The Archaeology of Knowledge Traditions of the Indian Ocean World

Himanshu Prabha Ray, Himanshu Prabha Ray

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000220735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This book examines knowledge traditions that held together the fluid and overlapping maritime worlds of the Indian Ocean in the premodern period, as evident in the material and archaeological record. It breaks new ground by shifting the focus from studying cross-pollination of ideas from textual sources to identifying this exchange of ideas in archaeological and historical documentation.

The themes covered in the book include conceptualization of the seas and maritime landscapes in Sanskrit, Arabic and Chinese narratives; materiality of knowledge production as indicated in the archaeological record of communities where writing on stone first appears; and anchoring the coasts, not only through an understanding of littoral shrines and ritual landscapes, but also by an analysis of religious imagery on coins, more so at the time of the introduction of new religions such as Islam in the Indian Ocean around the eighth century.

This volume will be of great interest to researchers and scholars of archaeology, anthropology, museum and heritage studies, Indian Ocean studies, maritime studies, South and Southeast Asian studies, religious studies and cultural studies.

1
Introduction

Himanshu Prabha Ray

The Danish underwater archaeologist Thijs J. Maarleveld raised the crucial issue of the extent to which maritime cultural heritage and maritime archaeology can be labelled as ‘international’, even though practitioners often regard themselves as a part of an international academic community.¹

Heritage issues are part of the international dialogue and cooperation projects entailing ‘culture and development’ are stimulated worldwide and for most laudable reasons (UNESCO 1995). Politically, such projects are a means rather than a goal…. In other words, both in national and in international cooperative situations, it is local, regional or national politics that define the relevance of any attention at all, as quite rightly professional advice is embedded in or made relevant through competent authorities.²

How is this gulf between national histories and maritime cultural heritage to be negotiated keeping in mind trans-national mobility and connectivity in the ancient past?

Histories of new nation states written in the post-colonial period have focused on present political boundaries and traced the history of these political entities overlooking not only the larger context within which historical developments took place, but also connectivity across the seas.³ In the context of the history of South and Southeast Asia, Farish Noor has shown that the colonial period marked an epistemic and politicoeconomic break between South and Southeast Asia, thus severing the long cultural, ethnic and commercial links between the Indian subcontinent and maritime Southeast Asia. This saw the demise of the fluid and overlapping world of an interconnected Asia that had hitherto been defined and controlled by Asians themselves.⁴ How is this overlapping Indian Ocean world to be identified in the archaeological record and what knowledge traditions held it together?

Recent research indicates that intellectual advances in many fields were the outcome of cross-pollination of ideas resulting from travels across the Indian Ocean world in the premodern period. The interchange of ideas across societies and regions created the dynamism necessary for the emergence and sustenance of extensive civilizations and the movement of scholars and students. The challenge is to identify this exchange of ideas in the archaeological and historical record and to initiate interdisciplinary dialogue across several disciplines on the shared culture across the seas. The chapters in this edited book address this challenge through three themes: conceptualizing the seas (Reddy, Malhan, Cobb and Agius), the materiality of knowledge production (Bauer and Johansen, Suvrathan, and Lambourn) and anchoring the coasts (Kulshreshtha, Vadillo, Nicolas and Bhandare).

Traditionally historians have used accounts in Greek, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit and so on to emphasize the predominance of certain language groups in maritime networks, such as ‘Roman trade’, ‘Arab trade’, the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’ or the ‘Buddhist Cosmopolis’. In contrast, conceptualization of the seas and maritime landscapes has been neglected. Four scholars address the subject from different vantage points: Srinivas Reddy from a reading of the Sanskrit Puranas and the narrative of the ‘Churning of the Ocean’; Tara Sheemar Malhan from an analysis of the narrative Sanskrit text, the Kathāsaritsāgara; Dionisius Agius based on Al-Maqdisī’s (d. after 378/988) description of the coastal landscape of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea; and Matthew Cobb with reference to the kingdom of Da Qin and its people, dating from roughly the mid-third to seventh centuries CE as described in Chinese sources.

Another theme of interest is the spread of writing across the ocean, especially scripts such as Brahmi used for inscribing on pottery from Berenike on the Red Sea coast to Vietnam on the east. The use of a diverse variety of scripts for inscriptions is also evident in the Hoq cave on the island of Socotra, as discussed in the next section. The spread of scripts has generally been associated either with trade or kings, such as Ashoka of the third century BCE Mauryan dynasty. The discussion in secondary literature has tended to focus on decontextualized inscriptions, such as the Ashokan writings on rocks and pillars found across the Indian subcontinent. An important site in this regard is that of Maski in Raichur District of Karnataka. Ashokan edicts inscribed on rocks were first discovered at Maski in 1915, and for the first time, the name of the king was deciphered. Earlier inscriptions had referred to the ruler as ‘devanampiya’ or beloved of the gods. Despite the importance of the site, little attention has been given to its archaeological context. This is an issue taken up in the chapter by Bauer and Johansen in the second section on ‘Materiality of Knowledge Production’.

The emphasis on material evidence continues in the chapter by Suvrathan who uses archaeological data from the three sites of Berenike, Egypt, Tissamaharama, Sri Lanka and Arikamedu, India to analyse the nature of connectedness in the premodern Indian Ocean. The final chapter in the section by Lambourn centres on the materiality of writing in exchanges between the Middle East and South Asia before 1500. More specifically, it focuses on the writing supports and marking technologies used in the correspondence of Middle Eastern sojourners in South Asia, as documented in twelfth-century material from the Cairo Genizah.

The shrine was a crucial component of the Asian landscape around which various social, economic and political systems and institutions evolved, as discussed in the third section of the book. Kulshreshtha highlights the coastal shrine at Khor Rori on the Arabian coast, while Veronica Walker Vadillo draws the temples at Angkor in Cambodia through an analysis of the nautical iconography.

Epistemic pluralism and the transmission of knowledge through means other than through textual transmission such as recitation, performance, temples and medical therapies were raised in a 2002 Presidential Address to the American Academy of Religion. Relevant to this chapter is the fact that the first play to be performed for the gods, as narrated in the Nāṭyaśāstra of Bharata dated from 200 BCE to 200 CE, was the churning of the ocean of milk by the gods and the demons, which resulted in releasing the jewels from the ocean. Not only is this story prominently sculpted in several temples in India and Southeast Asia including in a huge 49-m-wide panel at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, but it is also a popular theme for dance performances.⁵ Nicolas addresses the theme from the perspective of Sanskrit musical terms used in inscriptions. He concludes that in Old Javanese inscriptions, there was extensive use of these terms during the Central Javanese period from the ninth to the tenth centuries, but then it virtually disappeared during the East Javanese period starting from the mid-tenth century onwards. Coins have generally been studied as instruments of trade and acculturation used by Empires in antiquity, such as the secondary writings on finds of Roman coins in India and the presence of Roman colonies in the subcontinent. The chapter by Shailendra Bhandare shifts the goal posts and examines how a coin’s appearance is determined and why some ideas develop wide currency, while others remain firmly local.

Thus, the book raises new questions and opens several avenues for further research on the diverse means of communication across the Indian Ocean and ways in which this has encouraged dialogue between different communities and shaped the languages and knowledge traditions as well as impacting various religious developments in the area. In the remaining part of this chapter, I would like to place this edited study within the larger context of secondary writings on the theme.

Sacred Geography of the Coast: The Archaeological Evidence

An important aspect of fourth- to seventh-century maritime networks is the development of multi-religious sites along the Bay of Bengal littoral.⁶ Nagarjunakonda is located about 150 km inland from the coastal site of Machilipatnam, identified with Maisolos mentioned by the Greek geographer Ptolemy. More than 30 Buddhist establishments, 19 Hindu temples and a few medieval Jain shrines were unearthed in several seasons of archaeological excavations conducted at the site after its discovery in 1920 until its submergence in 1960. The data from Nagarjunakonda is an indicator of the multi-religious networks that extended across the seas by the middle of the first millennium CE and evident at several sites across Southeast Asia.

U Thong is located 45 km from the Mekong in central Thailand and was previously more accessible from the coast than at present. The fourth-century BCE burial site of Ban Don Ta Phet, which has yielded a rich haul of goods obtained through maritime networks, is located 25 km south of U Thong.⁷ A copper-plate inscription in Sanskrit was found at the site in 1957 and published by Çoedes in 1958. In the inscription, king Harsavarman donates to two Siva lingas, an issue discussed at length in secondary writings, since U Thong has been considered ‘Buddhist’.⁸ Archaeological excavations have unearthed Siva lingas and Visnu images now housed in the museum at the site. This multi-religious nature of early sites has been considered the norm for both U Thong and Nakhon Pathom on the west bank of the Ta Chin river, which is closer to the Gulf of Thailand and several other sites in other parts of Southeast Asia.

The Go Thap archaeological site in Dong Thap province of central Vietnam was declared a national relic by the Vietnamese Government in 1998 and a Special National Relic in 2012, known both for its rich archaeological heritag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part 1 Conceptualising the seas: Introduction
• Part 2 The materiality of knowledge production: Introduction
• Part 3 Anchoring the coasts: Introduction
• Index