Chinese Power in Indian Ocean (1/2)

Chinese treasure ship (via Wikipedia)

In 1498, three ships — Sao Gabriel, Sao Rafael, and Sao Miguel — appeared in Calicut heralding a new era in geopolitics and world trade. Vasco da Gama would become immortal for finding a route from Europe to India, avoiding the Muslims who had a monopoly on overland trade. But for the residents of Calicut, this was not a major event. They were used to foreign traders and many foreigners lived in the Malabar coast. Even da Gama’s ships and crew of less than two hundred people was not a jaw dropper since they had seen huge Chinese ships with larger crew in Calicut port.
Much before Europeans became major players in the Indian Ocean, traders routinely sailed from the Malabar coast to the Swahili coast. During that time the Chinese built the biggest ships of the era and under Admiral Zheng He (pronounced Jung Huh) made seven voyages reaching as far as the Swahili coast. With such technology, the Chinese could have dominated trade, instead of the Europeans, but they did not. It is interesting to see why.
Ming and Zheng He
This story begins on September 10, 1368 when Ukhaantu Khan of the Yuan dynasty fled to Inner Mongolia unable to face the rebels under the leadership of Zhu Yuanzhang. These rebels would establish the native Ming dynasty. The third Ming emperor Zhu Di, wanted to improve trade, enhance the empire’s prestige, and encourage a tribute system for which he ordered an armada to be built.
Zhu Di’s admiral for the mission was Zheng He, a six and half feet tall two hundred pound man. This 34 year old Muslim originally named Ma Ho, was captured as a child by the Ming army from the Mongol village of Yunan. Like the Egyptian Mamluks, these slaves had career paths, but only after castration and so Zheng He eventually became the Grand Eunuch.
Even before the Ming dynasty, huge Chinese ships were spotted in Kerala. In 1340, Ibn Battuta, who was in Calicut, saw 13 Chinese junks wintering in the port. Ibn Battuta who had traveled in various type of ships and dhows in his travels from Morocco to India never mentioned much construction details in his accounts, but the Chinese ships impressed him so much that he wrote about three types of ships — the large junks, middle sized zaws, and small kakams. Ibn Battuta also expressed happiness at the privacy offered in their cabins that he could take his slave girls and wives and no one on board would know about it.
In 1330, Jordan Catalani, a Dominican monk saw them in Quilon and wrote that they had over 100 cabins and 10 sails. They were triple keeled and held together not by nails or metal structures, but the thread of some plant. Ibn Battuta wrote that these ships carried thousand men of which four hundred were soldiers.
Zhu Di’s ships, under the command of Zheng He sailed in 1405. There were 317 ships of which 60 were the large junks. These treasure ships held lacquers, porcelain, and silks. They carried a total of 27,000 men which included soldiers, carpenters, physicians, astrologers, cartographers and interpreters. Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan or Francis Drake would never command such a fleet nor as many men.
Under his leadership, the fleet made seven voyages trading, transporting ambassadors and establishing Chinese colonies. Three of those were to India, one to the Persian Gulf and three to the Swahili Coast and in the process he visited the Champa kingdom, Cambodia, Sumatra, Nicobar Islands, Ceylon, Maldives. One item which Zheng He took back to China was a giraffe; how the giraffe was transported on a ship passing through a rough ocean is not documented well, but it certainly amused the king. So did zebras which were called celestial
horses.
They called Calicut, “a great country” and people as “honest and trustworthy”. They had good opinion of the Zamorin and observed that Calicut had a highly structured society, well trained army and a harsh system of justice. In Calicut they traded using the language of the fingers.
(Read Part 2)

Calabashes or Plastic Pots?

(Photograph by author)

Many winter solstices back, a study compared certain parameters like life expectancy, infant mortality etc. of Kerala and United States and found they were equal. Thus it was concluded that Kerala is equal to United States. So the state assembly stopped debating mundane roti, kapda, hartaal issues and engaged in discussions of historical importance like if the final destruction of the library of Alexandria happened during the Muslim invasion in 642 CE.
A new study, done exclusively based on news reports, suggests that Kerala is not United States, but Nigeria. Few years back helmets were made mandatory in Kerala and as usual we Malayalees protested. No words can express what high literacy combined with anger can do to a society than this picture or this.
Recently Nigeria enforced helmet laws on motorcyclists and they protested in a way which would have made every Malayalee proud.

Motorcyclists in Nigeria have been wearing dried pumpkin shells on their heads to dodge a new law forcing them to wear helmets, authorities say. Road safety officials said calabash-wearers would be prosecuted. Calabashes are dried pumpkin shells more commonly used to carry liquid. [Nigeria bikers’ vegetable helmets]

In Kerala, everything is attributed to “western conspiracy”; in Nigeria, fear of voodoo.

Stories have also appeared in the local papers highlighting passengers’ fears that the helmets could be used by motorcyclists to cast spells on their clients, making it easy for them to be robbed. “Some people can put juju inside the helmets and when they are worn the victim can either lose consciousness or be struck dumb,” passenger Kolawole Aremu told the Daily Trust newspaper. [Nigeria bikers’ vegetable helmets]

The similarities do not seem to end. Prof. Amartya Sen should factor this into his studies of “Kerala’s experience of development.”

The Slave Dynasties of Cairo and Delhi

(via thovie333)

India and Egypt have a lot in common.Both are ancient civilizations. Trade ships used to ply between the West coast of India to Egypt as documented in 1st century book, The Periplus of the Eritrean Sea. Following Independence, Chacha Nehru, along with a bunch of people founded the Non-Aligned Movement and conned a bunch of countries to join so that they could align themselves with the Soviet Union. One of Nehruji’s friends was Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt who in 1967 Tughlaqian move tried to wipe Israel off the map.

A lesser discussed fact is that both Delhi and Cairo were once ruled by members of the Slave Dynasty who were Turks. Nothing illustrates this better than the story of two such Turks, Baibars [2] and Qutb-ud-din Aybak.
Baibars was captured by the Mongols, sometime after 1223, and sold as a slave. He was passed up by many buyers since he had cataract. Sold at a discount, he ended up in Syria and was later sold to an Egyptian Mamluk. He had charisma and soon became a commander defeating the Seventh Crusade by Louis IX of France. A quick promotion and he became the Sultan of Egypt ruling about half a million people.
Baibars was a Mamluk – a Turkish speaking warrior class who ruled not just Egypt but Syria and Palestine, thus controlling Jerusalem. The Mamluk tradition was to capture pagan boys as slaves from the north of Black Sea and Caspian Sea. The captured boys were converted to Islam, trained in religion and warfare, and given freedom and employment. They remained separate from the Egyptian population.They were patrons of Islam, building mosques and madrassas, and hence was tolerated by the local population.
Qutb-ud-din Aybak was born before Baibars in Central Asia and captured as a slave when he was a boy. He was sold to a qazi of a town in Iran who gave him very good education. After the qazi’s death, his sons sold him to a slave merchant and finally he was bought by a person called Muhammad of Ghor.
Muhammad of Ghor soon owned a major portion of India. He had one problem though – no male heirs. But he had a way around it which was clarified by the remark, “I have thousands of sons, my Turkish slaves who will be the heirs of my dominions, and who, after me, will take care to preserve my name in the Khutba throughout these territories.” After Muhammad’s death Qutb-ud-din Aybak established the slave dynasty in India. This is a slumdog millionaire story which even Vikas Swarup can’t make up.
In Egypt, minorities like Jews and Christians were treated as second class citizens during the Mamluk era; they had to wear distinguishing clothing. Sometimes synagogues and churches were destroyed to build mosques.This was the time of crusades and some believe that the attacks on Jews and Christians of Egypt were a reaction[2]. In India which was not affected by the Western crusades, Qutb-ud-din Aybak, who constructed the Qutub Minar inspired by the Minaret of Jam, would also build the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque from the parts of twenty seven Hindu and Jain temples. In Varanasi, Aybak demolished idols in a thousand temples and made them the place of worship of one true God[3].
Apart from such religious tolerance, a major achievement of the Mamluks was keeping the Mongols out. Due to this Cairo prospered and became a refuge for scholars, artists and merchants and became a cosmopolitan center among Islamic countries. In India, Gengis Khan crossed the Indus in 1222 and a similar exodus of Muslim refugees into India happened making Delhi a another Islamic cosmopolitan center. The Mongols would try again, after Raziya Sultana’s time, but would be held back by another slave, Ghiyas ud din Balban.
When Ibn Battuta visited Cairo in 1326, it was still under Mamluk control; they would be defeated by the Ottomans. By the time he reached Delhi in 1333, the Tughlaq dynasty was in power[1]; the Turkish slave dynasty was put to an end by the Khilji dynasty in 1290.
References:

  1. The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century
  2. Making of the Modern World 4, Lecture 2, by Prof. Mathew Herbst.
  3. India: A History
  4. Wikipedia:Qutb-ud-din Aybak, Baibars, Qutub Complex, Ghiyas ud din Balban

[serialposts]

King Agathocles's Coins

(Balarama depicted on a 1st century BCE Maues coin. via wikipedia)

Between 190 and 180 BCE, towards the end of the Mauryan empire, there lived a king named Agathocles near Ai-Khanoum, in the Kunduz area of Afghanistan. There are no cities, monuments or accounts about him and he would have remained unknown if not for one thing – coins.

Some time in the 70s, archaeologists found two types of coins issued by him. One set was Greek silver coins depicting Zeus and Dionysos. He also issued bronze and silver coins, square or rectangular in shape, which portryated Indian gods like Vishnu, Shiva, Vasudeva, Buddha and Balarama. On these coins were written, in Brahmi or Kharoshthi, that the money belonged to Rajane Agathuklayasa.

“These square coins, dating back to 180- BC, with Krishna on one side and Balram on the other, were unearthed recently in Al Khanoun in Afghanistan and are the earliest proof that Krishna was venerated as a god, and that the worship had spread beyond the Mathura region,” says T K V Rajan, archaeologist and founder-director, Indian Science Monitor, who is holding a five-day exhibition, In search of Lord Krishna,’ in the city from Saturday. [New finds take archaeologists closer to Krishna-Chennai-Cities-The Times of India]

The images show Vasudeva carrying a chakra and sankha on one side and Balarama carrying a gada (club) and hala (plough) and are some of the earliest coins depicting Krishna and Balarama. But these are not recent discoveries as mentioned in Times of India; a paper on it (Narain, A.K. “Two Hindu Divinities on the Coins of Agathocles from Ai-Khanum”, Journal of Numismatic Society of India) was published in 1973.

References:

  1. Alexander the Great and Bactria By Frank Lee Holt
  2. Iconography of Balarama By N.P. Joshi

Happy New Year


That’s the partial reading list for the first quarter.The Malayalam book is Marthandavarma, written in 1891 by C V Raman Pillai and the little green book at the top is The Travels of Sir John Mandeville & The Journal of Friar Odoric. Sometime after 1321, Friar Odoric, an Italian, spent time in Malabar, Cranganore, Kollam, and Chennai.
For 2009, this blog has a new WordPress theme. varnam is now on twitter as well.

Preserving the Vedic Traditions

Ibn Battuta, the Moroccon traveler who reached lands as far as Delhi and Calicut in 1341, grew up in Tangier. In the book The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, Prof. Ross E Dunn writes about Ibn Battuta’s upbringing: Tangier did not have madrassas like the ones in Tunis or Fez, but the neighborhood Koranic school provided him with sufficient Islamic teaching.
These students sat at the foot of the master listened to his discourses and learned the Qu’ran by heart. To be a learned master, you had to commit the text to memory and compared to other schools, the Moroccan school emphasized the rote learning. Like the Indic tradition, the memorization of these texts were meant to transmit scriptures to future generations
I am not sure if the Islamic tradition still emphasizes committing texts to memory with the same rigour as the old schools in Tangier and Fez, but the Indic tradition continues uncorrupted and with the same high standards in Thrissur, Kerala. In an event called anyonyam (each other), Rig Vedic scholars from two schools — Thrissur and Thiruvanaya — meet at the Sree Rama temple at Kadavallur, every November, to demonstrate their mastery over Rg Veda chanting.

The Kadavalloor Anyonyam is an outward manifestation of the method of ancient traditional Vedic recital. Only in Kerala can one see remnants of the basic traditions in the study of Vedams, use of Prayogams, and in enunciation (chanting / recital). Only in Kerala have the Mudras (standardised movement of hand and fingers) used during Vedic recital been retained in its truly traditional, uncorrupted and pure form till this day. Its musical aspects (notes like Udaatham, Anudaatham, Swaritham) later evolved and developed into the classical music system of the country, and yet, the original form continues to be retained here. [via ]

Here is a video
See Also: Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam’s speech at the Brahmaswom Madom, one of the vedic schools which participates in the anyonyam.

"Alleged" News Agency

Here are the pictures of the Pakistani terrorist, Ajmal Amir Kasab, roaming around in CST with a machine gun. Here is the video of their encounter with police in the railway station , captured on CCTV. Still the headline on CNN reads, Alleged Mumbai attacker seeks Pakistani help.
They say, a picture is worth a thousand words and a video clip, a gazillion words. Still CNN can’t get the important word right.

Consequences of having Reflective Floors

An important turning point in Mahabharata is when Duryodhana visits Indraprastha for attending Yudhishtira’s rajasuya yagya. Walking around, amazed at the grandeur of the palace, at one place Duryodhana mistakes the floor to be a pool of water and raises his clothes. In another place, he mistakes a pool as the floor and falls into it, and Draupadi laughs. You know the rest.
There is a similar story in the Qur’an about a person getting confused with a reflective floor. Here it is a woman – the Queen of Sheba – who ruled over a kingdom which may have included Eritrea, Ethiopia and Yemen. In the story, she visits King Sulayman (the biblical Solomon) with gifts of incense.
The pagan Queen enters the palace and seeing the reflective floor assumes it is water and lifts her skirt. This, of course is against social convention. It also does not help when Sulayman tells her that it was just glass. According to one version the Queen admits her mistake and accepts the King’s religion.
In another version the King too had heard about the Queen. He also had heard that her left foot is hairy and is like that of a goat. To test this he gets the floor shined until it is like glass.

When the Queen of Sheba walks across the floor, Solomon sees the reflection of her cloven foot. Right in front of his eyes, it transforms and becomes normal.The Queen of Sheba tests Solomon’s wisdom, asking him many questions and giving him riddles to solve. He answers to her satisfaction and then he teaches her about his god Yahweh and she becomes a follower.[In Search of Myths & Heroes . The Queen of Sheba | PBS]

The missionaries who are busy harvesting souls in Orissa and Karnataka would be wishing if only conversions were this easy.

Quotes (1)

Westerners have singularly narrowed the history of the world in grouping the little that they know about the expansion of the human race around the peoples of Israel, Greece and Rome. Thus have they ignored all those travelers and explorers who in their ships ploughed the China Sea and the Indian Ocean, or rode the immensities of Central Asia to the Persian Gulf. In truth the larger part of the globe, containing cultures different from those of the ancient Greeks and Romans but no less civilized, has remained unknown to those who wrote the history of their little world under the impression that they were writing world history

Henri Cordier, French Sinologist quoted in The Adventures of Ibn Battuta