Civilisational Linkages in the Indian Ocean: An Archaeological Study on

India’s Trade with Rome and Southeast Asia

Kishor K. BasaDepartment of Anthropology,

Utkal University, Bhubaneswar-751004Email: kishorkbasa58@gmail.com

Trade between India and Rome as well as India and South East Asia had caught the imagination of scholars since late 19t century.

However, some trends during the last three decades in such studies

• Indian Ocean Perspective

• Romano-centric approach has been rightly questioned

• Increasing emphasis on archaeological sources

The present lecture will have three parts:

• Indo-Roman Trade

• Trade between India and South East Asia

• Changing perspectives of Indian writings on early history and archaeology of South East Asia from a historiographicalperspective

Indo-Roman Trade

Trade between India and Rome was very active

during the 2nd – 1st centuries BC as known from the

recovery of Republican coins in South India.

The political stability ushered in by Augustus Caesar

and the discovery of the use of the south-west

monsoon for trading voyage – said to have been

made by Hippalus sometime in the 1st century BC –

accelerated the process.

Exports from India :

Plant Products

Spices are the most important. Raschkementioned 6 kinds of spices : malabathrum, pepper, frankincense, myrhh, cassia and cinnamon, that came to the Roman Empire from the east.

Miller : sesame seed and cardamom ; cotton

Animal products

ivory, hide, fur, silk, lac, pearl oysters, conch-shell, tortoise shell, ghi musk

Raw silk, silk yarn and silk cloth were primarily a transit trade coming from China.

At least one of the silk textiles from Dura Europos was of Indian origin.

1st century AD Ivory statue of Lakshmi from Pompei

Mineral Products

semi-precious stones

Periplus carnelian from Bhrauch;

Pliny – beryl ( found in Coimbatore district of Tamilnadu) was popular among Indians and the Indian traders imitated beryls by staining rock-crystals.

Pliny : of all the countries that produced gems, India was the most prolific.

Evidence of Indo-Roman trade

Hoards of Roman coins and ornaments

Pottery

Terra sigillata found at Arikamedu was believed not to have been traded, but was perhaps brought to India for the personal use of Roman merchants

Mediterranean amphora fragments in different sites – Arikamdedu

Rouletted Ware

idea of rouletting and chattering probably from the west

Mould made ware of the western Deccan, both in shape and decoration is believed to have analogies with the Hellenistic pottery as well as Achaemenid (and later) metal work.

Trade Between India and South East Asia

India’s Interest in South East Asia

External Trade as an Extension of Internal trade:

Grand Route passing through North India connected Tamralipti to the northwest of the subcontinent.

Bhrauch was the most important port in western India which connected western India with north India via Ujjain.

South East Asia as Suvarnabhumi or Land of Gold;

(it might mean real gold,

Besides, spices – cloves and nutmegs from Eastern Indonesia - might have yielded profit which is explained metaphorically by reference to gold)

India as middleman between South East Asia and Rome

South East Asian interest in the westerly trade:

emergence of Chiefdom and nascent state which meant that there was a need for exotics for their use as status symbols;

profit from this trade

Items of Trade:

spices from South East Asia to India

glass and semi-precious stone beads etc

from India to South East Asia

Evidence for Indo-South East Asian Trade

Literary – Western Classical, Indian and Chinese literature

Epigraphic

In this lecture primacy to archaeological evidence

Glass beads: types and chemical composition

Monochrome drawn glass beads (Mutisalah beads)

Monochrome drawn glass bead making from Arikamedu

Opaque black round bead with spiral grooves

Prasat Muang Sing

Kausambi

Opaque black round bead with spiral grooves

Ban Don ta Phet: Hexagonal barrel, hexagonal prism, square barrel, square prism glass beads

Hexagonal biconical glass bead

From our analysis of South East Asian glass beads, two types of glass:

• Mixed-alkali glass and potash glass

• Mixed-alkali glass with soda as the main alkali, has got high alumina and low lime – the two most important characteristics of Indian glass

• Potash glass : examples of potash glass also known from India from analysis done earlier

Etched Beads From Thailand

Ian Glover

Parallels for etched beads from South EastAsia can be found in collections in India andPakistan, matching best with Beck’s MiddlePeriod (300 BC – AD 200).

Knobbed Vessels

High Tin Bronze

High tin bronze from Indian subcontinent from Adichanallur in Tinnevelly district, Tamilnadu, Coimbatore in the Nilgiri Hills and Bhir mound, Taxila

Strabo’s Geography incorporates an earlier observation , made by Nearchus about the local people who used “brass that is cast, not the kind that is forged ---” with the result that “when they fall to the ground they break to pieces like pottery”.

Such a description fits well the bowls from Taxila and from Ban Don Ta Phet. Copper-tin artefacts are rare in India – which is deficient in tin. Hence, high-tin cast bronze vessels are believed to be an import from South East Asia.

Sharada Srinivasan : documented such technology from Kerala in South India

Rouletted Ware from India and South East Asia

Other Archaeological Evidence

Three phases

Phase I (c.400 to c.50 BC) organized maritime contacts developed between two regions

Phase II (c.50 BC to c. 300 AD) It was most extensive.

Stability of the Roman Empire;

Demand for western goods by the Han dynasty, Later Han dynasty and Wu kingdom

Importance of exotic items in Chiefdoms and nascent states in South East Asia

Phase III (c. AD 300-500) Roman Empire was in decline, but Indo-South East Asian trade continued as known from inscriptions in South East Asia influenced by Indian script and style

Phases of Indo-South East Asian Trade (c. 400 BC

to c. 500 AD)

Changing Perspectives of Indian Writings on Early History and Archaeology of South East Asia

Colonial historiography

At its worst, the colonial school for Indian history was arrogant and reacted to Indian art, to use Parha Mitter’s phrase, as ‘much maligned monsters’.

Essence of colonialist school was to demonstrate that British rule in India was meant for a ‘civilising mission’ to teach Indians science and democracy against superstition and backwardness.

Indian Nationalist historiography coinciding with Indian nationalist movement

Became intense from 1920s

A spurt of Indian writings on South East Asian history and archaeology during 1920s and 1940s.

Formation of Greater India Society in Kolkata in 1926 and its Journal in 1934

The aims and objectives of the journal were made explicit by the Nobel laureate Poet

Rabindranath Tagore in his Foreword for the first number:

"To know my country in truth one has to travel tothat age when she realised her soul, and thustranscended her physical boundaries, when sherevealed her being in a radiant magnanimity whichillumined the Eastern horizon making her recognisedas their own by those in alien shore who wereawakened into a great surprise of life, and not nowwhen she has withdrawn herself within a narrowbarrier of obscurity, in to a miserly pride ofexclusiveness: in to a poverty of mind that humblyrevolves round itself in an unmeaning repetition of apast that has lost its light and no message to thepilgrims of the future" (Tagore 1934:Foreword).

The most well known scholar of the Indiannationalist school was R.C.Majumdar who wroteprolifically on Southeast Asia Majumdar's first majorpublication on Southeast Asia was a comprehensiveaccount of the history and culture of Champa (1927)which was the first volume of a projected seriescalled Ancient Indian Colonies in the Far East.

Majumdar's two more monumental volumes wereon Suvarnadvipa, Part I (political history) (1937) andPart II (cultural history) (1938).

K.A. Nilakanta Sastri

prevalence of Tamil merchant guild in Sumatra in 11th

century and Takuapa in Thailand (9th century)

Vo-Canh inscriptions in Champa derived from south India,

Importance of Ramayana and Agastya in South East Asia

Other scholars

B. C. Chhabra, H. B. Sarkar, B. C. Chatterjee, NiharRanjan Ray, O.C. Gangoly, D. P. Ghosh

two related issues which dominated their discourse :

(i)‘colony’

(ii) Indianisation of what they called ‘Greater India’.

three forms of colony – commercial, political and cultural.

What was at first commercial intercourse was followed by political influence (Chatterjee1939:138) and cultural conquest (Majumdar1927: XXIII).

R, C, Majumdar

“Indianisation of these countries was primarily as complete in the ancient times as we find in the Dravidian countries within the frontier of India” (1927:iv).

“So far as faith, beliefs and religious practices are concerned, the colonies in the Far East were almost a replica of the motherland” (1927:83).

O. C. Gangoly went to the extreme:

“Indian art in the archipelago is a continuation of and a logical development by Indian hands of the principles and symbols of Indian creations applied under colonial conditions. The art and civilizations of Java formed an integral part of the art and civilization of the Indian continent. It is one of the outlying frontiers of the Civilizations of a Greater India stretching itself to the shores beyond ‘the moving seas’ “ (Gangoly 1927:53).

Indian Nationalist School Not a Monolith

(i) Gangoly held extreme view.

S. K. Saraswati local genius in his study of temples at Pagan in Mynamar

(ii) Role played by different regions:

Majumdar favoured north India

Nilakanta Sastri favoured south India with the predominant influence of the Pallavas for the same.

(iii) Primacy to different castes

R. K. Mookerji Ksatriyas

Chatterjee Brahmins

Two dimensions of Indian Nationalist School

Enabling dimension

(i) Indian scholars worked on the primary sources of the cultural heritage of South East Asia and in that sense expanded the data base.

(ii) The issue of Indian impact on South East Asian culture counteracted the Colonial historiography of the ‘civilizing mission’ discourse and hence questioned the legitimacy of British rule in India.

Limitation

Colonised as Coloniser : The colonized and Indian nationalist discourse with regard to South East Asia became a colonial discourse for South East Asia and hence resentment in South East Asia

Van Leur (1955) reacted against the India-centric argument and argued that the Indonesian rulers invited the Brahmins of India which resulted in the legitimisation of their authority.

“The sheen of the world religions and foreign cultural forms is a thin flaking glaze; underneath it the whole of the old indigenous form has continued to exist. “ (1955:95).

Recent trends

(i) Therefore, emphasis by Indian scholars on the mutual give and take in the interaction between India and South East Asia.

(ii) Emphasis to treat South East Asia as an active agent rather than a mere passive recipient, of culture process.