The Indian Ocean Read online

  The role of fisherfolk as pilots in the Gulf of Cambay may point to some direct state involvement in oceanic trade. In the case of the Tamil country, in southeast India, in the early historical period, from 300 BCE to 300 CE, cities were located on the coast, and were closely connected with overseas trade. When trade declined so did these port cities. The rulers of the time promoted this trade: they themselves were consumers of luxury goods, they developed ports and collected tolls and customs at them.30 So also Kautilya's famous Arthasastra, while concentrating its prescriptions relating to water matters mostly to the conduct of river passages – fords and ferries and such like – also shows a very substantial state interest in arranging to provide assistance to those in distress at sea, along with the collection of customs duties.31 True that this normative account may have little connection with actual practice, yet at the least this and other Hindu texts, such as the Laws of Manu and the various Sastras, show a state awareness of maritime matters in India.

  Apart from trade with the Gulf and the Red Sea, there were other connections across the western Indian Ocean. From very early on Sri Lanka acted as a hinge between the western and eastern oceans, as indeed one would expect given its location. On the other side, Ethiopia and India had contacts before the beginning of the Common Era. The first hard evidence comes from the Periplus, which also found Indian traders in Socotra, some of them permanently settled. Arabs also traded and settled on this island, and it is revealing that its name comes from Sanskrit.32

  Further down the East African coast, we have described local maritime connections from very early on. By around the last century before the Common Era this local trade was integrated, to an extent, into the wider Indian Ocean world. This integration spread from north to south, that is starting in Somalia and incrementally spreading right down the coast. The focus of this trade was with the Red Sea, and while proto-Swahili people acted as mediators and collectors of goods in the embryonic port cities of the coast, the actual trade was handled by Arabs. Again then, if we look at Arab activity we get a useful corrective to the older notion of 'Roman' domination. Arabs traded extensively over the whole western ocean long before Islam, as indeed the Periplus noted. The author wrote, 'The Arab kings sent thither [to East Africa] many large ships, with Arab captains and agents. These are familiar with the inhabitants, and both dwell and intermarry with them; they know all their villages and speak their languages.'33

  What products attracted traders to the Swahili coast? It seems that ivory was always important, finding ready markets in India and China. Trade in wood for Arabia probably also goes back far into history. In certain later times slaves for the Middle East were a major export, but this trade seems to have become important only around the eighth century when the Muslim empire centred on Baghdad needed them to drain the Tigris-Euphrates marshes. Roman pots have been found on Zanzibar island, dating from around the fifth century CE, though they were almost certainly carried not by Romans but by Persians. Other finds on the island confirm an extensive trade, with goods originating in India, China and the Middle East.34

  In the third to the fifth centuries trade in the Indian Ocean was affected positively by the rise of the Sassanian empire in Persia. The sea played a central part in the general world view of the founder, Adashir I. There appears to have been some state encouragement and even direction, and certainly traders from Persia dominated trade in the Gulf and the western Indian Ocean. Some may even have reached southeast Asia and China.35 More usually western Indian Ocean ships used Sri Lanka as a trans-shipment place. Persians, and Axumites from the Axum port of Adulis on the southwest coast of the Red Sea, met traders from east Asia there. When the Buddhist pilgrim Fa Hsien visited Sri Lanka in the early fifth century he found not only Chinese goods but also Chinese traders present. Similarly linking the eastern and western oceans was the southeast coastal area of Coromandel: for example, there is evidence of Tamil products on the Red Sea coast of Egypt, and an inscription in Thailand from the early part of the Common Era.36

  Within the eastern ocean, there was extensive trade all around the shores of the Bay of Bengal, while within island southeast Asia there were whole more or less autonomous and very complex networks which go back millennia. From about 500 BCE there were local networks connecting the Vietnamese coast with Indonesia and then around the Malay peninsular and into Burma even, and also linking Thailand with the South China Sea. Later, Indian prestige goods entered this network, from around the start of the Common Era, and as we will see below, ideas went with these goods.37 The Buddhist pilgrim Fa Hsien writing in 415 CE went on a ship from Sri Lanka to Srivijaya, and there were 200 travellers, who Panikkar identified as being brahmanical merchants, on board.38 We will quote his account of his voyage at the end of this chapter.

  Longer distance trade connected India and China. There are two ways to travel east from India and get to China: overland across the Isthmus of Kra in the Malay peninsula, or passing through the Straits of Melaka. It seems that the overland route was chosen in earlier times, until better and bigger ships made the all-sea route from, say, Sri Lanka to the South China Sea more cost effective. In the first century of the Common Era Funan, on the lower Vietnam coast, did well. The usual route was from India to the isthmus of Kra, and then to China via Funan. Indeed, this state expanded considerably in the next two centuries, until the sea route via Melaka took over. The seas of insular southeast Asia were then, from the sixth to the eleventh centuries, dominated by Srivijaya, and from the late thirteenth century by Majapahit. But by this time, as we will see in the next chapter, Islam was entering the region.

  Yet again it must be stressed that our records in this period, and later, privilege long-distance, high-value trade. Yet this trade was and is very much superstructure. The base was coastal trade, and indeed a part of coastal trade was vital for the long-distance routes, for they fed local products into the wider circuit. Similarly, while the records often focus on glamorous valuable products, essentials were also carried. We have already described several routes where essentials were carried quite long distances. As before, this trade remains largely hidden from our records, but we do know that it was always important. The Periplus mentions bulk items being traded from India to the Red Sea and Egypt, such as grain, rice, ghee, sesame oil, cotton cloth and cane sugar, though this was not a direct trade for the cargoes were broken up at Socotra, or modern Somalia.

  When we distinguish between luxuries and necessities, the essential point is that it is the latter which continues, unaffected by political rises and declines: indeed the very name implies this. Luxuries, on the other hand, suffer from a very labile, or discretionary, demand. 'Little and often usually outweighs big and rare.' This whole distinction is of great interest to political economy theorists, who consider that an exchange of necessities shows a greater integration of the two areas concerned. However, in real life most ships carried both, as indeed is obvious, and as has been shown when the cargoes of old wrecks are studied. One would be unlikely to find a ship full only of pearls, gold, and fine handicrafts. Historians have spent far too much time on luxuries, just because they are privileged in the records: in reality 'the glamorous manifestations of high-prestige trade should generally be regarded as outgrowths from or intensifications of the routine patterns of redistribution'.39

  Another obscure category of people have also used the sea from the very earliest times, that is fisherfolk. It may be however that fishing in our ocean was, at least for early people with primitive craft, more limited than in other oceans. The continental shelf in the Indian Ocean is mostly much narrower than in other oceans, so there is less area from which to take demersal fish. And coral often gets in the way. We can assume that traditional fishing was mostly done close inshore, and also that few would be full time piscatorial specialists: rather, most of them were peasants as well. We quoted some descriptions of their humble craft earlier in this chapter. Another category again is pearl fishing in three different locations: the Gulf, be
tween India and Sri Lanka, and in the Sulu archipelago. Again the sailors and divers would probably not be specialists, but rather have occupations on land also for the time outside the pearl fishing season.

  We will quote a vivid account of a storm in the Bay of Bengal presently, but there was another invariant hazard to navigation which was man-made, in other words the prevalence of piracy, something which continues to today. Piracy is a surprisingly controversial matter. Some have seen pirates as macroparasites, human groups that draw sustenance from the toil and enterprise of others, offering nothing in return. Others point out that they are at least a sign of prosperity, for they need something to prey on; similarly, only a rich port is worth plundering. In rather sanguine fashion, Horden and Purcell claim that they are not really separate from others at sea: 'Piracy is the continuation of cabotage by other means.'40 Piracy was endemic from the earliest times in both the Red Sea and the Gulf. Often it was a matter of tribal raiders simply extending their activities to the sea, this then again reflecting the fact that most people at sea at this time also had links and occupations on land.

  Not surprisingly, most rulers tried to ward them off, or even eliminate them. In the seventh century BCE the Assyrian King Sennacherib sent out an expedition against Gulf pirates, and over 300 years later Alexander the Great's fleet was harassed by them. Even the distant Roman emperor Trajan led a naval expedition to the Gulf to try and root them out. In the first century of the Common Era Pliny noted that ships in the Red Sea and those going across the Indian Ocean to southwest India carried archers to ward off pirates.41

  Navigation in this early period is probably better depicted as wayfinding. A description of this in the Pacific fits very well with what we know of early Indian Ocean practice. Wayfinding is 'navigation by "reading" the stars, sun, ocean swells, wave patterns, cloud formations, wind directions, colour of the sea, flight of sea birds, and integrating all this information with the aid of a mental compass to determine or maintain a sailing course toward an unseen or unknown land target.'42 An early Pali text says that a navigator needs to know how to dock a boat, and take it out to sea, know the seasons, and the stars, and be able to find his location at sea 'by observing the fishes, the colour of the water, the species of the ground, birds, and rocks.' The magnetic compass came late to the Indian Ocean as compared with Chinese practice, but the astrolabe, the kamal, was used in the Indian Ocean from quite early times. Observing stars made finding a ship's position much more precise.43 Dr Varadarajan did a series of interviews in the 1970s with traditional coastal people in Gujarat, and as the knowledge is passed on orally from master to pupil over generations she claims what she was told was authentic for centuries past. Sailors and navigators learnt by experience, by sailing with a master. The nakhuda was all important. Not only was he the captain and navigator, he also was the commercial agent for the owners of the cargo, assuming they were not on board. She was even told what food should be taken. The list included tea, dried fish, cereals, pulses, onions, potatoes, and dried vegetables and pickles, these chosen as foods which could last for a year on a long voyage,44 not that a vessel would ever be at sea for this long. It may be that the notion was that ritually pure food from home would be available throughout a long voyage, so that possibly dubious food did not have to be taken on board at foreign ports.

  Finally, what do we know about the actual experience of people at sea at this early time? The only extended account we have comes from the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Fa Hsien. Here is his account of a long voyage, the first we have of an actual passage over the Indian Ocean. He set out from China overland for India in 399 and returned by sea in 413–14. In Sri Lanka:

  he took passage on board a large merchant vessel, on which there were over two hundred souls, and astern of which there was a smaller vessel in tow in case of accidents at sea and destruction of the big vessel. Catching a fair wind, they sailed eastwards for two days; then they encountered a heavy gale, and the vessel sprang a leak. The merchants wished to get aboard the smaller vessel, but the men on the latter, fearing that they would be swamped by numbers, quickly cut the tow-rope in two. The merchants were terrified, for death was close at hand; and fearing that the vessel would fill, they promptly took what bulky goods there were and threw them into the sea. Fa-Hsien also took his pitcher and ewer, with whatever else he could spare, and threw them into the sea; but he was afraid that the merchants would throw over his books and his images, and accordingly fixed his whole thoughts on Kuan-Yin, the Hearer of Prayers, and put his life into the hands of the Catholic [that is, Buddhist] Church in China, saying 'I have journeyed far on behalf of the Faith. O that by your awful power you would grant me a safe return from my wanderings.' The gale blew on for thirteen days and nights, when they arrived alongside of an island [somewhere in the Andamans], and then, at ebb-tide, they saw the place where the vessel leaked and forthwith stopped it up, after which they again proceeded on their way. This sea is infested with pirates, to meet whom is death. The expanse of ocean is boundless, east and west are not distinguishable; only by observation of the sun, moon, and constellations is progress to be made. In cloudy and rainy weather our vessel drifted at the mercy of the wind, without keeping any definite course. In the darkness of night nothing was to be seen but the great waves beating upon one another and flashing forth light like fire, huge turtles, sea-lizards, and such-like monsters of the deep. Then the merchants lost heart, not knowing whither they were going, and the sea being deep, without bottom, they had no place where they could cast their stone-anchor and stop. When the sky had cleared, they were able to tell east from west and again to proceed on their proper course; but had they struck a hidden rock, there would have been no way of escape.

  They finally reached Java, but the subsequent voyage, on a large ship which carried 200 men and had provisions for fifty days, was equally trying. They went northeast for a month, and then met a 'black wind'. Seventy days out from Java they knew they should have been near Guangzhou (Canton), so they went northwest and in twelve days got to Lau-shan, on the southeast of the Shantung Peninsula.45

  Fa Hsien was a pilgrim, engaged in a Buddhist act of piety. His travels open for us the matter of non-economic exchanges across the Indian Ocean in this early period. We need to look at the ideas that travelled with the goods, and especially the matter of the spread of Indic ideas, notably Buddhism and later Hinduism, to southeast Asia.

  From at least the beginning of the Common Era we have good evidence of the spread to southeast Asia of Indian cultural and religious influences, first Buddhism, and from the fourth or fifth centuries brahmanical Hinduism. Indeed, Glover claims that economic contacts began even around 500 BCE, so that even this early southeast Asia was linked to a vast trading world spreading from the Mediterranean to Han China (circa 200 BCE to 200 CE). It could be, he claims, that this trade was done by Buddhist missionaries, or alternatively that Buddhist missionaries even this early (remembering that the Buddha lived during the sixth century BCE) accompanied traders. Such very early contacts are not universally accepted46 yet certainly from the first century of the Common Era there is evident an increasing use of Indian Hindu and Buddhist religious ideas, monuments and icons, and Indian scripts and languages.

  The connection between Buddhism and trade, including that to southeast Asia, is not really causal. Rather we can see in the early Common Era a mutually supportive interactive system. At the ideological level Buddhism encouraged lay devotees to accumulate wealth by trade; at the social level donations to Buddhist monasteries gave status to traders; and at the professional level Buddhist monasteries were repositories of knowledge and essential skills, such as writing. Not all traders were Buddhist, though many wealthy ones were. It is very unlikely that traders were the main agents in the spread of Buddhist, and later Hindu, ideas in southeast Asia, for most of them, while no doubt personally devout, were really ignorant peddlers whose opinions would carry little weight.

  The initiative lay in southeast Asia. Local
rulers there heard of south Indian ideas of kingship and ritual and imported Brahmins to raise their status and legitimise them. They were thus not mere passive recipients of a higher culture. These connections continued for centuries, as Buddhist pilgrims not only from southeast Asia but also East Asia visited holy sites in India, and studied in Sri Lanka. In Fa Hsien's time in the 420s we have two references to Sri Lankan Buddhist nuns travelling to China by sea,47 and from the fifth and seventh centuries we know of many Chinese pilgrims visiting Sri Lanka, and India. In the former they went to the tooth relic, that is an actual tooth of the Buddha in the interior at Kandy, and also studied important texts and worked with distinguished teachers. In India, where Buddhism was in decline, they went to places associated with the life of the Buddha, such as Bodh Gaya, where he attained enlightenment. There was a quite complicated circulation. In the early eleventh century the important southeast state of Srivijaya built a Buddhist shrine in Nagapattinam, the main port of the great Cola Tamil kingdom, and the Cola ruler, who was a Hindu, allocated revenue from a village to support this shrine.48 These contacts from insular, Malay, southeast Asia declined as Islam spread in the area soon after this, and new connections, now to Mecca, were created.

  Others also travelled for religious purposes. In about 330 CE a Syrian Christian bound for India was shipwrecked off Ethiopia, and subsequently helped to convert the Aksumite empire to Christianity. Later a Bishop of Adulis called Moses visited India, along with a Coptic bishop from Egypt, to examine Hindu philosophy.49 The origin of the so-called St Thomas Christian community, and more generally other Christian activity in India, is a matter of much controversy. Perhaps our guiding principle here should be to follow a recent detailed study of early Christianity in Asia and ask ourselves which is most important, 'clearly established historical veracity or an ongoing enlivening tradition which has given and continues to give purpose, dignity and significance to the lives of thousands?' 50 If we follow this line of argument, then we really do not need 'proof' that St Thomas, the apostle Doubting Thomas, really visited and died in India. Gillman points out that many other early Christian traditions are accepted as 'real' without the need for any documented evidence, such as the notion of Peter as the first pope and an unbroken line of succession since then. Similarly, the first life of St Patrick of Ireland dates from 300 years after his death, and so strictly speaking can hardly be taken to provide an historically veracious account. We need to give the same latitude to the St Thomas Christians, even to the extent of accepting that his tomb, in a suburb of modern Chennai, is indeed 'authentic'.