Blog 123 - The Ancient - Indian - Mariner

The Ancient ( Indian ) Mariner

Sometimes, a kernel of a thought, or a novel, or a movie or a stray monologue that you may have come across in your childhood days, will lie dormant for many a decade to either die a silent death or find fruition in being revoked back into your life in the form of your own research, either for your own personal interest or the urge to write about it. 

Two of the more keenly anticipated movies, one in 2022 and its second part in 2023, were “Ponniyin Selvan I” and “Ponniyin Selvan II”, both released in multiple languages and proven thermselves to be box office hits.

“Ponniyin Selvan” story, written in Tamil by the well known author ‘Kalki’ Krishnamurthy, was first serialized in the weekly magazine ‘Kalki’ from 1950 to 1954 with several weekly reprints coming up later in the 1960s, such being the popularity of the story. It later was published as a novel of five volumes.

Krishnamurthy, fondly known as ‘Kalki’, was a prolific Tamil writer, a journalist of repute, a freedom fighter who, sadly, was unknown beyond the boundaries of the Tamil speaking world. It is a travesty of justice that his reputation flew high in only the Tamil speaking world. Had it been in any other language, he would have garnered accolades and awards in every continent.

A blend of historical fact and imaginative fiction, ‘Ponniyn Selvan’ depicted the Chola dynasty at its most powerful, spanning nearly the whole of India, Sri Lanka and quite a bit of South East Asian countries with whom they traded and over whom they had a tremendous influence.

Raja Raja Cholan and Rajendra Cholan feature strongly in this fictional account.

In the late ’50s and early ‘60s, as a pre-teen school goer, I used to wait for our neighbours to finish reading the weekly magazines ‘Kalki’ and ‘Ananda Vikatan’, both being popular Tamil magazines, in order to catch up with the weekly what-next of serialised stories such as “Ponniyin Selvan” - literally translates to “Ponni’s favourite child” - in ‘Kalki’ magazine and ‘Thuppariyum Sambhu’ - translates to “Detective Sambhu’ - in ‘Ananda Vikatan’.

As the years went by and with long stretches at sea, I had almost forgotten them - till their memories were revoked in the form of movies in 2022 and 2023.

Although part fictional, the two movies led me back to the original book (volumes), wherein I found pages and pages of references to sea trade, land battles and conquests - mostly of South East Asian nations. Which is what made me delve deeper into historical data about the maritime activities of the Cholas, decidedly the most powerful kingdom to conquer the seas in the medieval and pre-medieval periods, more than a thousand years ago, compared to other long lasting dynasties. So began a search into the history of the Cholas and the earlier periods of Indian maritime history.

To the victors belong the spoils. The spoils are not necessarily restricted to the treasures and riches of the conquered, but also include the bondage of the populace, the subjugation of the womenfolk to the amour of the conquering hordes, the usurpation of the technologies for which the conquered were famous - example textiles, iron work, copper work, ship building, navigation technology - the appropriation of the collective intellectual knowledge of the past into their own cultural enclave to the extent of claiming authorship and, most despicably, changing and rewriting the history of the conquered in order to belittle the civilisation of the conquered. 

So it comes to pass that, perhaps two centuries later, the enslaved have practically forgotten their own past history and are dependent on the histories as written by the conqueror.

Our history, Bharath’s history texts, as most know, has been written by wave upon wave of, mostly, school dropouts from the British Isles and thrust upon the Indian populace over a two hundred year period to the extent that we nearly forgot our own version of what had gone before. As conquerors and colonisers, the British - wanting to establish the superiority of their civilisation - demeaned any and all references to an ancient and superior civilisation, by employing supposedly scholarly British historians to write their own version of Indian history.   

Unsurprisingly, the British version of Indian history became the lingua franca of the Indian elite, even post independence, with the highly censored versions of our past becoming part of the school curriculum, by which our young were being brainwashed into accepting the British version verbatim and without question. The so-called intellectual elite of the immediate post independence era made themselves famous by propagating the Anglicised version of our past history and, in the process, became the sole authoritative custodians of our thought processes. 

This supposedly intellectual elite continued to hold sway for over 5 decades after independence

Post independence, only a very few dared to question the English version of Indian history, Neelakanta Sastry being the foremost, albeit confined to a history of the South. The more elderly of readers may recall their history lessons in school made hardly any mention of the several dynasties that ruled the southern part of India. This was the period during which Indian merchants traded with the rest of the world, there were no famines, food was a-plenty and prosperity was evident.

During the same period - 500 CE to 1500 CE - Europe was in chaos. The Roman Empire had fallen and there was a power vacuum, with every territorial governor declaring himself as the new ‘Caesar’. This period finds itself historically described variously as the ‘Medieval Period’ or the ‘Dark Ages’ or the ‘Middle Ages’, with internecine fighting between factions and nations, with almost no economic or intellectual growth. This period came to an end with the conquest and colonisation of far away lands.

In stark contrast, in the same period foreign travellers to the Indian sub continent saw a prosperous populace which emphasised cultural and intellectual pursuits and where education was given the highest priority. Indian traders had reached the far corners of the Roman Empire, the south east Asian nations and had gone as far as China.

Note the numerous ports along both the coasts

Ancient Sea Trade Routes from India

Quote

Roman patricians in the classical age were addicted to luxury goods imported from India—textiles, ivory, spices and jewels. Roman goods did not have a comparable attraction in Indian households. So gold was transferred to India as payment. It is no surprise that part of the massive bullion hoard that was unearthed in a hidden chamber at the Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple in Kerala a couple of years ago included urns of Roman gold coins. There were also foreign coins from other historical epochs, from Venice during the Renaissance right down to France under Napoleon. Several commentators wrote at the time that the existence of these coins in the temple vaults showed that India was an active trading country in the classical era and that it had a large trade surplus with other parts of the world.

The great Roman historian Pliny the Elder (circa 70 CE) wrote about the addiction to Indian luxury products. He complained about the drain of gold to India. The Roman senate saw impassioned appeals to the aristocracy to reduce its use of Indian luxuries. Perhaps the men were told to stop using Indian cloth for their togas while the women were told to avoid Indian spices during the evening fiestas and silks in their attire.

Unquote

(Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, executive editor, Mint)

Muziris in present day Kerala and Arikamedu in Tamil Nadu are reputed to have been trading posts and settlements of Rome. Initially, starting from around 250 BCE, Indians traded with Greece, with ships carrying cargo to Red Sea ports and across the connecting stretch of land to several Mediterranean ports to once again being transported by ships to various European ports.

With the ascendancy of Rome, trade with the Roman Empire flourished.

In fact, trade with Rome had increased beyond  $100 million (equivalent to several billion at today’s rate), to the extent that the ships attracted pirates in the Red Sea, forcing them to carry troops on board to repel the pirates. It is reminiscent of today’s scenario where different nations’ navies have come together and are patrolling the Red Sea area to repel pirates, whether Somalis or Yemenis or Houthis. Some things never change.

Gold coin of Julius Caesar (27BCE to 14 CE), gold coins of Caligula (37 to 41CE) and gold coins of Nero (54 to 68CE) have been found at Pudukottai in Tamil Nadu, now displayed in British Museum.

Wikipedia

Present day archaeological excavations at Keezhadi (a 'Sangam' period settlement) and Kottayam have shown up Roman coins and Roman amphoras of wine, urns, mosaics.

A remarkable find in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, further substantiated the history of ancient trade between India and the rest of the world. It included a 13 cm bronze of Poseidon, which lay claims to trade with the Roman Empire.

Quote (from Peepul Tree)

The Kolhapur Bronzes:

Poseidon’s statue found in Kolhapur

A hoard consisting of bronze objects of diverse provenance was brought to light in 1945 during archaeological explorations conducted at the Brahmapuri mound in Kolhapur, Maharashtra. The lecture will discuss selected items from the bronze hoard and will attempt to situate them within the artistic and cultural traditions of the Satavahana period (1st-2nd c CE).

One swallow makes not a summer. Archaeological digs may unearth a few gold or silver coins from another geographic area from which an ardent archaeologist may surpass himself by vividly piecing together an imaginary web of world wide trade just on the basis of a few shards of pottery or an amphora of wine. The truth may be that an enterprising youth may have set out to see the world and brought back a few tokens from various places. The presence of a Japanese doll in my house does not necessarily indicate a billion dollar trade between our nations.

But the written word, a statement in the memoirs of a traveller, a song from the past - all are sure indications of what had been.

The ‘Agananuru’ (3rd 'Sangam' period literature) details Roman and other settlements of immigrants who set up shop in the southern parts for centuries.

The immigrants were referred to as ‘Yavanars’ - strangers or foreigners - which initially referred to Ionians from Greece pre circa 700 BCE, later going on to include Romans who came in around 100 BCE.

Megasthenes, Greek diplomat, historian, explorer (around 300 BCE) wrote four volumes on India - “Indica” - that, apart from other details, mentions the sea trade and ship construction that went on. Very little of his works survive, but excerpts were copied by others in the following centuries.

Megasthenes

From the time Indian origin merchants started trading overseas, funding them, their cargo and their ships came through a then - unique method of guilds underwriting their voyages, much akin to the Lloyds of today. These guilds were - mostly - centred around the riches of the temples, because of which financing was never a problem. 

• Major exports of the Sangam age were cotton fabrics and spices like pepper, ginger, cardamom, cinnamon and turmeric along with ivory products, pearls and precious stones.

• Major imports for the traders were horses, gold, and sweet wine.

Ancient India and Ship Building:

It is a travesty of justice that huge chunks of ancient Indian history were ignored by the British historians. To our collective shame, post independence, we continued to blatantly ignore for nearly 60 years what proved to be in plain sight because of the persuasive, left leaning, Marxist minded, so called intellectuals who held sway over government policies.

In fact, there was nothing much beyond the Harappan and Indus Valley Civilisations’ excavations ,with a very poorly funded official government body, the Archaeological Survey of India doing very little except for some digs in North India, with hardly any excavations of interesting sites in South India. 

It took 6 decades, 60 years or so, for some fresh air to enter the flawed domains of colonial history, with unbiased young minds entering the almost closed-to-thought-processes edifices, to challenge long established beliefs and re-research theories that had almost been etched into the Indian mind.

For example, the long held theories of the mythical Aryan invasion and the Aryan ~ Dravidian divide, dreamt of and espoused by a  biased set of ignorant British school drop outs, has now been put on the back burner, with fresh evidence pointing to a totally different scenario.

For example, British history of India hardly mentions the volume of trade even before 300 BCE with European empires, when the Indian GDP was around 30+% of world GDP. In terms of personal contacts, there was a steady migration of goods, people, ideas, art and technology that flowed both ways for millennia, but never accorded its place in history till recently. It will take a couple of generational changes for the actual historical details to become a part of school room historical texts.

So far as the southern part of India is concerned, there is literally a treasure trove of information waiting to be deciphered, apart from the actual site digs. Miles and miles of inscriptions on the stone walls of temples - mostly in archaic Tamil - are waiting their turn to be brought out into the light of day.

Ancient Tamil Literature is primarily associated with the “Sangam” periods. “Sangam” literally means a confluence of rivers. But in this instance it means a confluence of ideas, cultural, intellectual, sociological and religious. 

There were three “Sangam” periods, each bringing together the writers, philosophers, activists of that particular era, to meet, discuss and - possibly - provide prudent advice to the monarch of that time.

There is no record and literature of the first ‘Sangam’. Legend has it that extreme sea level rise subsumed a great part of a large land mass south of Kanyakumari, hence losing all literature. (This area has been given the name of 'Kumari Kandam' by Indian historians and 'Lemuria' by European historians). It is presently a source of legend, with no substantive evidence of having existed. A time frame of 9600 BCE (more than 11,000 years ago) to 5200 BCE is given for this period of the First 'Sangam'. A sincere search is on to find evidence of the same.

The Second ‘Sangam’ - period estimated to cover 3,500 years, from around 5000 BCE to 1500 BCE - has left behind only one piece of literature - the “Tholkappiyam” - still in existence.

Tholkappiyar, author of Tholkappiyam

Tholkappiyar, author of 'Tholkappiyam

Source of Portrait: Dinamalar, a Tamil newspaper

The third “Sangam” (period 1000 BCE to 400 CE) literature - “Agananuru” for instance, refers extensively to the flourishing trade between the Greeks and Indians and between the Romans and Indians. There are numerous other texts that have survived and have done justice to this vibrant period of history that are slowly being deciphered by young scholars, demystifying the myths of a thrust-upon history.

In all honesty I started this article with the intention of only writing about the superiority of the Chola Empire’s naval fleet and their conquests, but was drawn to what had transpired before the Cholas, which led me to the Harappan age - around 5000 BCE - and their sea trade, followed by what transpired in the latter centuries.

So, I’ll have to assign a second part to this article soon.

The British colonisers narrate that nothing really existed before 4500 years ago in our history and that India was part pastoral, part nomadic, with no civilisation to speak of till the European Aryan turned up and transformed India, giving them education, technology, culture, language, arts and crafts.

There is this rather hilarious interpretation of a find of chariot wheels and the bones of a horse in Harappa, but the bones were described as those of a donkey as, per their set view of history, the horse had not yet arrived in India.

Western history is written with the timeline of the Georgian calendar. Hence events in Indian history had a confusion of dates, as India followed a different timeline. 

Dating of finds, such as antiquities, archaeological sites or historical finds were very rudimentary and more arbitrary till fifty years ago and depended on the discretion and reputation of the archaeologist, not really very scientific. But with technological advances came more sophisticated dating methods of finite objects.

For instance, Radio carbon dating measures the decay of isotope C-14 in any organic substance, such as wood, plants, textiles or the remains of animal or human bodies.

Dendrochronology is another method, which counts the rings of the trunk of trees to date it. Whether it can date an antique of a few thousand years old, I am not sure. Trees need to be living for dendrochronology to be effective?

Thermoluminescence is used for dating ceramics and pottery.

Fission track dating is used with fissionable uranium 238.

There are at least ten other methods that are used for dating physical objects.

But what about collating ancient written records of events to a particular timeline? Each and every nation has its own sets of events of yore that are looked upon as legends, but the people of that region believe in its veracity.

The latest to enter the field of dating an event is the use of references in the texts to celestial bodies, their positions and their movements, the time scale stretching to 20,000 or 30,000 or more years.

Present research has dated certain events in India to as far back as 18,000 years. How did they arrive at this timeline? They used celestial sightings of different stars and constellations and their periodic - in many cases thousands of years apart - conjunctions to date a particular event that is written in the various old texts. Supercomputers have helped in a big way to go back in time to portray the stars as they were thousands of years ago, given that constellations have certain fixed orbits.

The coming decade is likely to shatter the shallow views taken by the colonial historians and history books totally re-written.

Why, even comets have been described and used to set a particular date. Sangam literature has numerous references to comets. Of course, not all comets return in the same orbit - some get scattered. Halley’s  comet returns every 76.3 years or thereabouts. When Caesar was assassinated, Caesar’s comet was visible in the sky - but has not returned.

“When beggars die there are no comets seen: 

The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”

Quotes from ‘Clear IAS’:

Ancient Indians were skilled shipbuilders and navigators. The Harappan civilization (around 2600-1900 BCE, recently recorded to be even earlier, around 5000 BCE) had access to the Arabian Sea and the Indus River, facilitating maritime trade with neighboring regions.

• Excavations at Lothal, a major Harappan port city, have revealed the existence of a sophisticated dockyard with evidence of shipbuilding.

• A certain caste held a monopoly on the technology of shipbuilding, which was an inherited trade that was passed down from father to son.

• The units of measurement utilized by the native builders were their hands, fingers, and feet. (I think this is an injustice to the people whose mathematical prowess was far ahead of the then Europeans.)

• Flat-bottomed boats were designed to dock and service ships on both the big seas and domestic rivers. Around 60 tonnes of weight may be carried by these boats.

• Additionally, the Harappans constructed a tidal dock for berthing and maintaining ships at port cities. This is seen to be a special development since it was the first tide dock ever built.

• Thus, from 3000 BCE to 2000 BCE, India had a sophisticated civilization centered around shipbuilding.

The earlier Vedic period (2000-600 BCE) saw a slowdown from the advancement of the Harrapan culture and hence is called the dark age for ship building in India.

The later Vedic period (600-200 BCE) saw the revival of maritime activity.

Maurya and Gupta Empires

During the Maurya (322-185 BCE) and Gupta (320-550 CE) periods, India continued to be a significant maritime power. The Indian Ocean was a thriving network of trade routes, connecting India with Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

• During the Mauryan Era, a Superintendent of Ships was appointed for the building and maintenance of boats. (Having been a Ship Superintendent myself and having been in-charge of new constructions in the ship yard, I felt particularly proud of this - that I come from an ancient pedigree).

• Ocean-going ships capable of accommodating 700 passengers were built.

• There are records of boats with up to 30 oars having been built in Punjab for Alexander’s fleet implying that the shipbuilding culture had started taking shape during the Mauryan Era.

• Post-Gupta period had vessels with single, double, treble, and four masts also with as many sails, were built.

• The wood used to build ships was mainly Malabar teak as it was found to be more durable than Oak which was used in other parts of the world to manufacture vessels.

There are references to "stitched" ships - I am researching it further.

To be Continued

Rangan