Narrators of the Indian Ocean
By 2000 BCE, there was contact between the coastal communities of the Red Sea, the Gulf and the Indus Valley. At the other end of the Indian Ocean, from around 3000 BCE, there was a migration from Taiwan to the Philippines and down to Southeast Asia, and on to Micronesia and Polynesia with the Sulawesi Sea as a major point of transit from about 1500 BCE.
South Asian merchants, Malay mariners, Buddhist monks, and the eventual emergence of states such as the Sassanians in Persia, the Guptas in India and Funan in Southeast Asia, who were interested in oceanic trade, set a template for the Indian Ocean in the first centuries of the common era, prior to the increasing spread of Islam, south and east from the Middle East. Contact between the Middle East and China by way of the Indian Ocean is evident in the establishment of settlements: a Persian settlement on the island of Hainan in 748 and a mixed Arab- Persian colony at Canton around the same time. Chinese ships were also visiting the Persian Gulf in the ninth century.[94]For Sugata Bose, the Indian Ocean has never been a ‘system’ as much as an ‘arena’ of ‘a hundred horizons’, which are economic, political and cultural, and where both space and time was crossed.[95] This surely applies to the history of histories of the Indian Ocean too. Even the earliest histories of trade and migration explode the Indian Ocean’s boundaries in geographical terms, linking it to the Mediterranean and the Pacific. Among sources which link the ocean west are those connected to the Roman Empire, for instance Periplus Marae Erythraensis or ‘Sailor’s Guide to the Indian Ocean’, whose author was probably a Greek who lived in the mid-first century, based in the port of Bernice on the Red Sea coast of Egypt and who had travelled to the Pandya kingdom of South India, which in turn had sent a mission to Rome to encourage traders to visit it.
Or indeed, there is Hyphegesis Geographike, ‘Guide to Geography’, written around 150 CE, by the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, based in Alexandria, showing especial interest in Southeast Asia, recording accurate information as far as the borderlands of China. The Indian Ocean’s indefinition is certainly evident in these early sources: should they be classed as Greco-Roman, Alexandrian or, as one important Southeast Asianist writes, reliant ‘on a whole series of stories heard in the ports of India and Sri Lanka?’[96]Yet despite this undoubted multi-dimensionality, people who faced this ocean sought to encompass it as a unit. One marvellous recent find that bears this out is an eleventh-century Egyptian cosmographic treatise, in Arabic manuscript, The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and. Marvels for the Eyes. While the author is unknown it is likely to have arisen from the Fatimid caliphate. The second book or maqalat relies heavily on Ptolemy and includes a map of the Indian Ocean, alongside one of the Mediterranean and the Caspian Sea; maps of Sicily and Cyprus and ports in North Africa and five maps of rivers, including the Nile, the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Oxus and the Indus. Intriguingly, the Indian Ocean is presented as an enclosed, symmetric and oblong green oval with mountains sprouting almost tree-like from it. This is containmentpar excellence. As two authorities on this find write: ‘The concept of an enclosed Indian Ocean may have derived directly from Ptolemy, who surmised that the Chinese coast extends southwards and the African coast eastwards, so that they eventually join up.’[97]
The Indian Ocean is drawn here in two halves, east and west.[98] There is specific attention to islands of transit - such as Pulau Tioman and the Nicobar islands, which are stopping places on the way to China, or Zanzibar which appears as Unjuwa, a corruption of the Swahili, Unguja, as a rectangular box in the sea. Protruding into the sea and out of it are ports - such as Aden and a volcano, ‘in which there is fire night and day’, possibly Krakatau in Indonesia.
While this demonstrates an understanding of the Indian Ocean as an integrated space, that space is already plural and it is historicised, for knowledge of it already comes from prior classical sources and Muslim sailors and merchants served as informants in the making of this map. Thinking with this source, as with Periplus or Hyphegesis, the enclosure of the Indian Ocean hides a more complicated history of intellectual inheritance.One fabled island of transit in the middle of the Indian Ocean which was listed in the Book of Curiosities under ‘islands of the infidels’ was ‘Sarandib’, present-day Sri Lanka, which is called ‘Taprobane’ in maps attributed to Ptolemy and exaggerated to fourteen times its size today:
It is ruled by two kings and is inhabited by members of every nation. There is the Mountain al-Rahun, which is the place where Adam, may the Blessings of God be upon him, fell [from Heaven]... No other country on the face of the Earth equals the wealth of Sarandib. Its people sail the seas...7
By the early fifteenth century, Zheng He, the Muslim eunuch appointed to ‘display [Ming] soldiers in strange lands in order to make manifest the wealth and power of the Middle Kingdom’ arrived on Sri Lanka for the third time. At the southern port of Galle he held a fair to display Chinese products: candlesticks, lacquer ware, silks, porcelain, textiles, and Buddhist sutras and incense burners.[99] [100] A commemorative tablet was installed at Galle, which referred to the holy Lankan mountain, noted above. Critically, and in keeping with the plurality of the Indian ocean, it was inscribed in three languages, Persian, Tamil and Chinese, bestowing offerings to Buddha, Vishnu and the Light of Islam. The Chinese inscription included the alms bestowed to the Temple of the Mountain, including 1,000 pieces of gold, 5,000 pieces of silver and fifty rolls of silk. In praise of Buddha, it noted: ‘Of late we have despatched missions to announce our mandate to foreign nations, and during their journey over the ocean they have been favoured with the blessing of your beneficent protection.’[101] Zheng He’s seven voyages, from 1405 to 1433, sponsored by the third Ming Emperor, Yongle, are perhaps the best example of a view of the Indian Ocean from the East, to counterbalance that provided by the Arab cosmographies of the West. In as much as these pre-1500 cartographies and histories roam across the ocean, borrowing from their predecessors, the recurrence of the ocean as a space of historical consciousness and geographical thought is apparent into the late modern period. For instance, in the early-twentieth century, Tamil scholars looked back to an undated past when their homeland stretched across the Indian Ocean.[105] The biogeographer Philip Sclater (1829-1913) recast Lemuria as ‘Ilemuria’, or as Kumari’s territory or continent. Kumari was a virgin and her sunken continent was for some writers characterised by the rule of queens. In 1903, for Suryanarayana Sastri, the author of a history of the Tamil language, this land extended from Cape Comorin to Kerguelen Island and from Madagascar to the Sunda Islands, including Sumatra and Java.[106] In the literary rendition of R. P. Sethu Pillai, professor ofTamil at the University of Madras, the sage Ilango Adigal speaks to the ocean thus: ‘O mischievous ocean!... If these engagements from South Asia, China and the Middle East demonstrate the longevity and chronological resonance of meanings attached to the Indian Ocean, and how the making of a singular space of meaning and a plural terrain of inheritance wrestle with each other, it is problematic that the origin of Indian Ocean historiography is dated to the midtwentieth century. Accordingly, the first wave of Indian Ocean histories came in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by a cross-fertilisation between the Annales-school and world-systems analysis in the 1980s. Among the first wave are said to be the Mauritius archivist Auguste Toussaint, and the Australian mariner, photographer, author and circumnavigator, Alan Villiers; among the second wave were Kirti Chaudhuri, Michael Pearson and Kenneth McPherson.[109] While Toussaint critiques Villiers for not being a historian, both Villiers and Toussaint’s texts share a similar narrative arc. Toussaint puts to one side ‘the obscure ages of Lemuria’, and begins ‘about 2300 BC’ in Egypt and ends with the Second World War.[110] There is in both a marked romanticisation of the Indian Ocean.[111] Toussaint ends urging ‘a new balance’ in the global order, inspired by the Indian Ocean as a space that would tie East to West. Histories such as these are travel texts, prognostics and prophecies, technical digests and geographical surveys of location, islands and routes. While surely affected by new technologies of steam and even air, they are mythic imaginaries; attempts to create a new future through the definition of the Indian Ocean’s history at a moment when the world of old empires was fading. Take this paragraph from Villiers: In my mind’s eye, flying over the Indian Ocean - as once I had to do during the war - I see something of the great array of the illustrious past across those blue and sunlit waters. I see the curious ships of Egypt putting out for the land of Punt. I see the Chinese junks; the Arab, the Indian, the Persian dhows in their thousands; the praus of the East and the sewn boats of Shihr, and Lamu... It is a swansong, for already the belch of smoke shows upon the western horizon and, far away, a score thousand lean brown hands are scraping at the sands of Suez. The vision fades. Far below me, a great steamer, a 20,000-tonner with an enormous, bolt-upright and curiously ugly stack, is belting at the gentle mounds of rippling water at her heedless bows. The year now is 1951, and the radio at my side is telling, in a toneless and affected voice, of warfare in Korea, dock strikes in Australia, New Zealand, London, a festival in Britain, an immense armament drive in the United States.[113] Such a flight across the ocean - despite the new vista provided by air travel - is totally aligned with the potentiality of the Indian Ocean across the centuries, to rethink space, time and civilisation. The late beginning of a more ‘professional’ historiography of the Indian Ocean might then be dissolved within the story told here of the ocean as a fluid space of meaning, and yet one over which ownership has been attempted from multiple starting points without full success. The Indian Ocean evaded the historical mastery of a singular culture or a privileged set of narrators into the twentieth century.