Before European naval power began its history in Southeast Asia just 500 years ago, there were three prior external naval assaults on this vital hinge of commerce. Each was remarkable, and baffling in its motivation. Two came from Chinese ports — the Mongol-led expeditions of the 1290s and the enormous fleets under the Muslim Ming Admiral Zheng He in the early 1400s. The earliest and least well documented was the expedition mounted by the Tamil Chola Dynasty in 1025, evidently from its major port of Nagapattinam, against ports associated with Sriwijaya in Sumatra and the Peninsula. The 600th anniversary of Zheng He's first expedition in 1405 came and went with much fanfare but virtually sheds no further light on the motivation for this eccentric moment — although the consequences of that intervention for Southeast Asia have now been very well covered in Southeast Asia in the fifteenth century: The China factor, ed. Geoff Wade and Sun Laichen (NUS Press and University of Hong Kong University Press, 2010).
This welcome volume on the Chola intervention, already 15 years in advance of its millennial anniversary, does succeed in clarifying the likely motivation and character of the last Indian intervention in the Southeast Asian region before the British–Indian conquest of Java in 1811. It does this not by putting new data on the table — the same rather few hard facts are returned to repeatedly by different authors. The achievement of this book and the 2007 conference that lay behind it was to bring together discourses that have regrettably engaged little in a much-needed conversation. Indian, and particularly Tamil, scholars have focused on the inscriptions and texts in Indian languages, particularly the one specific source on the expedition, the 1027 CE Tirukkadaiyur inscription on a temple in Tanjavore (romanised and translated here in an appendix, pp. 279–80). Sinologists have worked over the often-puzzling Chinese sources describing the southern barbarian lands and their ‘tribute’ missions to the Middle Kingdom. Finally, archaeologists have recently made considerable progress in documenting the presence of Chinese ceramics of the Song era around the Indian Ocean, and their association with historically recorded sites. The first two of these types of source have been assembled and translated systematically in two appendices occupying the last 45 pages of the book. The third is represented in this volume by Noboru Karashima's work in southern India and that of P. Shanmugam (of Madras University) in Indonesia, while other archeological evidence from Southeast Asia presented at the 2007 conference will appear primarily in a companion volume on Early Indian influence in Southeast Asia edited by Pierre-Yves Manguin and others.
Hermann Kulke's introduction to this book records rather disappointingly that the main upshot of the conference was to confirm ‘the conundrum’ of the Chola raids due to lack of evidence. But his own paper and particularly that of Tansen Sen on the Chola–Sriwijaya–China triangle, and to a lesser extent Gokul Seshadri on Nagapattinam, Karashima and Subbaralaya Anjuvanam on the South Indian trading guilds, and Hema Devare on Indian cotton cloth exports, do permit some greater clarity on the problem. In essence, as Sen explains, the advent of the Song in China (960), the Fatimids in Egypt (969) and the Cholas in South India (985) increased substantially the traffic on the sea route to China, largely displacing overland routes. For all the key players, but particularly for the Cholas and Sriwijaya, dominating the two most strategic staging-posts of the maritime route in South and Southeast Asia respectively, and controlling access to the vital China market was crucial to their power. The growing traffic between them, and between both and China, is demonstrated by the increasing amounts of Chinese ceramics in key South and Southeast Asian ports from the tenth century, and by the ritual interactions between the three corners of Sen's triangle. In 1003 Sriwijaya's envoys to China reported that their king had erected a Buddhist shrine in honour of the Chinese emperor, and requested bronze bells to decorate it. In 1005, the Sriwijaya ruler financed the construction of a Buddhist vihara at the principal Chola (and Hindu) port of Nagapattinam (where a ‘Chinese pagoda’ had already been erected in the eighth century, according to Gokul Seshadri, during the first period of intense interaction). In the following decade, traders/envoys purporting to represent Srivijayan kings presented precious stones, bronze lamps and ‘Chinese gold’ to (Hindu?) temples in Nagapattinam, while in 1015 King Rajendra Chola confirmed his patronage of the Sriwijayan Budddhist vihara at Nagapattinam. To complete the triangle, Chinese records report the first Cholas ‘tribute’ mission in 1015, and a steady series of 16 missions from Sriwijaya in the period 960–1017, six of them in the last 15 of these years (Kulke, pp. 6–8; Sen, pp. 66–7).
While the first generation of Indian writers interpreted these ritual interactions as a sign of harmonious relations preceding the Chola attacks, Tansen Sen looks more closely and critically at the Chinese sources to show the growing political strains on the relationship. The traders who kept the interaction flowing were no doubt anxious to placate and manipulate the three sets of rulers in their own interests, using whatever Hindu, Buddhist or Confucian rituals and networks that worked to their advantage (though Sriwijayan envoys were increasingly Muslim in the period). Sriwijaya had a very long-standing stake in exploiting the Chinese imperial preoccupation with ‘tribute’ to assert an effective monopoly on Southeast Asian trade to China. The Cholas were new and very ambitious players in this game, conquering one South Asian port after another in an obvious strategy of monopolising the long-distance maritime trade through this zone. But Sriwijaya had the inside track in funnelling this trade through the Southeast Asian portals to China, and naturally insisted to the Chinese court that the Cholas, like Javanese and other rivals in Southeast Asia, were but subsidiaries of Srivijaya who should be given trade access only through their agency. This was likely to have economic consequences for the Chola traders seeking direct access to China, and put them on the side of encouraging an extension of Chola expansionary policy eastwards.
Interestingly, the aggressive tactic appears to have failed in its purpose, since in 1106 the Chinese Council of Rites was still classifying the Cholas as ‘subject to Sriwijaya’ (Sen, p. 69). However, this is probably an artifact of the extreme conservatism of Chinese policy towards the Southern barbarians, which may have insisted on regarding joint missions that came from Cholas and Sriwijaya as essentially Sriwijayan, the better-known category at court.
Among the other interesting new data on the context for the Chola raids (thought by both Sen and Kulke to have included an earlier 1017 raid as well as that of 1025) are the chapters by Karashima and Subbaralaya (of the Tamil University of Thanjavur) on the South Indian merchant guilds that flourished especially in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries. Karashima's team assembled all the 314 inscriptions pertaining to these guilds, including four in Southeast Asia, from Sumatra and the isthmian ports of the Peninsula. Although most of these were essentially Hindu and centred around the cult of a particular deity or temple, both authors report new research on the Anjuvannam, for which inscriptions record rights and grants to particular merchants with Jewish, Christian and Muslim names. Was this also a trade guild in the same sense, or rather a category of entitlement and protection accorded to foreign merchants from West Asia?
One should be warned that the editing of this volume has been light. The papers do not all have new research or analysis to report, there is considerable repetition of material between them, and almost no acknowledgement in any papers except the Introduction of the existence of other papers or of the valuable primary sources in the appendices. Karashima's two chapters in the book have overlapping material, including the same table repeated (pp. 53, 137). The index is very valuable, but it would have been nice to have also a list of illustrations, many of which seem important including the beguiling cover, which is nowhere explained.
Still, this is a valuable advance towards bridging the gap that opened up between Indian and Southeast Asian scholarship in the 1950s. It is a fine first product of the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
