7
The Great City of Angkor
Even as the Arab conquests changed the political and cultural landscape of the western Indian Ocean, the eastern Indian Ocean continued largely as before. The Palas of Bengal and the Pallavas of Kanchi continued to trade with South East Asia and beyond. South East Asia remained a patchwork of Hindu–Buddhist kingdoms that were heavily influenced by the Indian civilization.
In the second half of the eighth century, the kingdoms in Java, Indonesia, began to flex their muscles and we have records of their raids on the Khmers of Cambodia and on Champa in southern Vietnam. A Javan inscription even claims that King Sanjaya ruled over the Khmers.1 Not to be left out of the action, the Sri Vijaya king of Sumatra–Malaya also made a surprise raid on the hapless Khmers and killed the ruler of one of their kingdoms. It was amidst this turmoil that a new ruler, Jayavarman II, came to the Khmer throne. It was he who founded the Angkor empire, though not the city by which the empire is now known.
Very little is known about the origins of Jayavarman II but later inscriptions say that he came from Java to take the crown. What was he doing in Java? Was he a Khmer prince taken away by the Javanese as a hostage or was he Javanese? The only thing we know for sure is that he was very devoted to the Hindu god Shiva. It is also likely that his claim to the Khmer throne was acquired by marriage to a Khmer princess.
Having acquired power, he systematically subdued local rivals as well as fended off the raiders from both Java and Sri Vijaya. He next conducted the ancient Vedic ceremony that declared him as a Chakravarti Samrat or Universal Monarch. By doing this, he was signalling that the Khmers were no longer vassals of any external power.2 A new capital called Indrapura was founded, the first of several new cities that Jayavarman II would establish. At the same time, the territories around the great lake of Tonle Sap were added to the growing kingdom and systematically settled. This would later lead to an economy based on hydraulics and intensive rice cultivation.
Jayavarman II died around AD 850. He was succeeded by his son who seems to have consolidated the fledgling empire till AD 877. The next king, Indravarman I, however, was Jayavarman II’s queen’s nephew.3 Inscriptions also tell us that Indravarman I’s wife traced her lineage back to the royal family of ancient Funan that had been established by Kaundinya and the Naga princess. As one can see, matrilineal descent was a very important component of royal legitimacy in Angkor. This is explicit in the inscriptions of the Angkor monarchs. For instance, when Indravarman built a grand Shiva temple at Bakong, he dedicated statues to Jayavarman II and his queen, his own parents and his maternal grandparents.
It was under Indravarman I that the Khmers began to build the complex hydraulic network of canals and lakes that allowed a major expansion in rice cultivation. By the time his son and successor Yashovarman I wore the crown, the Khmers ruled much of what is now Cambodia, Thailand and Laos. The empire now needed a grand capital and Yashovarman I laid out the first city in Angkor and named it after himself Yashodharapura. He also built a number of large Hindu temples. This includes the Preah Vihear temple, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, built on a mountaintop on the Thai-Cambodian border which is now the focus of a bitter dispute between the two countries. Despite the International Court of Justice in Hague ruling that it belonged to Cambodia, the conflict spiralled into an armed skirmish in 2011 and nearly escalated into a war.4
Angkor grew and prospered through most of the tenth century but there appears to have been instability and civil war at the beginning of the eleventh century. Yet again, power was captured by an outsider with a matrilineal claim to the throne. Suryavarman I was a prince of a vassal state but his mother came from the same maternal line as that of Jayavarman II’s queen and Indravarman I’s mother’s family. Some Western historians have suggested that Suryavarman’s claim to the throne was tenuous.5 However, from a Khmer perspective, a matrilineal link to the royal Naga clan was an entirely legitimate claim to the crown.
Suryavarman I ruled over the empire for almost half a century (AD 1002–1050). He re-established control over territories that had broken away during the civil war as well as established temporary peace along the eastern border with Champa. He also expanded the capital and built a large palace complex that included a tiered pyramid called the Phimaen Akas or Sky Palace. A Chinese visitor, who visited Angkor a few generations later, reports that the stepped pyramid was topped with a golden pinnacle that no longer exists.
A modern-day visitor will almost certainly be told of the legend of how the ruling monarch was expected to spend the first watch of every night in the pyramid tower where he would sleep with a serpent princess in the form of a beautiful woman. While I am a little sceptical about the bit where snakes turn into women, it is a reminder of the importance of the Naga lineage in establishing the legitimacy of royal power. This is why the royal symbol of the Khmer kings was the seven-headed cobra which shows up frequently in their art.
After Suryavarman I’s death, the empire again suffered internal wars as well as renewed hostilities with the Chams. In 1113, order was restored by another powerful leader, Suryavarman II. It is he who built Angkor Wat, still the largest religious building in the world and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its sheer scale must be seen to be believed but, in order to imagine what it looked like in its heyday, one must remember that the towers were originally covered in gold leaf!6
Note that Angkor Wat was originally a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu. When it was adapted to Buddhist use in later times, the main idol of Vishnu was moved out of the sanctum to a corridor near the main entrance. Visitors will find that it is still lovingly worshipped by the locals. This should not be surprising as Hinduism and Buddhism remain closely related and their adherents routinely visit each other’s shrines. Just as Cambodian Buddhists worship Vishnu, Hindus venerate Buddha as an incarnation of Vishnu.
After a period of stability under Suryavarman II, the familiar pattern of war and disorder repeated itself. Suryavarman II’s successors were particularly harassed by repeated raids made by the Chams. In 1177, the Chams made a naval attack that bypassed the usual land defences and took the Khmers completely by surprise. The invaders managed to reach the capital where the wooden palisades and moats of Yashodharapura proved inadequate. The Khmer king was killed and the city sacked. The empire descended into chaos. Once more, an energetic new leader, Jayavarman VII, came to the rescue of the empire. The maternal line was again important as he derived his legitimacy from the fact that his mother was Suryavarman I’s granddaughter. The new king first dealt with the Chams and defeated them in a major naval battle that is vividly depicted on the wall of the Bayon temple. He then rebuilt the capital. Recognizing the limitations of the old defences, he built Angkor Thom to be more compact than Yashodharapura, but added laterite walls and a wide moat. Five stone causeways gave access to this royal city through monumental gates that were surmounted by gigantic human faces; this is the stuff of a million tourist photographs.
I apologize if the above narrative about Angkor’s history seems like a long list of kings with very long names. It was unavoidable for two reasons. First, the idea was to illustrate the importance of matrilineal systems in the history of South East Asia. This was only possible by giving a taste of who succeeded whom. Second, I hoped to give the readers a sense of how Angkor evolved as an empire and a city.
At its height in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Angkor was the largest urban agglomeration in the world. Analysis of satellite images have confirmed that the royal capital was surrounded by a densely populated, semi-rural ‘suburbia’ where non-agricultural activities were mixed in with intensive farming sustained by a complex water management system. Estimates vary, but it is reasonable to say that more than a million people lived in greater Angkor.
So what was Angkor like as a living city? In 1296, Chinese diplomat Zhou Daguan visited Angkor and stayed there for eleven months.7 He has left us a detailed account of his visit which makes for fascinating reading. Enough of the city has survived that we can follow his footsteps and identify landmarks. But he also provides details that make the place come alive. For instance, he mentions the grand gateways of Angkor Thom topped with gigantic human heads, but he adds the detail that the middle face was covered in gold! This allows us to better understand what these monuments originally looked like.
Zhou Daguan has left a vivid description of a royal procession. The processions were led by a body of cavalry accompanied by standards and music. A few hundred beautifully attired palace women followed. Some carried gold and silver vessels, others burning tapers and still others were female warriors with swords and shields. Ministers and princes were next. Seated on elephants, they had gold and silver parasols according to their rank. After this came the queens and other women of the royal family—on palanquins and chariots. Finally, the king himself entered on a large elephant surrounded by an escort of palace guards, also on elephants. The king held in his hand the sacred sword, the symbol of royal power, and would be shaded by twenty parasols. It bears mentioning here that the last such procession took place in Cambodia as recently as 1901 during the ceremonial cutting of hair of Prince Chandralekha, son of King Norodom.
Zhou Daguan has also left us descriptions of more mundane everyday life. He tells us that the rich lived in houses with tiled roofs while the poor used thatch. The floors were covered in matting but there were no tables, chairs and beds. People both sat and slept on the mats. Moreover, the climate was so hot and humid that people sometimes got up at night to bathe. This would come as no surprise to anyone who has spent the day exploring the sites at Angkor—the still, steamy heat can wear down even those used to Singapore or Mumbai.
Interestingly, the Chinese diplomat wrote that commerce in the marketplace was mostly conducted by women. By paying rent to the local authority, they could set up a stall by displaying their goods on a mat laid out on the ground. Such scenes can still be seen across India and South East Asia. While women shopkeepers are not unusual, their dominance in the marketplace is particularly visible in the north east Indian states of Meghalaya and Manipur. Just wander around the local markets in Shillong or the Ima Keithel market in Imphal to understand what I mean. Readers will recall that the matrilineal Khasis are genetically and linguistically related to the Khmer. It is remarkable how certain cultural traits have survived from Neolithic times.
Geopolitics of the Chola-Era
The Cholas, as the reader will recall, were one of the three clans who dominated the southern tip of India in ancient times. During the period of Pallava rule, they had accepted the overlordship of Kanchi but still retained significant political clout. At the end of the ninth century, a Chola general called Aditya helped the Pallavas crush a revolt by the Pandyas, the other ancient Tamil clan. As a reward, he seems to have been given sizeable new territories. Aditya used the new resources to build up his military capability and in AD 873 he marched against his Pallava overlords. The Cholas defeated and killed the last Pallava king Aparajita (whose name ironically means ‘he who cannot be defeated’). Aditya took care, however, to marry a Pallava princess and thereby absorb their lineage into his own.8
Over the next several decades, the Cholas steadily expanded their kingdom. They repeatedly defeated the combined armies of the Pandyas and their Sri Lankan allies. However, not all their military campaigns went well. When the Cholas attempted to expand northwards, they were beaten back by the Rashtrakutas who had replaced the Chalukyas in the Deccan plateau. In fact, the Rashtrakutas pushed back and occupied the old Pallava capital of Kanchi. It took several years for the Cholas to recover from the defeat but they seemed to have clawed back the lost territory by the time Rajaraja Chola came to the throne in AD 985.
Rajaraja is widely regarded by Tamils as their greatest king. He defeated the combined armies of the Pandyas, the Sinhalese and the ruler of Kerala. This gave him control over ports on both the eastern and western coasts. Next he decided to teach the Sri Lankans a lesson. A naval raid occupied the north of the island and sacked the Sinhalese capital of Anuradhapura. The Maldives was also added to the empire. As thanksgiving for his victories, Rajaraja then built the enormous Brihadeswara temple dedicated to Shiva. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The next Chola ruler was Rajaraja’s son Rajendra who assumed the throne in 1014. He initially had to put down revolts by the old rival clans and consolidate his control over Sri Lanka. He then led an extraordinary military expedition that made its way north to the banks of the Ganga. Although the Cholas did not attempt to maintain control over these northern lands, Rajendra was clearly very proud of having made his way to the holy river. Water from the Ganga was carried back in golden vessels and a new capital was built—‘Gangaikonda Cholapuram’ meaning, ‘The City of the Chola who brought the Ganga’.
From the perspective of Indian Ocean history, however, the most significant event of Rajendra’s rule was a major naval raid on the Sri Vijaya kingdom of Sumatra and Malaya. In order to appreciate the historical context of this event, one needs to step back and understand the geopolitical dynamics of the times. The maritime trade route between India and China had become very lucrative and there were two main routes. The first passed through the Straits of Malacca, between the Malay peninsula and Sumatra. The Sri Vijaya kingdom controlled this route. The second, more southerly route, passed through the Sunda Straits between Sumatra and Java. Although it was a bit of a detour for those going to China or Champa, it had better access to the spice growing Maluku and Banda islands. This route was usually controlled by the Javans. Not surprisingly, there was constant rivalry between the Sri Vijaya and the Javanese kingdoms.
The late tenth century was a period of prosperity in the Indian Ocean rim as trade boomed between the Song empire in China, the Cholas in southern India and the Shiite Fatimid caliphate that controlled Egypt and the Red Sea. The rivalries of South East Asia were proving to be a major threat to this economic pipeline. In AD 987, a Sri Vijaya diplomatic mission made its way to China.9 During its stay in China, the diplomats were informed that their country was under attack from the Javan kingdom of Mataram. They decided to head home but the war escalated and the mission found itself stranded in Champa for a year. It is likely that they received new instructions from the capital for they headed back to China and pleaded with the Song emperor to place Sri Vijaya under its protection. Thus, China came to have influence in the region.
The Sri Vijaya would have been aware that the entry of the Chinese into the Indian Ocean could elicit a response from the Cholas. Thus, they simultaneously sent missions to the Chola kings and made generous grants to Hindu and Buddhist temples in Chola ports. Amusingly, Chinese records show that the Sri Vijaya were playing a double game because their diplomats were deliberately misrepresenting the situation by claiming that the Cholas paid tribute to them!
The Sri Vijaya seem to have used Chinese protection to build up their own strength. Not surprisingly, this caused their neighbours to become concerned. Around 1012, Suryavarman I, the king of Angkor, chose to send an unusual gift to Rajendra Chola—his personal war chariot with which he had defeated his enemies. In the Indic cultural context, such a gift has great symbolic importance and it is likely that Angkor was trying to woo the Cholas as a way to counterbalance the Sino-Sri Vijaya alliance. It is also possible, that Angkor was trying to reopen the old trade route through the Isthmus of Kra as a way to bypass the contested straits. Amidst all this hectic diplomacy, the Cholas sent a direct diplomatic mission to China in 1015.10
The ground situation, however, suddenly changed in 1016 when the Sri Vijaya and their allies defeated the Javanese and sacked the Mataram capital. This left the Sri Vijaya in control of both sea routes. We have evidence to suggest that it soon exploited this situation by exacting exorbitant tolls on merchant ships. Rajendra Chola probably sent a small naval expedition to Sumatra in 1017 as a warning but it was not taken seriously. Thus, the Chola returned in 1025 with a much larger fleet.
We do not know the exact sequence of events, but a study of the available information suggests the following: The fleet probably assembled near the main Chola port of Nagapattinam. Appropriately for a port that traded with South East Asia, the name means ‘Port of the Nagas’. There is still a major port there but the medieval port was probably several kilometres to the south.11 The Chola fleet would have first sailed south towards Sri Lanka before swinging east using ocean currents that would have taken them across to Sumatra. They probably then sailed down the west coast of the island towards the Strait of Sunda where they may have been resupplied by Javanese allies and picked up local guides.
The fleet now made its way north into the Straits of Malacca and systematically sacked Sri Vijaya ports along the way. Finally, we are told that the Cholas decisively defeated the main Sri Vijaya army in Kadaram (now Kedah province in Malaysia). The invading force then withdrew, stopping by at the Nicobar Islands on their way home.
The Chola raid significantly diminished Sri Vijaya power but it is remarkable that the Chinese did not do anything to support their supposed vassals. It is possible that the Chinese were just as annoyed at Sri Vijaya’s rent extraction and had entered into an understanding with the Indians. The Sumatrans too seem to have accepted their reduced status as they continued to send ambassadors to the Chola court and even participated in a joint diplomatic mission to China. When a Chola naval fleet returned to Kadaram in 1068, it was in support of a Sri Vijaya king against his local rivals. Meanwhile, with external threats diminished, Java began to rebuild itself under a Balinese prince, Airlangga. The process of revival would culminate in the great Majapahit empire in the fourteenth century.
Merchant Guilds and Temple Banks
As one can see, maritime trade was not just a driver of the economy during the Chola era but was the key factor determining geopolitical developments. So, how did medieval Indian merchants organize themselves? The average reader may be under the impression that we are dealing with individual merchants functioning under the umbrella of royal protection. Individual merchants did exist and some of them became very wealthy and powerful. However, much of the trade was done by corporatized merchant guilds. Such organizations, created under contract, are called Samaya in inscriptions.12 One of the largest guilds, called ‘The Five Hundred’, was established in Aihole, Karnataka and soon became a multinational corporation. Another guild, called Manigramam, was from Tamil country and is mentioned in Nandi Varman’s inscriptions in Thailand!
A code of conduct called ‘banaju-dharma’ governed such organizations. Membership was based on economic interest and often cut across caste divisions—for instance, The Five Hundred was founded by Karnataka Brahmins but would later be dominated by Tamil Chettiars. Moreover, the supply chain depended on contracts between different guilds. Thus, the weavers’ guild would contract with the merchants’ guild to supply a certain amount of cloth for export. While these corporations had links to the ruling dynasties, they were capable of making independent arrangements for themselves. Thus, we find that business carried on irrespective of changing rulers, wars and geopolitical balance. Some of the larger guilds had companies of mercenaries that protected their interests from pirates, rivals and even avaricious rulers. In this way, the Manigramam guild survived several centuries till around AD 1300!
The network of temples played an important role in financing this economic model. Unlike their Sumerian and Egyptian contemporaries, Vedic Hindus had preferred simple fire altars to grand religious structures. This changed in later times as temples became the centre of social and cultural life. The early medieval period saw a sharp increase in temple building. Much of Indian classical music, dance, drama, sculpture, painting and other art forms evolved in the temples rather than at the royal court. What is less appreciated is that the temples were key to the financing of trade, industry and infrastructure building.
It is well known that medieval temples were very wealthy but the common impression is that this wealth was mostly due to royal grants. In reality, the network of large and small temples had a close relationship with merchant and artisan communities as well as the village/town councils; this is quite clear from an examination of various donations and contracts. Moreover, the reason that the temples accumulated so much wealth is that they acted as bankers and financiers!
For instance, a study of temple records by Kanakalatha Mukund shows that temple lending was mostly directed to corporatized bodies like guilds and village councils rather than individual merchants.13 The temples lent money to village/town councils for infrastructure investment and to merchant and artisan guilds for business. Interest rates usually ranged from 12.5 to 15 per cent per annum. An eleventh-century inscription clearly shows that there was an active credit market. Thus, by the Chola period, Indian Ocean trade was no longer about individual merchants and small moneylenders, but was a sophisticated network of multinational guilds financed by large temple banks. Like globalized businesses of today, they too had to navigate between local political rivalries and those of major geopolitical powers.
The Odiya Candidate
The first shock to the Chola empire came in the 1060s. The Chalukyas had come back and retrieved their empire from the Rashtrakutas. This is another example of the persistence and cyclical revival of old dynasties in peninsular India. What makes them even more confusing is that it’s often not entirely clear how the revivalists are related to the old dynasty. As the Chalukyas expanded south, they came in conflict with the Cholas. With the Cholas distracted by wars on their northern borders, the Sinhalese began to claw back their island under the leadership of Vijayabahu. Around 1070, the Cholas were finally pushed out. They would try to re-establish control over Sri Lanka but would not succeed.
There may be a temptation to see the wars between the Cholas and the Sinhalese kings in terms of ethnic conflict. However, one must realize that the Sri Lankans were part of an anti-Chola alliance led by another Tamil clan, the Pandyas. Indeed, Vijayabahu’s army had several Tamil mercenary units. Having pushed the Cholas out, the Sinhalese would help the Pandyas recover their kingdom on the mainland. Thus, this is better seen as a struggle for supremacy between two geopolitical alliances rather than two ethnic groups. One can clearly see this in how events played out over the next two centuries.
After Vijayabahu, the Sinhalese kingdom was consumed by civil war and broke up into several kingdoms. These were reunited by a king called Parakramabahu.14 Unfortunately he had no sons and after his death Sri Lanka appears to have slid back into chaos. At this moment in history, a complete outsider managed to capture the throne. His name was Nissanka Malla, an Odiya prince, who used the Sinhalese link to ancient Kalinga to claim descent from King Vijaya (recall the Kalingan prince who is said to have first settled the island in the sixth century BC). Given that his claim to the throne was always suspect, Nissanka converted to Buddhism and proclaimed that only a true Buddhist could be the king of Sri Lanka. Thus, it was an insecure Indian prince who cemented the link between Buddhism and the Sri Lankan throne!
The Cholas watched all this and decided to back their own Odiya candidate—Magha of Kalinga. According to the Culavamsa, sequel to the Mahavamsa, Magha landed in Sri Lanka with 24,000 soldiers and proceeded to carve out a kingdom in the north of the island. Although the Cholas were in severe decline by this time, they seem to have backed him as best they could. Magha also encouraged a lot of Tamils to settle in his kingdom. It is quite extraordinary that two adventurers from faraway Odisha were at the heart of a rivalry that would later come to be seen as Tamil–Sinhala conflict.
As if things were not complicated enough, Sri Lanka suffered a naval invasion from South East Asia in 1247. It was led by Chandrabhanu, a prince from a kingdom on the Malay peninsula. We do not know what prompted such a long-range expedition. It is possible that this was the last throw of the dice by the pro-Chola alliance in the Indian Ocean. The Sinhalese defeated the Malay prince with some difficulty and forced him to seek refuge in Magha’s kingdom in the north. The prince from South East Asia then somehow managed to become the ruler of Magha’s kingdom. It is possible that the Cholas gave him the throne after Magha’s death. So here we have an impossible combination of a Malay prince ruling over a Tamil kingdom founded by an Odiya adventurer in the north of Sri Lanka!
It appears that Chandrabhanu still had ambitions of conquering the rest of the island and decided to make a second attempt. This time the Sinhalese asked for help from their traditional Pandya allies who defeated and killed Chandrabhanu. However, in exchange for their help, the Tamil clan took over the defeated king’s territories. When the Pandyas later collapsed during the Muslim invasions, this territory would become an independent state. This is the origin of the Tamil kingdom of Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka.
Memories of Fustat
I hope it is clear from the above narrative that the Bay of Bengal and eastern Indian Ocean rim was a very interconnected region linked over vast distances by maritime trade, cultural exchange, geo-political rivalries, marriage alliances and military operations. The same can be said of the Arabian Sea and western Indian Ocean rim. The Yemeni port of Aden became a great hub for business with Arab and Indian merchants flocking to it.
During this period, the Jews established an elaborate business network that extended from the Mediterranean to the west coast of India. The detailed records of how this group carried out business are available to us due to a lucky combination of dry climate and medieval superstition. The Jews of this period believed that they could not destroy any document with the name of God written on it. This included all business correspondence. So, when a merchant died, his papers were sent to a repository in Fustat, Old Cairo. Tens of thousands of manuscripts have survived and provide a very vivid picture of the times.
For instance, we have a letter from Mahruz, a Jewish merchant in Aden, to his cousin who had been attacked by pirates on the western coast of India and had taken refuge in the Gujarati port of Bharuch (the same port mentioned a thousand years earlier in The Periplus). In the letter, Mahruz tells his cousin to get in touch with his Indian contact Tinbu in case he needed money and help: ‘If my lord, you need gold, please take it on my account from the nakhoda Tinbu, for he is staying in Tana [on the Konkan coast], and between him and me there are inseparable bonds of friendship and brotherhood.’15
Great Zimbabwe and the Zunj
As we saw in the previous chapter, the east coast of Africa saw the establishment of a number of Arab and Persian settlements during the eighth and ninth centuries. The settlers were often dissident Muslims fleeing persecution—Ibadhi, Shia and Kharajite.16 They created a string of ports down the coast—Mogadishu, Mombasa, Kilwa, Zanzibar and so on. The migrants soon married local women and absorbed local influences. The Swahili language is the outcome of the interaction between Arabic and Bantu languages. One could argue that more than just a language, it is an evolving culture that emerged from the churn of the Indian Ocean and would be further shaped by Portuguese, Indian, English and other influences.
Over time, the coastal settlements would grow from refugee outposts to prosperous ports. The key to their prosperity was their role in procuring two commodities from the African hinterlands—slaves and gold. So many African slaves would be transported to the Middle East that a revolt by them in AD 869 would take over much of southern Iraq, at the heart of the Abbasid empire. Known as the Zunj Revolt, the rebels would briefly run an independent state that included the port of Basra. It would take the Abbasids fifteen years of armed force, bribery and amnesties to quell the rebellion. Despite this shock, slavery would remain alive in the Middle East till 1962 when Saudi Arabia became the last country to abolish the practice.17
Meanwhile, the interiors of Africa began to witness political and economic changes due to the supply chains that needed to pump slaves and gold to the coast. By this time the Bantu migrants had largely replaced or absorbed the ancient Khoi-San hunter–gatherers. Since the 1930s, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of the small kingdom of Mapungubwe that existed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the Limpopo valley in Zimbabwe. The settlements have yielded beads from India and Egypt showing that goods from the Indian Ocean rim made it inland. The sites have also yielded the skeletons of a ‘king’ and a ‘queen’ who were buried along with gold ornaments and burial goods.18
Mapungubwe was soon superseded by a larger kingdom further north that has left behind the remains of hundreds of structures built in stone. The largest and most impressive of these structures are concentrated at Great Zimbabwe, the kingdom’s capital. The term ‘dzimba dzimabwe’ means ‘houses of stone’ in the local Shona dialect. A related form—Zimbabwe—would become the name of the country when it became free in 1980. Excavations at Great Zimbabwe have yielded a glazed Persian bowl, Chinese dishes, Arab coins minted in Kilwa and so on. Recent genetic testing of a small local tribe has found DNA traces from Yemeni Jews! So, it is quite obvious that this kingdom had close trading relations with Indian Ocean ports like Kilwa.
The overwhelming evidence is that Great Zimbabwe was built and ruled by the local Shona people even if ideas and influences were exchanged with the Indian Ocean world. However, note that colonial-era historians would insist that native Africans were simply not capable of building such elaborate stone structures and that this was the work of colonizers from the north. Under the racist government of Rhodesia, any research suggesting a native origin was deliberately suppressed. Colonial-era histories would repeatedly stress that black Africans did not have a history till the Europeans arrived: ‘They have stayed, for untold centuries, sunk in barbarism. . . . The heart of Africa was scarcely beating.’19
Indian readers will recognize the parallels with the colonial-era ‘Aryan Invasion Theory’ about how Indian civilization was a gift from white-skinned invaders from the north. It was commonly argued by colonial-era scholars that India was not even a country but merely a geographical term and that Hinduism was not a religion but a collective noun for a bunch of unconnected pagan cults. The subtext was that, therefore, there was nothing wrong in keeping India under colonial rule or denigrating Hinduism. It is amazing how many of these racist ideas have remained alive even after the end of the colonial era. Some of these ideas take forms that look benign but are startlingly insidious when examined. Take, for instance, popular fictional characters like Tarzan and Phantom who are white heroes ‘protecting’ the locals. The underlying message is that the natives are incapable of looking after themselves. A lingering justification for intervention—both overt and covert.
The Apocalypse
At the end of the twelfth century, the Indian Ocean rim could be divided into two zones of civilizational influence. There was an Islamic zone that ran from Central Asia to the Swahili coast, and an Indic zone that ran from eastern Afghanistan to southern Vietnam. Further east, there was the Chinese civilizational zone that ran from the Gobi desert to the Pacific Ocean, and included Japan, Korea and northern Vietnam. Although the exact borders of these zones shifted back and forth, it would have seemed to a casual observer of that time that a sort of equilibrium had been established. Unfortunately, this was about to unravel and all three civilizations would soon face a major shock. The source of their troubles was the same—the steppes of Central Asia.
India was the first to get a taste of what was to follow. Turkic invaders from Central Asia pushed out the Hindu Shahi rulers of Kabul and then began to make raids into India. Led by Mahmud of Ghazni, the Turks made as many as seventeen raids between AD 1000 and 1025 and destroyed and pillaged many of the prosperous cities and temple towns of north-western India. Perhaps the most infamous of these was an attack on the revered temple of Somnath in Gujarat. Fifty thousand of its defenders were put to the sword and some twenty million dirhams worth of gold, silver and gems were carried away. Somnath would be destroyed and rebuilt many times, but Mahmud’s attack is still remembered most vividly. The temple that stands on the spot today was built in the 1950s. Its symbolic importance can be gauged from the fact that it was one of the first projects initiated by the Indian Republic.
Despite the death and destruction caused by Mahmud, the Turks were unable to hold territory beyond some parts of western Punjab and Sindh. Indeed, an alliance led by Raja Suheldeo Pasi defeated a large Turkic army led by Mahmud’s nephew at the Battle of Bahraich in 1033 (one version of oral history suggests Suheldeo was himself killed in battle). For a century and a half after this defeat, the Turks seem to have kept out of the heartlands.
To an Indian of those times, the Turkic raids would have seemed like yet another round of incursions like those of the Macedonians, Huns, Bactrians and Scythians of the past. The invaders had been either pushed out or absorbed, and had not posed a civilizational threat. If anything, there seems to have been a sense of complacency. So when Prithviraj Chauhan, ruler of Delhi, fended off a raid by Muhammad Ghori in 1191, he allowed the invader to return home to Afghanistan! Ghori returned the following year to defeat and kill Prithviraj. This led to the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate and opened up the rest of India to conquest. Over the next two centuries, the Turks would lay waste ancient cities, temples and universities in one of the most bloody episodes in human history. It is difficult to estimate exact numbers, but millions would have perished.
Bands of Turkic adventurers poured into India to seek their fortune. Bakhtiyar Khilji was one of these adventurers.20 He seems to have arrived in Ghazni from Central Asia around 1195 before moving to India as a soldier. He soon managed to get himself a small estate near Mirzapur (now in Uttar Pradesh) where he gathered a sizeable body of Central Asian soldiers of fortune like himself. Around 1200, Bakhtiyar attacked and destroyed the famous university of Nalanda. Most of the Brahmin scholars and Buddhist monks were put to death and its library was torched. Another famous university at Vikramshila was similarly destroyed soon thereafter.
The common practice of Buddhism in India had been in steady decline but it was still home to several institutions that attracted pilgrims and scholars from abroad. It now collapsed from the systematic destruction of these institutions. The Turks were unbelievably cruel towards Hindus and even fellow Muslims, but they seem to have reserved their worst for the Buddhists. One possible explanation for this is that they themselves had converted to Islam from Buddhism relatively recently and felt that they had to prove a point.
Encouraged by these successes, Bakhtiyar Khilji now decided to attempt the conquest of the wealthy kingdom of Bengal. Avoiding the usual routes, he led his army through the jungles of Jharkhand and made a surprise attack on Nabadwip, a pilgrimage town on the Ganga. It so happened that the aging ruler of Bengal, Lakshman Sen, was visiting the town when a scouting party of eighteen Turkic horsemen was seen approaching the city. Taken totally by surprise, Lakshman Sen and his retinue escaped by boat. The popular version of this story is often told as if Bakhtiyar Khilji conquered Bengal with eighteen horsemen. In reality, the Sen dynasty would keep up an active resistance in East Bengal for another half a century by using the riverine terrain against Turkic cavalry.
After pillaging Bengal for two years, Bakhtiyar, it would seem, got bored. Ever the thrill seeker, he now decided to cross the Himalayas and conquer Tibet. He marched north and crossed the Teesta River by a stone bridge. He also asked the king of Kamrup (modern Assam) for troops and supplies. The Assamese king delayed, so an impatient Bakhtiyar decided to carry on by himself. The Turks raped and looted their way through the mountains of Darjeeling and Sikkim before entering Tibet. Here he faced stiffer resistance. With supply lines stretched, Bakhtiyar decided to retreat but his army was relentlessly harassed by guerrilla attacks as it made its way back through the mountain passes. Supplies were so short that the Turks were forced to eat some of their horses.21
When the retreating army finally reached the Teesta, they found that the Assamese had destroyed the bridge and laid a trap. In the end, most of the Turks were killed by the Assamese or drowned in a desperate attempt to cross the fast-flowing river. Bakhtiyar escaped with only a hundred of his men. Unfortunately for him, he had now lost his authority and was soon assassinated by one of his followers. The death of Bakhtiyar Khilji, however, did not slow the Turks. In 1235, the great city of Ujjain, a major Hindu religious and cultural centre in Madhya Pradesh, was destroyed by the Delhi Sultanate.
If the Turks were feeling smug about their successes in India, they were about to get a taste of their own medicine. The Mongols led by Chengiz Khan attacked and devastated the Turkic homelands in Central Asia in 1220–22. They soon conquered Iran and went on to sack Baghdad in 1258. The region would be ruled by Chengiz Khan’s descendants for the next century and, despite the fact that Mongols were generally tolerant of different religions, for a while there was genuine concern that Islam would not recover from this shock. Interestingly, till they converted to Islam towards the end of their rule, the Mongol rulers of Iran were Buddhists or shamanists. This Buddhist episode in Iranian history is now almost forgotten.
Even as the Mongols were marching into the Middle East, they were simultaneously making inroads into China. Chengiz Khan captured the Yanjing (modern Beijing) capital of the northern Jin kingdom in 1215. However, the conquest of the southern Song empire would be a long and bloody affair that would be completed by Chengiz’s grandson, Kublai, in 1276. It is said that the last Song emperor, an eight-year-old boy, would die after jumping into the sea to avoid capture.
The rapid and simultaneous collapse of three established civilizations is difficult to explain merely on the basis of the tactical superiority of Turko-Mongol cavalry. All three civilizations had long experience of dealing with Central Asians. The popular perception in India is that the Hindus were unable to deal with a younger and more vigorous Islam. This too is inaccurate because Hindus had been dealing quite successfully with Islam for five centuries before Muhammad Ghori broke through. Moreover, the Turks did not conquer India during a period of glorious Muslim expansion but at a time when Islam itself was under severe stress in the Middle East and Central Asia. Were the established civilizations weakened by the equivalent of the Plague of Justinian in Asia? We know that the Black Death would devastate Europe and the Middle East in the following century, but did some such epidemic affect China and India in the thirteenth century? The available records are silent.
Whatever the reasons for the success of the Turks in India, the systematic destruction of temples did not just hurt intellectual and cultural life but also had a long-term paralysing impact on finance and risk-taking. As already discussed, temples acted as banks and their destruction meant that Indian merchant networks suddenly lost their financial muscle. Thus, we see a distinct decline in the importance of seafaring Indian merchants in the Indian Ocean rim from this point. The Indian merchant class became much more shore-based while the space they vacated was steadily taken over by Arabs and the Chinese. In other words, the Arabs and the Chinese recovered faster from the Turko-Mongol shock. In contrast, Indian Hindus imposed on themselves caste rules that discouraged the crossing of the seas. Why did a people with such a strong maritime tradition impose these restrictions on themselves? Was it a loss of civilizational self-confidence? I have long looked for a satisfactory answer but have not yet found one.
Nonetheless, I do not want to leave the reader with the impression that the Turks always had an easy time in India. Although they conquered the Gangetic plains with relative ease, they faced much stiffer resistance in other places. For instance, when they attempted to invade Odisha in 1247, the Turks were soundly defeated by Narasimha Deva I. It is said that the Odiya king pretended that he would embrace Islam and surrender the temple of Puri. However, while the Turks were celebrating their victory, the temple bells began to ring to signal a surprise attack by the Odiya army. The Odiya then chased the invaders back into Bengal. It is likely that the famous Sun Temple in Konark was built by Narasimha Deva I to celebrate this victory. At that time, Konark was a thriving port with links across the Indian Ocean. One of the temple’s panels depicts the king, seated on an elephant, receiving the gift of a giraffe from a foreign ambassador!
The Travellers
Despite the destruction caused by the Turko-Mongol hordes on land, the maritime world of the Indian Ocean recovered soon enough. Perhaps the most vivid eyewitness account of the times has been left behind by two travellers—Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta. The former was born in 1254 to a Venetian merchant who made a journey to China around 1260. A seventeen-year-old Marco Polo would join his father when he decided to make a second journey in 1271. Over the next twenty years, the Polos would travel extensively in the Mongol empire before returning to Venice. Several years after his return, Marco Polo would be captured in a war with Genoa and imprisoned. It was in prison that he dictated his book, The Travels, to a cellmate.
The book is mostly remembered for its descriptions of the Silk Route through Central Asia and of Kublai Khan’s empire in China, but it is often forgotten that Marco Polo returned home by the sea route and has left us many interesting observations about the Indian Ocean world. He set sail in 1290 from the port Zaiton (Quanzhou) as part of a delegation accompanying a Mongol princess being sent to get married to the Mongol ruler of Persia.
According to Marco Polo, the Chinese ships of the period were the largest in the world:
In most ships, are at least sixty cabins, each of which can easily accommodate one merchant. They have one steer oar and four masts. Often they add another two masts. . . . The crew needed to man a ship ranges from 150–300 according to her size. One ship can take five or six thousand baskets of pepper. 22
Polo tells us that as they sailed south they stopped at the kingdom of Champa. A few years earlier, the Mongols had sent a large army to subdue the Chams who had stoutly defended their fortified cities. However, the devastation in the countryside had been so great that they had ultimately agreed to pay an annual tribute to Kublai Khan of aloe wood and twenty elephants. From Champa, they sailed in a south-westerly direction till they came to the island of Bintan (this is probably the Indonesian island of the same name, just south of Singapore). They then sailed up the Straits of Malacca along the eastern coast of Sumatra. It appears that the Sri Vijaya kingdom had disintegrated by this time as Polo tells us that it was divided into eight independent kingdoms. He also tells us that most inhabitants of the island were Hindu–Buddhist but that the small kingdom of Ferlec had converted to Islam (this is probably Perlak in Aceh, in the northern tip of Sumatra).
As they made their way into the Bay of Bengal, the ships stopped by the Nicobar Islands. Polo is quite disapproving of the fact that ‘the people live like beasts. I assure you that they go stark naked, men and women alike, without any covering of any sort’. This is an obvious reference to the native population of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands that, in some cases, have managed to maintain their hunter–gatherer lifestyles into modern times. However, note that this was a conscious preference rather than a lack of exposure to ‘civilization’. Far from it, the heavy flow of mercantile trade past these islands meant that the Nicobarese were very familiar with things like cloth. Marco Polo tells us that the locals had acquired sashes of very high-quality silk that hung in their huts as a sign of wealth but steadfastly refused to wear them.
Marco Polo’s ship now sailed across to Sri Lanka. Interestingly, he mentions that the island was once much larger and that part of it had been submerged in ancient times. One wonders if this medieval myth was a lingering memory of the Great Flood at the end of the last Ice Age. He next sailed north to India. Some of his accounts of the Indian coastline can be confusing at first glance as he mixes up the east and west coasts. Nevertheless, he relates some interesting anecdotes. For instance, he tells us that Indians were great believers in astrology and that business negotiations would often be suspended to avoid inauspicious times of the day. Polo also mentions that Indians had a peculiar way of drinking water—they poured the water into their mouths without the lips touching the cup. This way of drinking water still survives in parts of southern India!
Till Marco Polo’s time, India was almost the only source of diamonds. The Travels relates how the Indians acquired these gems. Evidently the Indians claimed that there was a valley full of venomous snakes where the ground was covered in diamonds. The diamond merchants obtained the gems, you guessed it, by throwing large chunks of meat into the valley. The diamonds would stick to the meat that giant eagles picked up and carried to their nests. As one can see, the story mentioned by Herodotus and in the Arabian Nights was still circulating in the Indian Ocean. Perhaps one of the most successful cock and bull stories ever; one wonders who came up with it originally.
Marco Polo also mentions that the source of the diamonds was an inland kingdom ruled by a wise and popular queen. This is very likely a reference to Rudrama Devi, the queen of the Kakatiya dynasty who ruled over a kingdom that included the diamond mines of Golconda (just outside modern Hyderabad). She came to the throne in 1262 as her father did not have any sons.23 Although she married a Chalukya prince, she remained the ruler and temple inscriptions tell us of how she personally led her armies to battle. She is depicted on a temple pillar riding a lion, like the goddess Durga, with a shield and sword.
Rudrama Devi ruled till around 1289, just a year before Marco Polo’s visit. Since she too had no sons, the throne was passed to her daughter’s son, Prataparudra. He would be the last Kakatiya king and would face the fury of repeated attacks by the armies of the Delhi Sultanate led by the notorious Malik Kafur. This is how Sultan Alauddin Khilji obtained the Koh-i-Noor diamond. An attack by the Turks on the city of Madurai further south ended the ancient Tamil dynasty of the Pandyas in 1311.
About half a century after Marco Polo, a Moroccan traveller called Ibn Battuta also visited India. He is arguably one of the greatest travel writers of all time and would eventually make his way to China before returning home to Tangier to write about his adventures. When Ibn Battuta visited India, the throne of Delhi was occupied by Muhammad bin Tughlaq. The Moroccan accepted a senior position in the Sultan’s government and spent many years in Delhi, but eventually he grew to fear the cruel and erratic ruler. Therefore, he was very relieved when he got the opportunity to accompany a diplomatic mission to China.
Along with the rest of the embassy, Ibn Battuta made his way from Delhi to Gujarat and then to the port of Calicut (i.e. Kozhikode) in Kerala. In his writings, the Moroccan traveller casually mentions the chaos and devastation caused by the Turks across India—the destroyed cities and the lawless countryside. He also tells us of his brush with ‘infidel bandits’ who should be more properly seen as an indigenous resistance to the Turkish invaders. In Kerala, however, the old spice ports were still thriving and crowded with foreign merchant ships. Ibn Battuta confirms Marco Polo’s testimony about the enormous size of Chinese ships. He describes a large junk that had a complement of a thousand men—six hundred soldiers and four hundred sailors:
In the vessel they build four decks, and it has cabins, suites and salons for merchants; a set of several rooms and a latrine; it can be locked by the occupant, and he can take along with him slave girls and wives.24
Clearly, some merchants lived well on the cruise. However, this does not mean that these voyages were not dangerous, as Ibn Battuta soon found out.
When the Sultan’s embassy arrived in Calicut, most of the space on the ships had already been taken. After some negotiations, the embassy and the Sultan’s gifts were accommodated in a large junk but the Moroccan found that none of the bigger suites were available for him and his harem of slave girls. Now, Ibn Battuta was not a man who was willing to go on a long voyage without a private salon where he could enjoy his slave girls. So, he had his personal effects shifted to a smaller ship which could accommodate the ladies.
The evening before they were supposed to embark, a storm began to blow and the heavy surf meant that Ibn Battuta was unable to get on the ship. The next morning, it was found that the large junk carrying the main embassy had been dashed on the shore and many had been killed. Among the dead bodies that were washed up on the shore were several of his companions, including one whose head had been pierced by a large iron nail used to build Chinese ships (the Indo-Arab stitching technique clearly had its advantages). Meanwhile, the smaller ship containing the Moroccan’s personal effects decided to sail off without him! Thus, he suddenly found himself penniless and stranded in Calicut. He would try to desperately contact the surviving ship but later would find out that his personal goods and slaves had been seized by the authorities in Sumatra and sold off.
Ever the adventurer, Ibn Battuta was not to be held down by misfortune for long. He was afraid to return to Delhi as he did not know how the Sultan would react to the news of the failed embassy. So, he joined a Turkic warlord on his invasion of the Hindu kingdom of Goa. He would later visit the Maldives that had been converted from Buddhism to Islam only a few decades earlier. The islands were the source of cowry shells that were used as small change across the Indian Ocean till well into the modern era. Here he landed himself a job as a Qadi and married a local lass but found that, despite the religious conversion, the natives were continuing with pre-Islamic social mores. He writes disapprovingly:
The womenfolk do not cover their heads, not even on one side. Most of them wear just one apron from the navel to the ground, the rest of their bodies being uncovered. It is thus that they walk abroad in the bazaars and elsewhere. When I was qadi there, I tried to put an end to the practice and ordered them to wear clothes, but I met with no success.25
Ibn Battuta ultimately would give up on the Maldivians and, leaving behind a pregnant wife, continue on his travels. He would eventually make his way through Sri Lanka and South East Asia to China. It is a testimony to the active trade routes of the times that in China he would meet a fellow Moroccan whom he had previously met several years earlier in Delhi. Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta may have written down their experiences but it is clear that they were using well-established networks used by many others.