India

Caste distinctions were also observed in the south, but may well predate contact with the Sanskritic north. Certainly they did not conform to the hierarchical four-tier varna system; native ksatriya and vaisya are practically unknown in the south to this day. In caste functions, in hero-worship of the dead, and in the taboos and importance attached to relations between the sexes, there is indeed much that is non-Aryan. Equally unprecedented is the Sangam’s spirit of joyous celebration, which pervades both the endless wars between Cheras (Keralans), Pandyas and Cholas as well as the scenes of peaceful plenty and royal munificence which intervene. The impression given by these poems is not that of a society defying the rigid orthodoxies of inevitable Aryanisation, more of one voluntarily adjusting to prestigious new values and selectively adopting from them.

Patterns of Aryanisation were typically spontaneous and here, as outside India, Sanskritic innovations did not necessarily spread through direct contact with the Gangetic heartland. Thus it seems that the southern kingdoms derived as much from their seaward contacts as from landward intercourse. Literacy, for instance, ‘and indeed incipient civilisation in general’12 look to have originally spread not southward from the Gangetic valley but northward, from Sri Lanka. Heavily indebted to Ashoka’s missionising, Sri Lanka had stolen a march on the mainland. Its Buddhist chronicles provide the only cross-dating yet established for any of the kings mentioned in the Sangam poems. And from Sri Lanka the Brahmi script is thought to have crossed the straits to neighbouring parts of the Pandya country and thence on to Kerala and the Chola country. By this roundabout route other Aryanising traits may have followed.

The maritime dimension would continue to be crucial; in fact it is from their detailed descriptions of commercial life and foreign trade that the Sangam poems derive much of their authenticity. For in references to busy markets, bulging warehouses, ships from many lands, elaborate import/export procedures, and the Yavanas (not only the Bactrian Greeks, but foreigners in general) ‘whose prosperity never wanes’, there is an impressive convergence of Tamil testimony with what we know of south India in the first century AD from other sources, principally archaeology and copious references in the literature of the Roman empire.

This was the age of Rome’s commercial expansion. The new empire’s demand for exotica was insatiable, and the acquisition of Egypt in 30 BC had opened the maritime route to the East to Roman investors. A text written by a Greek of the first century AD, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, contains detailed navigational, commercial and even political information on the ports of the Indian Ocean, many of which have been reliably identified with maritime outlets on India’s coast. Ptolemy’s second-century ‘Geography’ adds further details; and the Elder Pliny was already rehearsing an argument, which would become something of a European refrain in the seventeenth century, about Roman bullion being drained away by the purchase of frivolous luxuries from the East. The emperor Augustus claims to have received ‘frequent’ Indian embassies which look to have come from as far afield as Gandhara and the Pandya kingdom; and it was during his reign (31 BC – 14 AD) that Europe’s first concerted bid for the exotic produce of the East saw fleets making annual sailings from the Red Sea. Crewed by Greeks and Egyptians, they were familiar with the monsoon trade winds and headed straight for the steamy ports of India’s Konkan and Malabar coasts.

There numerous examples of Roman pottery, including wine-impregnated amphorae, have been found in both the south and along the west coast; and hoards of Roman coins have been unearthed in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and elsewhere. On the east coast near Pondicherry (south of Madras) what has been described as ‘one of a series of Indo-Roman trading stations’ has been excavated at Arikamedu. ‘To Arikamedu suddenly, from unthought-of lands five thousand miles away, came strange wines, tablewares far beyond the local skill, lamps of a strange sort, glass, cut gems.’13

To a neighbouring port at about the same time, there also came the still ‘doubting’ Thomas. Traditionally on this, his second Indian mission, Thomas made more converts but ultimately paid the price of martyrdom. He was killed in Mylapore, now a suburb of Madras where the cave in which he lived, the hill on which he died, and the grave in which he was laid are named after him and still venerated.

Thomas had landed at one of the palm-fringed ports of Kerala’s coconut coast. From converts made there, some sections of Kerala’s still thriving Syrian Christian community claim descent. Thence the apostle had proceeded overland to the east coast. A trail of Roman finds extends across the peninsula from Cranganore, otherwise the Roman port of ‘Musiris’ (near Cochin), to Arikamedu and the mouth of the Kaveri. It would seem, therefore, that Roman shipping did not usually round Cape Comorin. Kerala’s pepper and malabathrum (a kind of cinnamon) were the principal Roman imports, and for these it was unnecessary to risk the contrary winds of the Cape. But clearly some of those amphorae of Tuscan wine, some of that glass and tableware and some Yavana traders must have trundled in oxcarts through the Coimbatore gap (in the Western Ghats) and down the Kaveri. At Arikamedu and elsewhere on the east coast they were needed to sustain a no less important trade – that in the cloves and nutmeg of the Moluccan spice islands and in the gems and resins of Malaya, Burma and the eastern Himalayas.

TRAFFIC AND SETTLEMENTS

A pattern of east – west trade thus emerges. It is one in which the Indian ports served as entrepôts as well as termini and in which the voyage across the Arabian Sea was only one sector of a much more extensive network. Further information on this first global exchange, and on the vital role played in it by Indian shipping and Indian merchants, emerges from two very different sources: inscriptions in the great cave temples of the western Deccan, and scattered archaeological finds in south-east Asia.

Unfortunately neither is as geographically explicit as the data available for the Bactrian and Karakoram routes to China. The archaeological finds in south-east Asia are particularly unimpressive when compared with the region’s later heritage of Indic monuments. In central Burma a town with palace and stupas based on Indian Buddhist models has been excavated and dated to the first centuries AD. In Thailand and Vietnam the odd Roman coin has been found as well as beads, gems, pottery, intaglios and metalwork of Indian provenance. Shards of Indo-Roman ceramics similar to those found at Arikamedu have also turned up in Javanese burial sites. More emphatically, bronze vessels and a carnelian lion found at Don Ta Phet in west-central Thailand are said to be Buddhist and to ‘strongly suggest that Buddhist missionaries were already active, indeed were established, in south-east Asia before the Christian era’. If account also be taken of Indian references to ocean-going ships and missionary and trading ventures to ‘Suvarnabhumi’, and of Roman notices of ‘Chryse’ and ‘Chersonese’ (all three words meaning ‘the land of gold’ and variously identified with Burma, Sumatra, or the Malay peninsula), then ‘enough evidence is now at hand … to show that south-east Asia was already part of a world trading system linking the civilisations of the Mediterranean Basin and Han China.’14

Thanks to this trade and missionary activity, there are also the first signs of Indianised cultures in south-east Asia. Early Chinese texts have been taken to indicate the existence on the Malay peninsula of ‘petty Indian states from the second century AD’.15 One such, called Tun-Sun by the Chinese, had five hundred families from India plus a thousand brahmans to whom the native population gave their daughters in marriage. ‘Consequently many of the brahmans do not go away. They do nothing but study the sacred canon, bathe themselves with scents and flowers, and practise piety ceaselessly by day and by night.’16

It seems that traders, rather than head down to the Malacca Strait, took a short-cut across the Malay peninsula, just as they did the Indian peninsula. Indian settlements in Malaya were presumably engaged in this transshipment activity, and it may well have been from one of these communities that Kaundinya, a brahman, continued east across the Gulf of Thailand to the mouth of the Mekong. There, again according to Chinese sources, he is said to have encountered hostility. The local queen, Liu-ye (‘Willow-Leaf’), wanted to seize his ship. But when Kaundinya fired an arrow which holed her own ship, Willow Leaf changed her mind.

Frightened, she gave herself up, and Kaundinya took her for his wife. But, unhappy to see her naked, he folded a piece of material to make a garment through which he had her pass her head. Then he governed the country and passed power on to his descendants.17

Thus, according to the Chinese, was founded in about 100 AD the Indic kingdom known as Funan. It would survive for five centuries, providing the impetus for other Hindu-Buddhist trading kingdoms on the Vietnamese coast (Champa, Lin-i), before becoming incorporated into the more famously ‘Hinduised’ kingdom of the Khmers of Angkor.

For the period prior to 300 AD Funan has left few relics. A port-city excavated at Oc-eo in Long-xuyen province in the Mekong delta may date back to the second century AD and has yielded a stone statuette of Vishnu and other Hindu cult objects as well as what may have been a temple. Up the coast at Vo-canh in the Nha Trang region a stele bearing an inscription in Sanskrit may be of the third century. It refers to a ruler who has not been certainly identified; more importantly, it strongly supports the idea that writing was introduced into south-east Asia from India. These are, however, no more than clues to an Aryanising process which, though begun in the first centuries AD, would only assume the character of a cultural diaspora after India’s culture had itself become more clearly defined under the ‘golden’ Guptas.

As for the information to be gleaned from the cave temples of the western Deccan, it not only corroborates Yavana (principally Roman) trading activities but also suggests an important link between religious foundations and commercial pioneering. Excavated and sculpted between about 100 BC and 170 AD, the earliest caves in the western Deccan number nearly a thousand. They include those of Bhaja, Karle, Nasik and some of the Ajanta and Ellora caves. Many incorporate the pillars, stupas, chaitya arches and magnificent façades which triumphantly belie their designation as ‘caves’; and most are Buddhist.

From their numerous inscriptions, plus coins, we learn of Maharashtra’s first dynasty and, by correlation with the listings in the Puranas, a rough order of succession has been constructed for its kings. These were the Shatavahanas, or Andhras. They are said to have deprived Magadha’s Kanva dynasty of its residual authority; and more certainly, they established an extensive if loosely-knit hegemony throughout central India and the Deccan. Its prosperity may be judged not only by the cave temples but also by the magnificent Amaravati stupa, structurally and sculpturally the most elaborate in India. Commissioned mainly by mercantile interests living under the Shatavahana dispensation, it was originally located in Andhra Pradesh but was dismantled in the nineteenth century and is now divided between several museums, including the British where it rightly ranks with the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles as a most cherished possession.

Like the reliefs on the Sanchi and Bharhut stupas, those of Amaravati depict incidents drawn from the mythology which had grown up around the life of the Buddha. Incidentally all these reliefs also provide insights into the busy social life of the period. In scenes crammed with vitality, turbaned crowds fill every panel. Musicians crouch intently over their instruments and wasp-waisted dancers sway provocatively. Above them ladies ajangle with necklaces and bangles lean from a first-floor balcony beneath the fanciful gable of a barrel-vaulted roof. Horses prance in the street, bullocks patiently haul an elaborately decorated carriage, and an elephant goes berserk. One can almost hear the hubbub, smell the dust. Laden ox-carts, and ships with sails and oars, attest the importance of trade. Masons and labourers are seen constructing the very stupa on which their work is depicted. Indeed the ubiquitous standards and fly whisks carried by those who attend on the Buddha may well belong to particular trade and craft guilds (sreni). From literary sources we know of the social, financial and even political weight exercised by guild organisations. We also know that each had its own banner and, from the inscriptions, that these guilds were major patrons of Buddhist institutions.

Similar organisations operated throughout the Shatavahana kingdom and it is no coincidence that Shatavahana ascendancy coincided with the boom in overseas trade with both south-east Asia and the Roman empire. The anonymous author of the Periplus actually mentions some of the Shatavahana kings, and clearly knew their port-cities well: Broach (Bharukaccha, ‘Barygaza’), he reports, had a system of pilot boats to escort ocean-going vessels into its tricky anchorage at the mouth of the Narmada, ‘where nothing can be observed with certainty’; Sopara and Kalyan (Kalliena), both near Bombay, were also major ports although the latter had lately been grabbed by the Shatavahanas’ rivals, the Shaka satraps of Gujarat; its trade was therefore ‘much hindered’. After 170 AD recession throughout the Roman world much hindered the entire Indian Ocean trade, and once again this development was faithfully reflected in the western Deccan; the excavation of cave temples abruptly ceased, not to be resumed for another two hundred years, as the Shatavahanas withdrew to the east.

Moreover, the link between trade and dominion was not just one of timing. ‘The prosperity ushered in by trade and the need to control the trade routes is apparent in the sites chosen by the Shatavahanas for their earliest inscriptions.’18 Inland trade routes converged on the Shatavahanas’ west coast ports from Ujjain and the Gangetic states as well as from the Shatavahanas’ capital at Paithan in the Deccan. In both cases they had to thread their way down the rocky defiles of the Western Ghats. The Shatavahanas’ earliest inscriptions are at cave sites clearly related to these passes and defiles. Not without reason did one of the earliest Shatavahana kings describe himself as daksinapatha-pati, ‘the lord of the daksinapatha (the “southern route”)’.

The Periplus describes vast wagon trains heading down from Ujjain with the exotic produce of the Kushana domains and beyond – spikenard, saffron and costus (a medicinal root) from the Himalayas, ivory and bdellium (a resin), muslins and silks, agate and carnelian, ebony and teak. The trade may go back to Mauryan times since a fragment of an Ashokan Rock Edict has been found at the port of Sopara. But it was the Shatavahanas who were responsible for developing it. They not only controlled the trade routes but also encouraged the settlement of lands which would supply both the ports and the staging posts. It was to further this programme of settlement and strategic control that the Shatavahana dynasty, though orthodox in its adherence to Vedic sacrifice and deities, patronised and encouraged Buddhist establishments as well as making land grants to brahmans.

Buddhism, as noted, had become identified with commerce and manufacturing. Not only did Buddhist doctrine encourage the investment of resources which would otherwise be wasted on sacrifices; it also denied caste taboos on food and travel which made trade so hazardous for the orthodox. Monastic establishments thus became foci of inland trade. Beside and below the extant cave temples it is thought that there stretched bazaars and lodging houses, stables, holding pens and joinery shops, all of course built in long-since-perished timber. The monasteries thus served the functions of caravanserais. And, though initially recipients of royal grants, they soon attracted private donations and mercantile endowments. As guild-members or as individuals, weavers, grain merchants, basket makers, leather workers, shipping agents, ivory carvers, smiths, salt merchants and a host of other craftsmen and dealers are recorded as donors in the cave temple inscriptions. Many hailed from distant parts of India; some even described themselves as Yavanas; all clearly had a vested interest in the booming commerce and so in the religious establishments which made it possible.

The nature of Aryanisation within the subcontinent is still debated; so is that of India’s growing influence outside the subcontinent. Were Funan and all the later Indianised states in south-east Asia the result of trading links, of missionary activities, of migration, or of conquest? Should they be called ‘colonies’? Or were their Indian credentials simply the result of local elites espousing imported ideas of kingship, cultural sophistication and social differentiation? Conquests like Rome’s contemporary triumphs in Gaul and Britain can be discounted. It is much more likely that the processes responsible for the diaspora of Indian ideas in south-east Asia mirrored those at work in the western Deccan where trade, religious institutions and royal authority operated in consort to promote security, extend agrarian settlement and stimulate state-formation.

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