The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (53 page)

The story of Ismail and the king comes from the
Book of the Wonders of India,
a remarkable collection of 136 stories gathered from friends and acquaintances by a Persian merchant named
Buzurg ibn Shahriyar. Buzurg names twenty-five of his informants, who are collectively responsible for half the stories, Ismail being the source of six. Twenty-six of the datable
stories take place between 908 and 953, and the oldest dates from the reign of
Harun al-Rashid at the turn of the ninth century. Some of them relate fantastic or highly embellished events or miracles similar to those associated with
Sinbad the Sailor in
The Arabian Nights,
but many reflect the ordinary interests of merchants everywhere. Most of Buzurg’s informants hail from
Suhar,
Siraf, or Basra, and although they relate adventures and mishaps from East Africa,
Jeddah, and
Aden to China, the destinations mentioned most often are in India and Sri Lanka. For this reason the compilation is an invaluable mirror of medieval Arab and Persian commerce on the Monsoon Seas. Merchants lucky and hapless, navigators with a sixth sense for the weather, and survivors
of
shipwreck account for the bulk of the more sober narratives. A brief tale told by Ismail, for instance, recounts how he sailed from the Malay Peninsula to
Shihr, on the coast of central Yemen, and after beating off sixty-six pirate boats completed the three-thousand-mile passage in forty-one days. His cargo was worth six hundred thousand dirhams, not including the goods the sultan of Oman exempted from duty or those that “
escaped the customs and were not discovered”—in a word, smuggled. Buzurg never moralizes, which imparts a chilling quality to his stories: about a shipwrecked girl raped by a sailor as she clings to flotsam while the narrator looks on; Indian suicides who hire people to drown them; and slaves, who except for Ismail’s unnamed king are enumerated with complete indifference, a hundred in this ship, two hundred in that. But it is this matter-of-fact quality that anchors these stories in the experience of their intended audience, deep-sea mariners with little use for nostalgia.

Sasanian mariners began making the six-thousand-mile passage to China beginning in the second century, and before the start of the Islamic era
Ubulla, at the head of the Persian Gulf, was renowned as
“the port to al-
Bahrain, Uman, al-Hind [India] and as-Sin [China].” Their role in this long-distance trade is noted in accounts of three Buddhists who traveled no farther west than the east coast of India. In 673, a Chinese
monk named
Yijing made his way to Guangzhou, where he “
fixed the date of meeting with the owner of a Persian ship to embark for the south.” Four decades later, the Indian
Vajrabodhi sailed for China from the
Pallava kingdom in southern India. Stopping in Sri Lanka—doubtless at Mantai, the premier South Asian port of call for traffic between Persia and China—their ship joined a fleet of thirty Persian vessels, each with a complement of five to six hundred people and cargoes of precious stones, among other things. The commercial orientation of Persian seafarers is also the subject of an observation by a Korean Buddhist named
Huichau, who after sailing to India in around 725 described the merchants from the Persian Gulf:

The oldest secular account of the passage from the Persian Gulf is provided by a
Sirafi merchant named Sulayman al-Tajir, who traded in China around 850. Because the largest ships could not reach the head of the Persian Gulf, on the first stage of the journey east, “
the goods are carried to Siraf from al-Basra, ’Uman and other [ports], and then they are loaded on the
Chinese boats at Siraf. This is because the waves are abundant in this sea and the water is at a low [level] in some places.” (“Chinese boats” refers not to ships built in or from China, but to those that traded to China, in the same way that nineteenth-century European and American square-riggers in the tea trade were referred to as
China clippers.) The first port of call was at Masqat on the
Musandam peninsula, where crews topped up their water before sailing direct to Kulam Malay (
Quilon, India), a month away. Here ships bound for China paid duties of a thousand dirhams. After rounding India and
Sri Lanka they called in the
Nicobar Islands, again for water, although there was also a small-scale trade in ambergris, which the natives exchanged for iron. They next sailed to
Kalah (probably
Takuapa, on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula below the
Kra Isthmus) and then south to
Sumatra. Once through the Strait of Malacca, the ships might call at the Buddhist kingdom of
“
Zabaj” (
Srivijaya) or sail directly across the South China Sea to southern Vietnam or Guangzhou. By Sulayman’s time, Persian Gulf mariners seem to have stopped trying to make the entire six-thousand-mile passage to China in one ship.
Major changes taking place along the length of the sea route made breaking the trip in South Asia more worthwhile than it had been.

One reason that Muslim expansion into India stalled after the capture of Daybul in the eighth century is that the subcontinent was undergoing a major political realignment that saw the rise of a number of powerful kingdoms, some founded on territorial expansion, others on overseas trade. The number of sixth-century Indian dynasties and kingdoms is almost incalculable; the borders of even the most enduring were mutable; and the incomplete historical record shows that many were short-lived. By the start of the seventh century, however, central and southern India were dominated by the dynasties of the Chalukyas, whose origins lay in
Karnataka in the southwest, and the Pallavas in the southeast. Under
Pulakeshin II, the Chalukyas conquered the
Konkan Coast between the
Gulf of Khambhat and modern Goa, and sent a fleet of a hundred ships against a place called Puri, possibly Elephanta Island in the harbor of modern
Mumbai. Crossing the
Narmada River into north India, the Chalukyas marched east to
Orissa and
Andhra Pradesh, and having spanned the subcontinent, Pulakeshin was known as “
lord of both the eastern and the western seas.” He next attacked the Pallavas to the south, who were heavily invested in the long-distance
trade of the Bay of Bengal and who
clashed repeatedly with the Chalukyas. The struggle for control of southern India swung back and forth for more than a century and embroiled the smaller southern Indian kingdoms of the Pandyas and
Cheras, and the kings of
Sri Lanka.

A tenth-century stone carving of a boat from the Pala kingdom in northeast India. The upturned stern is an unusual feature in vessels of the Indian Ocean, but the pavilion near the center of the boat probably houses someone of political or ritual importance. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Contemporary with the start of the
Abbasid Caliphate in the mid-eighth century, two major powers emerged in northern India, the
Rashtrakuta Dynasty founded by a Chalukya general, and the Buddhist Palas of Bengal and the eastern Ganga valley. Pala rule continued until the Muslim conquest in the thirteenth century, when
Buddhism was virtually eliminated from the land of its origin, but in the meantime
the Palas exerted a pronounced influence on Buddhist practice in Southeast Asia and China, where the religion continued to flourish. To the southwest, the Rashtrakutas forged one of India’s most extensive and wealthiest empires, which controlled the western coast of the subcontinent as far south as
Kerala. Much of its wealth came from the commerce that flowed through
ports in Gujarat and Konkan, which were home to communities of Persian and Arab Muslim traders as well as
Jews,
Nestorian Christians, Buddhists, and
Jains.

Plying the old Sasanian routes to India, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, and China, Muslim traders from Arabia and the
Persian Gulf planted the faith and customs of their lands and tribes of origin—Persian or Arab,
Omani, Hadrami, or Yemeni—and established expatriate communities notable for the accommodations they struck with their host rulers and each other. Muslim trading communities along the Konkan Coast between Khambhat and
Saymur (modern Chaul, south of
Mumbai) were quite large and had considerable autonomy. Tenth-century
Saymur had a population of about ten thousand
bayasira
, people born
in India of Muslim parents, as well as first-generation merchants and settlers from Oman,
Siraf,
Basra, and
Baghdad. Their communal leader served at the pleasure of the Rashtrakuta king and was presumably responsible for the appointment of port authorities and other officials who looked after Muslims’ affairs. Among them were a number of people identified as
nauvittaka
, “
one whose wealth (
vitta
) lies in his (possessing) ships or
nau.
” Some of these officials were specifically exempted from paying the customs dues and tolls normally owed the king.

Islam was also transplanted farther south to the
Malabar Coast of
Karnataka and Kerala and to Sri Lanka.
^c
Caste restrictions prevented intermarriage between Muslim merchants and anyone except low-caste Hindu wives, with whom they often contracted “temporary marriages.” The offspring of these unions were known as
Mappila, from the Malayalam meaning “big children,” and in time this was the name applied to the community of mestizo Muslims as a whole, which survived until well after the arrival of the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. Muslims were by no means the first expatriate communities established in India, where they were preceded by the Greek and Roman
Yavanas of antiquity, and subsequently by Jews, Nestorian Christians, and Zoroastrian Persians. A seventeenth-century English merchant preserved a story about how a group of Persian refugees emigrated to India to escape Muslim persecution. As in the foundation narrative preserved in
The Kilwa Chronicle,
the Persians are said to have taken a fleet of seven ships from the Persian Gulf and settled at
Swaley,
Surat, and Khambhat, in each place making a treaty with the local raja explaining why they had come and begging leave “
to be admitted as sojourners with them, using their own law and religion, but yielding themselves in subjection to their government,” in other words, to become autonomous subjects of the raja.

Muslim influence on the Coromandel Coast was less pronounced. Under Pallava influence, southern India became increasingly Hinduized and there was a steady growth in the number and size of
Brahman villages and Hindu temple complexes. This continued under the Chola kingdom of
Tamil Nadu, which in the late ninth century became as important to the growth of long-distance trade in the
Indian Ocean as the
Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt or the
Song Dynasty in China. Tamil merchants had a well-articulated approach to commerce and their influence could be found from China to the Red Sea. Traders began their apprenticeship at the age of ten and proceeded by stages to become independent merchants at the age of forty-one. Southern Indian trade was transformed by the simultaneous evolution of town merchant assemblies (
nagarams
), which were involved in regulating trade, and
merchant guilds, many of which specialized in specific goods like cloth,
oil, or horses. The guilds developed in Karnataka around the turn of the millennium and forged close ties with
temples, which were central to the exchange economy. They served as repositories for money in the form of donations that could be lent to guilds (and with greater risk to individuals) at interest, normally 12.5 to 15 percent per year but twice that in some instances. The spread of Hindu institutions led to a decrease in the number of Buddhists and
Jains, whose adherents had long been prominent in maritime trade. Nonetheless, the Cholas continued a strategic patronage of
Buddhism in deference to traders from Southeast Asia, whose ties with India intensified in the same period.
Southeast Asian rulers similarly endowed Hindu temples in southern India, as well as Buddhist monasteries and temples both at home and in India, probably with a view to commercial and political influence as much as for spiritual benefit.

The existence of foreign trading communities became especially important for southern India’s overseas trade as an increasingly conservative strain of Hinduism took hold. After the eighth century, the increased attention to the observance of purity rites led to a diminished involvement in overseas trade by Hindus relative to other communities. The difficulties of maintaining caste are evident in
Abu Zayd’s tenth-century description of the complex, to say nothing of expensive, rituals associated with eating: “
There are certain Indians, who never eat two out of the same dish, or upon the same table, and would deem it a very great sin if they should. When they come to Siraf, and are invited by the considerable merchants, [whether they are] a hundred in number, or more or less, they must each have a separate dish, with the least communication with the rest.” This is not to say that Hindus forsook the
sea entirely or were completely absent from overseas trade. Indian merchants sailed between
India and Southeast Asia, and in later centuries
banias
—Hindu merchants—also called at Aden. When the Portuguese reached
Malabar in the fifteenth century, they found its foreign trade in the hands of Hindu Chetties from the Coromandel Coast and
banias
from Gujarat, in addition to Malabari and Arab Muslims.