Kedah

Puranic texts include Kataha as one of nine dvipa (islands) into which Bharata dvarsa or Greater India was divided. Tamil poetry from the first centuries ce depicts active trade between India and Kalagam.^[1172] An eleventh-century collection of stories depicts Kataha as an important and rich country near Suvarnadvipa and glorifies it as “the seat of all felicities.”^[1173]

Indian and Arab texts often paired Srivijaya with Kedah.

The major result of the Chola invasion of 1025 was to place a Tamil viceroy on the throne of Kedah. This position may have been reserved for the crown prince of the Chola Empire, who could expect to be promoted to the kingship of the en­tire realm.^[1177] Archaeological data supports this inference (see later discussion). The main objective of the raid was probably Kedah, not Palembang. They were content to secure the northern end of the Straits of Melaka, while ignoring the southern coast.

Ninth-century Arab sources describe Kalah-bar as a vassal of either Zabaj (Srivijaya) or China, in communication with Oman.^[1179] Sinbad visited it on his fourth voyage, where he found camphor. Abu Zayd Hasan, around 916, wrote that the maharaja of Zabag ruled over many islands and the country of Kalah, halfway between China and Arabia, with a market where rare items such as camphor, san­dalwood, ivory, and spices were sold. Ships went back and forth between this port and Oman.^[1180]

A slightly mysterious place called Geluo appears in Chinese sources in the early seventh century, which claim that it had been known since the Han dynasty.^[1181] It lay at the north end of the Straits of Melaka, so the most likely area for it is Kedah/south Thailand. Kedah was the jumping-off point for the Buddhist holy land of India. Yijing during his stopover there met a man from Central Asia.^[1182] The early Chinese transliteration for Kedah, Jie-cha, may have been coined by Yijing from the Sanskrit Kataha.^[1183] According to Zhao Rugua, in the thirteenth century Kedah was one of three ports in the Straits sending ships to the Malabar Coast of India, along with Jambi and Srivijaya. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Kedah lost its posi­tion as the main port at the northern gateway to the Straits of Melaka to Aceh.