INDIA’S OCEAN?
An adventurous book, weighed down by motherland-lubbing
The Indian Ocean seems to drive intrepid travellers. The coconut palm originated somewhere here before riding ocean currents with the single-minded purpose of world domination. The coco-de-mer, a more exotic, butt-shaped cousin, travelled from the island of Praslin to the Maldives and elsewhere, attracting much speculation for centuries before its home in the Seychelles was discovered. Globe Skimmers, a dragonfly species, are said to ride monsoon winds to traverse 14,000 km in an annual round trip between South India and East Africa. A slightly less epic journey took settlers from Indonesia—a country named after its location in the ocean—to Madagascar centuries ago.
Having listened to such stories, I contemplated some form of flying tackle to land the book as soon as I spotted it at the store. Luckily for all parties, the gentleman handling it put it down and moved on. The title seemed adroitly pointed towards a mythological manthan just as much as it evoked movement, migration and mixing. The Ocean of Churn is not the most euphonious phrase, but the promise extended, that of explaining the ocean’s impact on human history, seemed like reason enough to press forward.
Sanjeev Sanyal, whose previous books include Land of the Seven Rivers (2012) and The Indian Renaissance (2008), lays out two ways in which the Indian Ocean rim has been written about. Eurocentric views treat prior history as if it never happened. While indigenous accounts try to remedy this, they end up offering a narrow focus, favouring a particular country rather than aiming for an understanding of how things are tied to one another across the region. This book is meant to remedy the shortcomings of both.
Sanyal offers us the proposition that a coastal rather than a continental focus might be such a remedy. He begins with a rather gripping story—the search for a successor to the Pallava crown brings to Kanchi a 12-year-old princeling from Cambodia who fights off pretenders to ascend the throne as Nandivarman II, and declares himself a pure Pallava despite his foreign origins.
The introduction identifies two broad trends that have marked the region’s history. One is the unacknowledged involvement of Indian soldiery in key events in the history of the region—a pattern that begins in the days of Alexander the Great. The other such trend is the connection between a strong matrilineal tradition in the region owing to largely male migrations.
The ten chapters that follow traverse the geological past of the region, the many migrations that populated it, the coming of urban civilisations, empire-building in the subcontinent, the arrival of Islam, trade across the region, the arrival of explorers looking for spice, colonisation, and its aftermath.
Sanyal aims his book at a lay audience, and brings to the task he has set for himself a combinatory excellence. The book takes the reader into the arcana of genetics and archaeology whilst staying readable. The author draws on an impressive array of sources and documents them carefully, and keeps a kind of conversation going even in the endnotes. His capacity for bringing history to the reader through a sharp eye for the most up-to-date material and their implications is commendable— notable among these is a dramatic archaeological discovery made at the Hyderabad University in 2015 which pushes Iron Age timelines in South India back to 2400 BC.
Among the book’s other charms are a gift for wryness. We find that the provenance of the name Andhra Pradesh lies in Satavahana self-description and that their place of origin is now in Telangana. The 17th century traveller Robert Knox records that Sinhala men respond violently later in life to endearing home-names given in childhood. Sanyal observes that present-day Bengali and Oriya readers would empathise.
Sanyal’s chief achievement, through the book, is an ability to continually prise revelatory little nuggets out of history’s unyielding rock. The Malay term for ‘Indians’, keling, comes from the fact that the first traders to operate there set out from the kingdom of Kalinga. Herodotus’s fanciful stories about how cinnamon is sourced are still knocking around when the spice traders arrive, suggesting that Asian trade monopolies depended on skills with cooking up good stories.
The author’s eye for the small, telling detail ranges from the quaint and the charming to the truly bizarre. We