Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [109]
The motive for the trade is also hinted at by the Sanskrit names that the Indians gave to parts of this eastern world. Śri Lanka was known as Tāmradvīpa, ‘copper island’, or Tāmrapaī, ‘copper-leafed’; the land beyond the eastern ocean as Suvaadvīpa, Suvaabhūmi, ‘the isle, or the land, of gold’. These names survived to be taken up, or translated, by Greek explorers, Taprobanē for Śri Lanka, and Khrysē Khersonēsos, ‘Golden Peninsula’, for South-East Asia. There is little in these countries’ known geology to suggest that the names were well founded. But the quest for precious metals was clearly part of the legend of such ancient navigation. One of the most evocative tales in the Sanskrit equivalent of the 1001 Nights, Somadeva’s Kathāsaritsāgaram (’Ocean of the Streams of Story’), recounts the quest of a Brahman, setting out for his lost loves in Kanakapurī, ‘The City of Gold’, located somewhere beyond ‘The Islands’. One of the merchants he meets on his way has a father who returns rich from a long voyage to a far island, his ship loaded specifically with gold.
More realistically, there was scope for immense profit either in entrepôt business, exchanging Indian aromatic resins (including frankincense (kundura) and myrrh (vola)) for Chinese silk, or in obtaining local products such as camphor (karpūra) from Sumatra, sandalwood (candana) from Timor or cloves (lavanga) from the Moluccas.28
Indians set out for this Land of Gold from all round the subcontinent. Evidently, the shortest journey was from Gaua (modern Bengal) and Kalinga: we know that Fa-Xian and Yi-Jing took ship from Tamralipti. But the prevailing wind across the Bay of Bengal from June to November is south-westerly, so the most direct sailing was to be had from the southern shores, and this is the area of all the ports noted by the Greeks.29 A handful of inscriptions in Tamil, turning up in Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, confirm this route. The ports of the western coast also had their share of departures for the east: an old Gujarati proverb mentions the wealth of sailors back from Java.30
More interesting for us than the motivation of the Indian sādhava is how they would have appeared to the receiving populations, known to the Indians as dvīpāntara, ‘islanders’. These people, Burmese in the east, Austro-Asiatic in the south (Mon, Khmer, or Cham), Malay in the islands, already used bronze, irrigated rice, domesticated cattle and buffalo, and had ships and boats of their own. They would not have been able to read or write. The Indians would have presented themselves to the local chiefs as visiting dignitaries, probably claiming royal connections back across the ocean, and offering gifts, and perhaps medicines and charms. Winning favour with local elites, some went on to take their daughters in marriage, and thus sow the seeds of new dynasties.
What the Indians brought with them was literacy, and an ancient culture with a vast array of rules (the sutras of the Hindu Dharmaśāstras, or the suttas of the Buddhist Tipiaka) for every occasion. There was the whole mythology of Hinduism, making Agastya, Krishna, Rama and the Pandava brothers into household names, as they have been ever since in South-East Asia. There was the distinctive idea of the complementary roles of king and priest, admittedly at sixes and sevens over which was ultimately the higher, but clearly in a relationship of mutual support. This relationship could underwrite, and make permanent, the legitimacy of rulers. And so the rulers that the Indians