afro-Eurasian landmass, moving to the connected area which is now Australia and New Guinea, called Sahul. To reach here, even when sea levels were much lower than today, required that between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago the ancestors of today's Melanesians and Australian Aborigines leave Sundaland and cross open straits at least 65 km wide, and at other periods up to 150 km wide.9 Much later, there is evidence of foraging subsistence people around the northern shores of the ocean from 7000 BCE. There was early exchange also: for example, shell beads found in northern Syria which date from the fifth millennium BCE must have come from the Indian Ocean region via the Gulf.10