Pattanam Excavation: Controveries and More

A Critique of the Pattanam Excavation

The project undertaken by the Kerala Council of Historical Research of discovering the lost city of Muziris seems to have hit a major roadblock. The Peutingers Tables dates back to the 13th Century and there is nothing in the surviving parts of the ancient map to suggest that Muziris was an actual sea port on the Kerala coast of the Arabian Sea. The capital of the Chera kingdom was indeed Musiri and it became conventional to identify one with the other. Added to this, was the confusion caused by the Saint Thomas tradition. After the Passion of Our Lord, one of his Apostles Saint Thomas is said to have come over to India and there is also a reference to a Parthian king in the Acts of the Apostles. The Syrian Christians unlike the more prosperous and politically influential Latin Catholics, trace their origin to the Ministry of Saint Thomas who was martyred near Madras, St Thomas Mount to be precise. Pattanam excavation, according to Dr B S Harishankar was designed to give historical and archaeological veracity to the legend of Saint Thomas thereby legitimizing the political claims of the Syrian and Malabar Church. From the two volumes of the Excavation Report published so far there is little evidence to suggest an overtly religious justification for the excavation. In Indian, History is highly politicized because the long years of Marxist and Leftist domination over the commanding heights of historical discourse, scholars are highly suspicious of state supported and sponsored history. And in Kerala the intolerance of the Left has made it impossible for historians to work in an atmosphere of safety and security.

The voule under review is a scathing attack on the excavations undertaken and Dr Harishankar is of the firm opinion that the white scholars associated with the Muziris Heritage Project have a hidden agenda of promoting a christian history of Kerala. The untold millions spent on the quest for Muziris makes one extremely suspicious.Harishankar has been able to demonstrate that the excavations have not yielded anything of historical value and goes no to show that Pattanam could not even have been a Port during the early centuries AD. Of course, a few scholars seem to have an overt interest in the St Thomas tradition but that is not shared by all. The involvement of the Archaeological Survey of India led to the stoppage of the excavation on the ground that the professional practices employed during the Excavation were questionable and added to this is the rather curious fact that the Team Leader of the excavation was a historian trained in Modern Indian History.

DR Harishakar has completely demolished the claims set forth by the Pattanam Excavations and it will not be easy for them to refute the allegation made in this short but interesting book.

Between Colombo and the Cape: Eighteenth Century Letters

Between Colombo and the Cape:
Letters in Tamil, Dutch and Sinhala Sent to Nicolaas Ondaatje
1728-1737.
Herman Tieken
New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 2015

The book under review is a study of 71 letters received by Nicholaas Ondaatje, a Tamil practitioner of native medicine who was exiled to Cape Town for some act of misdemeanor by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) which capture Ceylon in 1654. Nicholaas was sentenced to spend 10 years on Robben Island and he seems to have worked out a fairly comfortable stay for himself at Cape Town.
The judicial order sentencing him has been lost, but some documents of the case has survived and the editor has pieced together a fairly complete picture of the life of this individual in exile. There are few non western sources for the study of the social history of the early eighteenth century and the letters in this book are certainly an important source of documentation. In Pondicherry we have the journal of the dubash, Ananda Ranga Pillai, a diary which offers insight into the emerging consciousness of individuality and self identity.

The family of this Nicholaas Ondaatje was of Tamil origin and the name seems to have been a Dutch rendering of a Tamil name, Ontacci, a contraction of the name, ukantacci, a sub sect of the Chetti community. It appears that this group was originally dealing in salt and later shifted to trading in pearls. As a convert to the religion of the Dutch, a member of the Reformed Dutch Church, Nicholaas Ondaatje was accused of changing the date for the celebration of the Holy Communion. Nicholaas was able to communicate in three languages--Tamil, Dutch, and Sinhala.  Of the 71 letters received by him when he was in exile 64 were in Tamil, 6 in Dutch and only one in Sinhala. The letters essentially were from his family, an extended kin network consisting of maternal and paternal uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters. Interestingly, the corespondents were all males leading to the suspicion the female literacy was rather low. the 71 letters were from 29 individuals most of whom can be identified as members of the family of Nicholaas.

Nicholaas seems to have carried on some sort of trading activity while he was in Cape town and most of his letters deal with the commodities that he traded. Requests for cloth  were frequent and the source of the cloth could only be from South India, the Coromandel coast. Cloth was shipped to Ceylon from Nagapattinam which was under the Dutch at this time and Tranquebar which was under the Danish East India Company. An interesting point that comes across in the letters is the request for seeds from Sri Lanka. In one particular case, Nicholaas even requested a slave to be sent so that he could be sold in the Cape slave market and money realized. This is a rare instance of an Asian being involved in the nefarious slave trade.

This is an interesting book and historians interested in the history of the eighteenth century will find this book interesting.

History of the Indian Ocean By August Toussaint A review

https://archive.org/details/HISTORYOFTHEINDIANOCEAN_201505

History of the Indian Ocean
Auguste Toussaint

London, 1961

There are few historical studies of the Indian Ocean, unlike the Atlantic Ocean and has is now becoming apparent the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps the end of the Roman Empire in the fifth century and the disruption of the trans oceanic trade that centered around the ports of the Red Sea had a role to play in the neglect of this Ocean. Even the Ottoman intervention in the Indian Ocean following the successful conquest of Egypt is hardly taken note of in recent works which deal with the Portuguese conquest of the region in the early sixteenth century. It is not surprising the the post colonial perspective and intellectual fashions have contributed to this neglect of the history of the Indian Ocean. Nationalism demanded that each nation inscribes itself in the tableau of modernity by bestowing upon itself a History, as though the past seamlessly paved the way for the emergence of a "modern": nation-state. Indian Historiography, especially of the Modern Period is a prime example of this trend.

The consequence of such neglect has been the benign neglect of the Ocean. Like the Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean was not a barrier. It facilitated trade between the two most advanced and economically most powerful civilizations of the world before the advent of White countries: India and China. There have been very few studies of the historical dimensions of the Indian Ocean. August Toussaint published this book in 1961 and I have uploaded it on arcchive .org as it serves as an excellent introduction to  the Indian Ocean. The book was downloaded from the digital Archives of India and was converted into pdf by Shri Yogeswar Sastry. I have done this as this book is not easily availbele to researchers.

Asian Encounters: Exploring Connected Histories

  Asian Encounters: Exploring Connected Histories\
Ed Upinder Singh and Pandya Dhar
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014

One of the many unfortunate aspects of India's tryst with destiny is that its foundational role as a civilization has been largely ignored by historians who were quick to latch on to the notion of India as a "nation state" and its encounter with China, South east Asia and the rest of mainland Asia has been underplayed. This neglect of India's larger role in Asian history was welcomed by the newly emergent nations of the region in the post World War II epoch, even as the Americans and the French were busy fashioning their own spheres of influence in the region. The plea or construct of Autonomous History meant underplaying the civilizational role of India in bringing the written script, ideas of statecraft and kingship, architectural and iconographic themes into the region. The famous notion of Indianization was abandoned and all the states of the region marched to the beat of the nation state. Now it seems the wheel has turned a full circle and the book under review reintroduces themes which had laid dormant over the decades since decolonization. The book brings together 10 papers which have been arranged in four thematic sections. Hermann Kulke sets the historiographical  horizon in the very first paper in which he reviews the abiding influence of India on the early cultures of Southeast Asia. After having been driven underground, the study of Indian cultural influences has once again resurfaced as new excavations in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Indonesia have led to the discovery of new artifacts and sites. 

Geoff Wade has studied in depth the impact of the Ming voyages of exploration and trade in the early fifteenth century. His study is based on Chinese language sources and is an attempt at explaining the voyages of Zheng-He. There have been several interesting studies of the Ming voyages, and Geoff Wade has reexamined the political and military context of the voyages within the overarching ideological thrust toward providing a historical justification for China and its expansionist policy.  Tansens Sen has studied the military intervention of China in the Indian Ocean region and pointedly states that Indian notions of statecraft and kingship excluded the Sea. 

The studies undertaken  by Osmund Bopearachi, Yumikio Yamada, Suchandra Ghosh are interesting forays into areas which have not been studied hitherto. This book is a welcome addition to the growing body of works on Indian trade and civilizational encounter with Southeast Asia. 

MANTAI: CITY BY THE SEA, JOHN CRASWELL ET.AL An Excavation Report

Mantai: City by the Sea
John Carswell, Siran Dera Niyalaga and Alan Graham
Aichwald: Linden Soft Verlag, 2013


Unlike the Atlantic Ocean or even the Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean has remained a relatively unexplored from both the historical and archaeological perspectives. This is rather surprising as the Indian Ocean was the ocean that linked the three great civilizations of the early and medieval periods: the Chinese, Indian and the Islamic civilizations. The long shadow of colonialism and the emergence of the Nation State" meant that the countries of South east Asia in their desire for an "autonomous" history chose to disavow their long and enduring cultural and political links with India. The large number of Chinese settlers in Malaysia and other counties made China a visible cultural entity and the rise of China as a huge economic power house made the Chinese look up to China for inspiration, while India with perhaps a larger cultural footprint in the area had to see its role shrunk and truncated in the guise of revisionist historiography, Indianization as a concept for studying the early history of South east Asia was challenged on the ground that the symbols of Indian cultural presence attested to archaeologically in the form of inscriptions, votive objects, iconographical representations, place names, statuary, monumental architecture and the like are all of the elite sections of society and much of the rest of the society continued without the influence of "Indianization" until the advent of Islam in the thirteenth century. Fortunately such interpretations are now unravelling under the weight of evidence from archaeological sites all across the Indian Ocean region. Mantai in Norther Sri Lanka is one such example.

The sixth century Saiva Nayanmar, Sundarar refers to Mattodam by the Sea in one of his hymns and endows the site with a sacredness akin to Ramessvaram. The Cholas of medieval Tamil country built a Siva temple at Tirukketisvaram, close to the site of Mantai. Perhaps this temple was built as a padal perra stalam, the place that received a song in Saivite hagiography.. The medieval city of Mantai was a major entrepot and ships from both China and the Red Sea, Persian Gulf region visited the city. The excavation at this site which began in the 1920's when A M Hocart the celebrated author of Kings and Councillors began with a series of trenches close to the earthen walls. The excavations were disturbed for more than 20 years due to the LTTE insurgency and after the restoration of calm in the Island, the excavations were completed and the Report was published. John Carswell who is an international authority on Chinese trade ceramics of the Tang,, Sung and Ming periods has written the Report in a lucid and careful manner.The material found in Mantai includes (!) Chinese ceramics, (2) Arab/ Islamic Ware (3) Glass shards and a few pieces of European/ Mediterranean ware.

The material found in Mantai suggests that the ships carrying merchandise from the Red Sea reached the entrepot  of Mantai by sailing with the monsoon winds, a point strong suggested by Pliny's reference to Hippuros identified with Kudarimalai which lies south of Mantai.  From this port ships sailed to South East Asia and then further afield to China.

The Excavation report is divided into five sections' Background, The Excavations, Pottery and Artifacts, General Conclusions and lastly educational programme. The publishers have done a splendid job in bringing out this publication and historians will have to revise their understanding of trade in the region after reading this report.

Coolie Woman:The Odyssey of Indenture, Gaiutra Bahadur: A Review

 Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture
Gaiutra Bahadur

London: Hurst &Co, 2013

The Conquest of India by the East India Company, the agrarian changes that came in its wake particularly the transition to commercial agriculture and of course, the introduction of western education and modes of governance changed the historical landscape of India. Concomitant with this very important historical transformation there was another a silent revolution whose social and cultural dimension are the subject of the book under review. The Western world, particularly the United Kingdom, took the lead in the abolition of Slave Trade and the House of Commons formally outlawed Slave trade by British citizens and UK went on very successfully to impose the abolition of Slave Trade by the force of its navy, a subject studied by Christopher Lyod. India was at hand to provide the labor required to run the agrarian economy of the British Empire founded on Sugar and in the case of the USA, Cotton. Emperor Sugar and King Cotton demanded labour on a scale that  the abolition of Slavery made a monumental necessity. The West was able to assume the high moral ground of opposing Slavery as an economic institution because India was at hand to provide a new kind of Slaves, the Indentured worker.

The post colonial historians attempt to dress the past by using euphemisms to hide the ugly reality of Indenture and its kinship with Slavery. The language and rhetoric of post colonialism may make the past pretty, but History has a higher purpose: to reconstruct, record and preserve the memoria of the past.. The book under review fortunately does not make this patronizing curtsey to post colonial fashion. The author appropriates the term coolie and uses this term to right contextualize the forced immigration of large number of men and a much smaller number of women to sugar plantations ion Fiji, Guyana, Surinam, South Africa and Mauritius. The West Indian Islands of Trinidad, Tobago and Jamaica  were opened up to Indian indentured labour as early as 1845, a few years after the formal ending of Slavery in 1834. There is a strong political and economic bomnd between the end of Slavery and the export of labour from India. The author, born in Guyana was educated in the USA and belongs to the generation that came of age in the 1990s and so we do not have the usual attribution of blame to this country for the horrors of Indenture. India was also an exploited country and Indenture was part and parcel of the history of exploitation.

The book deals with the conditions surrounding the migration of the author's great grand-mother, Sujaria to Guyana,  The woman was four months pregnant when she made the perilous journey from Calcutta to Guyana and the author.s grand father was born on board the Steam Ship Clyde, in 1903. She was able to trace the journey of the woman on the basis of the colonial documentation. The book is a deft combination of historical research, personal narrative and the anthropology of the indenture society in the New World.

Several years back when I was doing my Ph D at the University of Hawaii, I had the opportunity to work with Professor Brij V Lal who had just published his book Girmitiyas on the indentured labor in Fiji. I was left with the distinct feeling that as an Indian, I had to ba=ear the burden of guilt for the ills of indenture. In a faculty meeting he presented his study on Kunti, a woman who endured savage mistreatment at the nhands of both her husband and her lover. I am bringing this point only to show that gender and violence was part of the indenture experience and the author has ably documented both.

The book is based on archival research and is a good study of the history of indenture in South America.

THE INDIAN OCEAN IN ANTIQUITY

The Indian Ocean in Antiquity
ed Julian Reade
London: British Museum in association with Routledge, 2009.

The shift to the study of oceans and seas began with Fernand Braudel when he wrote his masterpiece, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II. Oceans too are now seen as important factors in history, facilitating commerce and cultural contacts and exchanges. On the one hand this approach to history seems to bring back the old discredited school of diffusion in the shaping of civilizations and cultures,the shift to oceanic contacts and exchanges has reinvigorated the study of neglected aspects of the past. The Indian Ocean whose history in the famous work of the Indian diplomat and historian, K M Panikar began with the discovery of the sea route to India from Portugal in 1498, has generally remained neglected area of historical research. Of course we have Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean by K N Choudhary, the Indian Ocean by Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean ed. by Satish Chandra and more recent works by Sanjay Subrahrmanyam the early history of the area around the coasts of India and Arabia have been long neglected. Hence the volume under review is a welcome addition to the slender quantum of published materials available.

The book edited by Dr Julian Reade is a collection of papers presented in a Conference held several decades back in the British Museum and has been republished recently. The earlier study by Toussaint concentrated on the post da Gama Era while this volume deals with the early phase. There have been q few stdidies on the contacts between the Harappan Culture and the contemporary civilizations of West Asia but little work has been done on the archaeological and historical evidence pertaining to the navigation along the Arabian Sea whose antiquity as an important trading area is established by the Periplus whose translation by Lionell Casson has once again drawn attention to the early economic and cultural exchanges. The location of emporia all along the Persian Gulf and the coasts of India suggest that a trsding network had already been created anf the Greek navigator was only drawing attention to a pre existing fact. Unfortunately, the Periplus is read in the context of the so called Tamil poetical works which were put together as anthologies in the 7th or even the 8th centuries thereby distorting the historical contexts of both the early navigational endevours and of course, the Tamil past.

The article by Jutris Zarins dealing with the trasde in Obsidian is extremely interesting and needs to be followed by by studies in India and South east Asia. The study of Sasanian trade in the Indian Ocean and the traces of the Parthians known in India as the Sakas are both relevant to Indian historiography. The study of Glass which has been recovered in Arihamedu and Pattanm as well as Mantai needs to be follwed by detailed scientific examinations of the internal structure and properties so that the history of glass technology can be studies. Unfortunately lazy "archaeologists" from Tamil Nadu have taken to trumpetting Tamil claims which only goes to show that archaeology of Tamil Nadu is only a hand maiden of ethnic pride, Ian Glover's study of the archaeological evidence of "Indianization" is informative.

The short paper by John Carswell on the Mantai excavation is an important contribution. The Report on the excavation has recently been published but unfortunately not available to this historian.

This is a good book and all serious scholars and researchers on early Indian Ocean must read this book.