Indian Ocean
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A history of the Indian Ocean
The Times of India, Aug 07 2016
Sanjeev Sanyal
History of Indian Ocean shows how old rivalries can trigger rise of new forces
After hundreds of years of dominating the Indian Ocean and the broader region, the West is gradually withdrawing. This is allowing the emer gence of new geopolitical dynamics. In the Middle East, we see a Sunni alliance led by Saudi Arabia and Turkey pitted against a Shia alliance led by Iran. Meanwhile, China is establishing its footprint in the region with bases in Djibouti and Gwadar, Pakistan. It is simultaneously expanding into Southeast Asia with claims over the Spratly Islands. Interestingly, both sets of developments echo geopolitical dynamics that played themselves out in the Indian Ocean rim before the arrival of the Europeans.Revisiting this history provides interesting insights into the long-term implications of such rivalries.
Byzantines versus Persians
In the sixth century AD, the Middle East was dominated by two powers -a Christian alliance led by the Byzantine empire and the Sasanian empire of Iran. The main regional ally of the Byzantines was Ethiopia that had recently converted to Orthodox Christianity . One of the factors that drove the rivalry was control over the Yemen-Oman coast as it was key to trade with India. As a contemporary Byzantine put it, “For it is impossible for the Ethiopians to buy cloth from the Indians, since the Persian mer chants always locate themselves in the very harbours where the Indians first put in.“
The Ethiopian king Ella Asbeha tried several times to place a Christian on the Yemeni throne. However, each time the Ethiopian army withdrew, the Jewish and pro-Persian factions rose in revolt. Finally, Ella Asbeha left behind a large Ethiopian garrison but the soldiers went rogue and placed their own candidate on the throne. In this way Yemen was devastated by a complicated civil war. Eventually , the Persians intervened and took over the coast.
As if the Byzantine-Persian wars were not bad enough, the region suffered a deadly pandemic. Known as the Plague of Justinian, it spread across the Mediterranean and the Middle East killing an estimated 25-50 million people. Thus, when the seventh century dawned, the northwestern rim of the Indian Ocean was exhausted from war and disease. When the Arabs suddenly rose under the banner of Islam, the Byzantines and the Persians were simply too depleted to respond.
The Yemeni and Omani tribes fighting Persian rule were among the earliest groups to convert to Islam. The Arabs next defeated the Sasanians at the Battle of Qadisiyyah in 637AD and took over their empire. The last embers of Sasanian culture now survive as the tiny Parsi community in India. The Byzantines were similarly forced back into their heartlands in Anatolia (what is now Turkey). Their empire would slowly shrink to a small area around their capital Constantinople till Ottoman Turks captured and renamed it Istanbul.
Chinese treasure fleet
At the beginning of the 15th century, the Ming emperor of China decided to fund a series of grand voyages to the Indian Ocean. Note that these were not voyages of exploration as the routes had been well-known for hundreds of years. Instead, it was a display of geopolitical reach. Remember that the Chinese had only recently overthrown the Mongols and were keen to establish their position in the world; rather like today's China.
Between 1405 and 1433, the Chinese fleet would make seven voyages that would visit Southeast Asia, India, Sri Lanka, Oman and East Africa. The fleets included giant “treasure ships“ accompanied by hundreds of smaller vessels and as many as 28,000 men. The unlikeliest of people led the expeditions -a Muslim eunuch called Zheng He from landlocked Yunnan! The Chinese would soon use the fleet to rearrange the geopolitical landscape of the Indian Ocean. They backed the Thai against the Khmers. In India, they seem to have installed a new Samudrin in Kozhikode. They found Sri Lanka in a state of civil war, so one of the claimants to the throne was captured and taken to meet the Ming emperor. He was later sent back as part of a plan to ensure Chinese influence over the island. Zheng He similarly intervened in a war of succession in Sumatra.
Perhaps the most significant intervention was support for the new kingdom of Melaka as a counter-weight to the Majapahit of Java. The Hindu Majapahit were the most powerful maritime power in the Indian Ocean at that time and were opposed to Chinese expansion into their sphere of influence.
The Chinese provided systematic support to Melaka and its king made at least one trip to personally pay obeisance to the Ming emperor.Interestingly, the kingdom was also encouraged to convert to Islam to create a perma nent opposition to the Hindus of Java.
Melaka prospered under Chinese protection while the Majapahit were steadily pushed back. The Javanese princes who refused to convert even tually withdrew to Bali where their culture is alive to this day .
Back in China, however, the Con fucian mandarins were suspicious of power accumulated by the eu nuchs through the navy . So they de liberately undermined the navy . The treasure ships were allowed to rot and the records of the voyages were suppressed. China withdrew into centuries of isolationism and left a vacuum in the Indian Ocean that would be filled by an unexpected en trant -the Portuguese.
Twist of history
An important lesson of history is that geopolitical rivalries often have unintended consequences and can trigger the rise of a completely new force. The incessant Byzantine-Sasanian wars created the conditions that led to sudden Arab expansion. The Chinese fleet cleared the Indian Ocean of local powers but, by withdrawing suddenly , it left a vacuum that was filled by Europeans. This would eventually lead to the humiliation China itself suffered at the hands of colonial powers. Of course, history does not repeat itself exactly but, as Mark Twain put it, it often rhymes.
Ocean of churn
Arul Mani , India’s Ocean ? “India Today” August 17, 2016
The Indian Ocean seems to drive intrepid travellers. The coconut palm originated somewhere here before riding ocean currents with the single-minded purpose of world domination. The coco-de-mer, a more exotic, butt-shaped cousin, travelled from the island of Praslin to the Maldives and elsewhere, attracting much speculation for centuries before its home in the Seychelles was discovered. Globe Skimmers, a dragonfly species, are said to ride monsoon winds to traverse 14,000 km in an annual round trip between South India and East Africa. A slightly less epic journey took settlers from Indonesia-a country named after its location in the ocean-to Madagascar centuries ago. Having listened to such stories, I contemplated some form of flying tackle to land the book as soon as I spotted it at the store. Luckily for all parties, the gentleman handling it put it down and moved on. The title seemed adroitly pointed towards a mythological manthan just as much as it evoked movement, migration and mixing. The Ocean of Churn is not the most euphonious phrase, but the promise extended, that of explaining the ocean's impact on human history, seemed like reason enough to press forward.
Sanjeev Sanyal, whose previous books include Land of the Seven Rivers (2012) and The Indian Renaissance (2008), lays out two ways in which the Indian Ocean rim has been written about. Eurocentric views treat prior history as if it never happened. While indigenous accounts try to remedy this, they end up offering a narrow focus, favouring a particular country rather than aiming for an understanding of how things are tied to one another across the region. This book is meant to remedy the shortcomings of both.
Sanyal offers us the proposition that a coastal rather than a continental focus might be such a remedy. He begins with a rather gripping story-the search for a successor to the Pallava crown brings to Kanchi a 12-year-old princeling from Cambodia who fights off pretenders to ascend the throne as Nandivarman II, and declares himself a pure Pallava despite his foreign origins.
The introduction identifies two broad trends that have marked the region's history. One is the unacknowledged involvement of Indian soldiery in key events in the history of the region-a pattern that begins in the days of Alexander the Great. The other such trend is the connection between a strong matrilineal tradition in the region owing to largely male migrations.
The ten chapters that follow traverse the geological past of the region, the many migrations that populated it, the coming of urban civilisations, empire-building in the subcontinent, the arrival of Islam, trade across the region, the arrival of explorers looking for spice, colonisation, and its aftermath.
Sanyal aims his book at a lay audience, and brings to the task he has set for himself a combinatory excellence. The book takes the reader into the arcana of genetics and archaeology whilst staying readable. The author draws on an impressive array of sources and documents them carefully, and keeps a kind of conversation going even in the endnotes. His capacity for bringing history to the reader through a sharp eye for the most up-to-date material and their implications is commendable-notable among these is a dramatic archaeological discovery made at the Hyderabad University in 2015 which pushes Iron Age timelines in South India back to 2400 BC.
Among the book's other charms are a gift for wryness. We find that the provenance of the name Andhra Pradesh lies in Satavahana self-description and that their place of origin is now in Telangana. The 17th century traveller Robert Knox records that Sinhala men respond violently later in life to endearing home-names given in childhood. Sanyal observes that present-day Bengali and Oriya readers would empathise.
Sanyal's chief achievement, through the book, is an ability to continually prise revelatory little nuggets out of history's unyielding rock. The Malay term for 'Indians', keling, comes from the fact that the first traders to operate there set out from the kingdom of Kalinga. Herodotus's fanciful stories about how cinnamon is sourced are still knocking around when the spice traders arrive, suggesting that Asian trade monopolies depended on skills with cooking up good stories.
The author's eye for the small, telling detail ranges from the quaint and the charming to the truly bizarre. We get to sigh over the graffiti poems left by impressed sightseers from the past at Sigiriya; over the Arabian Nights story of Abu Hassan who farted too loudly at his own wedding and fled social ignominy to live happily ever after in Kozhikode where, presumably, they looked more kindly on such eccentricities.
How far can affection for details and the anecdotal take an enterprise of pitch and moment like this? Pretty far, going by the success of a precursor-Richard Hall, a mere journalist, who wrote Empires of the Monsoon, a work of popular history that continues to cast a long shadow on those who would write about the region. History, and historical method, must, after all, arrive willy-nilly in our daily conversations.
I have some reservations, though, about this book. Sanyal remarks that "in the Marxist version, the narrative of history flows along a predetermined track like some Victorian steam engine driven by the inescapable laws of Newton". I'm no Marxist myself, but this is lazy writing, for it collapses Marx and his attempted prophesying into the conversation that has sprung up around his ideas. There are those who swear by Marx and the predictive value of his work, and those who might disagree with these predictions but base an analytical approach on the idea that history has a material basis. In other words, there are Marxists and Marxists, and it is usually a good idea to identify those you disagree with and why.
He then offers his own theory of history. The world is a Complex-Adaptive system, and its history proceeds from "interactions between technological innovation, geography, nature, socio-economic forces, the actions of great and not-so-great individuals, culture, ideology and pure chance" leading eventually to recurrences and a law of unintended consequences. He might as well have called this theory A Little Bit of Everything (including Marxism).
This grand theory amounts to very little if you measure it against the initial promise-that of offering correctives to the different narrow focuses in European and indigenous accounts. Primarily because he is busy 'recovering' the nation as an unbroken continuity. On finishing the book, you've listened to him ride a bunch of hobbyhorses-a debunking of the Aryan Invasion theory, that migrations happened out of India into Eastern Europe, the location of the Saraswati, the Harappan origins of the Rig Veda, that the Persians were probably Indians of the Parshu tribe, and that Tipu wasn't really a freedom fighter.
While it may be difficult to cover everything that occurred in the region, the coastal focus he promises doesn't always arrive, probably because he has becalmed himself so far inland. His successes in this department include a long look at Kharavela, the Kalingan king who upstaged the Mauryas; absorbing accounts from episodes in the tussles over spice; and another long look at the battle of Kolachal (Colachel) where Marthanda Varma defeated the Dutch-years before the battle of Tsushima, touted as the first Asian defeat of a European force.
The omissions are many. The Maldives, for instance, gets about a paragraph where cowrie shells and Ibn Batuta's brief stint as Cadi are mentioned. Mauritius, one of the first countries to receive indentured labourers from India, gets similar treatment. Swahili, a language born of the interaction between Arab traders and African coastal communities, gets no more than a name-check. The Nagarathar, a branch of the Chettiar caste who took their name in memory of a lost trading city and moved far inland before venturing out all over Asia again, receive similar treatment. And Kaanaadukaathaan, the village off Karaikudi where their biggest banking operation was located, is mangled into Kanadukanta. The relatively peaceful arrivals of Islam and Christianity in the region, piggybacking on trade rather than conquest, are given short shrift.
The book's editors need to be spanked for letting Sanyal repeat himself severally in the book, and for allowing some of his bizarre statements to see print. He blithely remarks that Gandhi opted to collaborate with the British during World War I-that's a word with rather specific negative connotations in wartime. He tears into Ashoka's reputation for tolerance, which is alright, and then says academic historians were encouraged to build the man up in order "to provide a lineage to Nehru's socialist project". You could say Ashoka and Akbar received a bit of a lift as votaries of a home-grown secularism, but these two different ideas seem to have coalesced into one for the author. While talking of the Kingdom of Melaka embracing Islam, he sees a Chinese conspiracy "at ensuring a schism in Indic civilisation". He has an evocative section on how Vasco da Gama was received in Kozhikode, and then butts in while talking of the fanfare with some amateur anthropology on how Indian motorists love to honk. And quite out of the blue, while talking of the port of Muziris, where Jewish, Christian and Muslim sites were in proximity, we have a sentence that reads-"This is saying something at a time when the Christian community in Syria and Iraq is being systematically wiped out by the so-called Islamic State." They could have interrupted the prose here with a little scoreboard to tell us who was getting points for what.
The book has its merits, but these are outweighed by the missed opportunities. Mahathir Mohammad, for instance, benefited from putting son-of-the-soil politics into play in Malaysia, and then had to deal with the embarrassment of rumours that his father may have been a Malayali. Sanyal notices the sweet paradox that this moment offers, and how it seems to be a reversal of the Nandivarman story, and does nothing with these paradoxes. How is it that ethnic purity is such a big deal in a region marked by greatest heterogeneity? What does this imply for nationalist politics? Perhaps Benedict Anderson, the Marxist social theorist who travelled to Indonesia and learned Indonesian, Thai and Malay in order to write about nationalism and became a sort of honorary Indonesian, would have much to teach him.
