Welcome you all on the behalf of Team India First, to our discussion of the day, the Medicare history of India. India First, as you know, is a public discussion forum, which was floated around three years back, and it was floated because lots of us thought that the public discussion in JNU is going downhill. It is going to a path of anarchism, which we have seen in the last few days.

So India First as a forum was aimed at reviving the JNU legacy of debate and discussion for which it is known for. And we at JNU, we all know that history is a very hot topic for the JNU students. We always discuss the past and present and the future of JNU.

But as the history we discuss in this campus, we are always missing out certain things. In our discussion in history, in tribal history, in Dalit history, it is always lacking. In our discussion of history, the history of technology is always lacking.

In our discussion of history, India's interaction with the world is always lacking. As you know, India has always been a trading civilization. Since the Harappan times, India has been having contacts with all the corners of the world, from the Roman Empire, Arabia, Africa, to Southeast Asia.

And this interaction has shaped India's civilization in a decisive manner. So to discuss on this issue, we have with us Sanjeev Sanyal, who hardly needs an introduction. He is a leading financial economist and he is also a best-selling author.

His book, Bank of Selvageewa, History of India's Geography is one of the best-selling history books in India. So I request Sanjeev, please come. Thank you Abhinav.

I am a little concerned that I have been asked to bring order to disorder. None of my students through my educational career would have believed, none of my teachers in my educational career would have believed that I would be called on to do something like that. The theme of my talk today is the maritime history of India and the reason I think it may be interesting to many of you is that India is one of the great maritime countries in the world through history and unfortunately much of the history that we learn in our textbooks is very much continental oriented.

So if you aren't a specialist, you could be forgiven for thinking that Indian history is really about a series of dynasties who ruled Pataliputra, followed by a series of dynasties who ruled Delhi, all the way to the present day. So, my idea is to hopefully give you some flavor of another history and it is not just a theoretical, sentimental view of history because it has genuine implications for the way we think about our world today. Because if you take a continental sort of Delhi-centric view of Indian history, you will get the impression that our neighbors, our neighborhood is about China and Pakistan.

But if in fact, if you think about a maritime worldview, then our neighbors are Indonesia on one side, Oman on the other side and not just taking into account of Sri Lanka and Maldives, but even further out perhaps as far as Vietnam, because that is sort of in a sense the ecosystem of our history and so I am going to give you a flavor of that. I don't have a very long period of time and I don't want to bore you with a long monologue. So I will be necessarily selective in the way I am going through it, just to keep the story flowing, but hopefully I will be able to give you some sense of it.

Incidentally, what I am talking about is to some extent derived from a book I will be publishing later this year, it's called the Brief History of India's Geography. It has a main title but we haven't yet decided on that, but it's a Brief History of India's Geography. Now the landscape of the Indian Ocean that we are going to deal with, one thing to remember about it is that it is a living landscape, it is not a dead landscape.

The coastlines are continuously changing due to tectonic as well as rising and shifting shorelines and this is a very important thing to remember as we go through much of what I will speak about. Now if you came to this part of the world, the Indian Ocean rim, during the last Ice Age, which is more than 8-9000 years ago when it ended, but really at its peak about 14-14000 years ago, the coastline that you would have seen would have been very very different. Much of the world's water was stuffed in these massive ice sheets that were covering much of the Northern Hemisphere but also Southern Hemisphere and the water level was as much as between 100-150 meters below where it is now.

So as a result, for example, all of the Persian Gulf was actually a flat plain. What you see now as Gujarat was well inside inland and the coastline kind of was a straight line which kind of went down South. Sri Lanka was a part of the Indian mainland and all of the islands of Southeast Asia, almost all of them were part of one large land mass which we now call Sundaland.

In fact the ancestors of the Australian Aborigines actually literally walked across all of Southeast Asia and then made a small hop across to Australia. So that was the landscape. Now starting around 12000 years ago, these melting glaciers and ice sheets began to fill out these coastlines and from around 12000 years ago, you have for example the Persian Gulf getting flooded, the Indian coastline getting flooded, ultimately Sri Lanka getting separated from India and so on.

And it is possible that the memory of this event, because it's quite a catastrophic event, is remembered in the flood myths of almost all cultures across the world. So of course there is the story of Noah, but also there is the Sumerian story of Gilgamesh, the Australian Aborigines have a flood myth, the Laotians in Southeast Asia have a flood myth and of course we also have a flood myth, the story of Manu and Matsya avatar, the first avatar of Vishnu. So there are all these flood myths, very difficult to tell exact history from it, but it is tempting at least to believe that it may be a memory of these times.

But certainly by about 5000 BC or thereabouts, the coastline began to sort of resemble the coastline that we would be familiar with, but it would still be somewhat different. I'm going to start with Gujarat, because my story will start with Gujarat and the coastline of Gujarat during Harappan times would have been quite different, even from now. People think that sea levels rise in a sort of linear way and then fall in a linear way, that's actually not how it works.

Within those big falls and rises there are lots of variations. So during Harappan times, sea levels were in fact little bit higher than they are right now and the Saurashtra peninsula was in fact an island and you could actually go from the Gulf of Khambhat through past Saurashtra into what was the run of Kutch, because the run of Kutch was actually navigable and in fact not only was it navigable, it had two major rivers flowing into it. There was the Indus, which originally used to flow, in fact till the 19th century used to flow into the run of Kutch and of course there was this massive river, the Saraswati, which also flowed into this and satellite photographs clearly show that these two rivers flowed into it, even today you can, with a little bit of messing around, you can tell that there are these two old channels going into it and of course weather was, climate was also quite different, it was significantly wetter than it is now.

So what is now Baluchistan was savanna type area, much of early human migrations actually happened through Baluchistan, this is important to remember because today it's such impossible desert that we tend to think of that, you know people couldn't simply be going back and forth, that if you wanted in pre-modern times to go from Iran to India, you would actually have to go through Afghanistan, that is in fact not the case through much of history. So anyway, so you had this coastline and in that coastline cities begin to spring up in the 4th and 3rd millennium BC where they really begin to sprout out and the largest of this that we have so far discovered is a city called Dholavira. Now Dholavira is today well inland in the Rann of Kutch, as I mentioned the Rann of Kutch is now a salt plain, which occasionally has its marshy in the monsoons where by a salt plain and Dholavira is sort of like a hillock marooned in the middle of this salt plain.

But in Harappan times it would have been an island and it developed then into a major port, but there were other ports as well and one of the other ports was Lothal, which I am sure all of you from your history books will remember, it had this dry docks and so on. But the map of Gujarat that I just laid in front of you, suggests that in fact it should have been possible to go from Lothal to Dholavira by boat and similarly there was on the other side, on the northern side, an entry from what is now Dwarka, where there was a, there is still an island there called Bed Dwarka, where also a lot of Harappan artifacts have been found. So obviously we are guessing, but it seems like basically what was going on that there was this network of ports in Gujarat, where they were sailing back and forth out of it, those coming from the south would probably have gone through Lothal, which was possibly a customs post, before you reach Dholavira and there was probably another customs post for those people who were coming in from the west, at Bed Dwarka and then they made their way to Dholavira, probably did some trading and then perhaps some of these chaps made their way up north through the Indus and while the Saraswati was flowing, up to Saraswati as well.

Now who were these chaps trading with? Now we have very good evidence, that they were trading at least with the following places, because a lot of seals and Harappan goods have been found all along these areas. One of them is Oman, there is a lot of Harappan artifacts found scattered all over Iran, further inland in Bahrain, across the straits in Iran, in eastern Iran there is a newly discovered civilization called Jiroft. We don't know what they call themselves, but the area is called Jiroft, so it's called the Jiroft civilization.

It's quite possible that given where their location is, it's really far to the east of Iran and it's very very close to several Harappan sites that have been found in Balochistan, that they may have been culturally some links, not only cultural links, but they may even have been probably the same people who were passing back and forth across what I would call as the Indo-Iranian continuum and then further out towards Mesopotamia, there were all these settlements going all the way up, the Sumerian settlements and in many of them, seals and other Harappan artifacts have also been found. In fact they have even found records of a people called the Miluha, who the Sumerians claim to have been trading with, which sounds like they were Indians, there are many indications they were possibly the Harappans and there were even story about some settlements of Harappans living there. So the business of Indians living in the Middle East is not a new thing, we have been going to the Middle East for a long long time and settling there.

So that is kind of how things were, happily truddling along till something really bad happened. Around about 2000 BC and there is plenty of evidence of this, around about 2000 BC, there was a major climatic change worldwide and this is clearly shown not just in Poland records and other scientific things, it's actually shows through even in Akkadian records where they have tell us that this really bad droughts were happening and roughly at this time, the Saraswati river which incidentally at this point had already whittled down quite a lot, simply disappears and a large number of the settlements in and around that area are simply begin to be abandoned. Incidentally the old kingdom of Egypt also collapses at about this time and we suddenly see a dramatic drop in the number of Harappan artifacts that show up in all these areas.

Clearly the trade systems in this were breaking down. Now just as an aside, we have never found any Middle Eastern artifacts or even Central Asian artifacts in any Harappan site. So this is very mysterious because although the Harappans were clearly exporting stuff including people, it's entirely unclear what on earth they were importing.

Anyway with the collapse of these Harappan cities, we have clear signs that there was migration southward towards the Narmada, there was also a migration out towards the Gangetic plains, some of these sites, many of these sites show great amount of cultural continuity into what is called the later Harappan and then it fuses through later through to the Gangetic civilizations, but I am not going to go into that because my interest is maritime. Now what happens and this is where it now it gets more interesting because you will be probably quite familiar with much of what I have just talked about. Now what happens is that suddenly Central and Southern India come alive.

Now till this point for some reason we to the evidence that we have, Southern India doesn't really go through a Bronze Age. Now Harappans and all these civilizations that I mentioned were all Bronze Age civilizations and for some reason there wasn't much of a Bronze Age in Southern India and you suddenly have at about the time that the Harappan civilization are falling apart, the Iron Age suddenly appears on Southern India. They simply skip the Bronze Age and go into the Iron Age and this is very fascinating because the old idea was that these iron implements and other Iron Age essentially came to India along with these so called Aryans coming thundering down from Central Asia and it turns out that the earliest place where iron was actually found and used systematically is not even in Northern India but in and around what is now Hyderabad.

In fact just a year ago some of the oldest iron implements anywhere in the world have been found in fact inside Hyderabad University campus and so that was basically what is happening. But meanwhile a little further to the East, you have an absolute explosion of maritime activity that begins to now happen in what is now Odisha and West Bengal. The zone from the westernmost outlet of the Ganga which is the one that we now call Hooghly, all down the coast towards Chilika Lake, that coastline now just bursts out with activity.

In fact very very recently like literally a few weeks back, a major new site which is about 1500 years old has been found just outside of Bhubaneswar, a small town that has been found but there are many many smaller ports all along the coast and the Odiya now begin to do these major voyages. Firstly they begin to go slowly along the coast, so some of these Odiya sailors and merchants make their way slowly down the coast and certainly by about the 5th, 6th century BC, they begin to turn up in Sri Lanka and this is quite interesting because you would think that the people who would begin to populate Sri Lanka would be the Tamils and the Keralites who are right next door and they possibly did go to the northern bits. But the first clear signs of what would you call civilization so to speak, turns up with these people who are clearly coming from significantly further out.

Now there were already some people living there, the Veddas, but the major group of people suddenly begin to turn up and they are not just going down south, they are also going down the other way along the coast towards Southeast Asia to a place where the Isthmus of Kra, this is basically the thin strip of land from which Malaysia hangs off, now in Thailand and they are going over there and then some of them just hop across and then begin to sail across the Gulf of Thailand towards Vietnam, Southern Vietnam and Cambodia. We now actually have some records, at least in oral histories and some inscriptions and in old mythologies of what was possibly going on. In fact the founding myth of the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka is in fact the story of Prince Vijaya, who claimed to be the grandson of a lion and a princess, a bit of the story that I have some suspicions about.

He basically takes 400 or so of his followers, he is thrown out by his father by the way for behaving particularly badly and he makes his way down the coast and he turns up in Sri Lanka and it is quite interesting that these people then begin to settle in and the majority population of Sri Lanka today takes its roots back to this migration of people, of course this must have been many migrations afterwards but they take their roots back to this migration and they bring with them very interesting cultural motifs that are still alive. Let's take for example the idea of the lion. Now the lion is there in the Sri Lankan flag but where did it come from? Now if you go to Orissa and wander around in some of the more older sort of settlements of Orissa, one of the things that will strike you is that many of them have got Narasimha temples.

This is also true of Andhra by the way. Even in Puri, the older temple is not that to Jagannath but to Narasimha and even today when the bhog is first served, it's not taken directly to Jagannath but is actually taken first to Narasimha. So the worship of Narasimha or some sort of a veneration of the lion was clearly a very important part of the culture of that area, which is all very odd because that is all tiger territory now.

But there is also incidentally signs of that in Bengal, which is also tiger territory but again of course that veneration of the lion continues to this day because Durga's Vahan is a lion. So I cannot explain why it is that, may be familiarity breeds contempt, so they didn't think much of the tiger or may be the climate was different and may be there were more lions there, I do not know. But it is the case that there are plenty of lions in the iconography of this part of the world and that gets transferred and has survived to this day in the Sri Lankan flag.

Now similar thing begins to happen on the other side as these guys begin to trade with that South East Asia as well and it is quite fascinating, the name they begin to give this and I'll come back to this. They begin to call, in the Indic literature, the term Naga is very very commonly used for the people of the snake, the people of the serpent and it seems to be systematically used for people of, with oriental features. Why? Because as you will see it is a very important part of the iconography of South East Asia and how does this, what is the stories that are remembered from this time that tell us about this.

So there is a story which is very common in the inscriptions of Cambodia, Vietnam and so on, where much later the Angkor and Cham Empires rose. But the story goes somewhat like this, that there was an Indian Brahmin called Kondinia, who was sailing past the coast of what is now Southern Vietnam and Southern Cambodia, in the Mekong area and he was in the ship, he was attacked by these pirates and he being a heroic chap, he fought off the pirates and drove them away. Unfortunately what happened is that the ship was leaking as a result of this and he and his crew had to take it on to the shore in order to try and repair it.

So when they were doing this, the local tribe, which they were the snake clan, decided that they would attack them. So evidently they were surrounded and yet again Kondinia being a brave lad, took out his sword and was defending himself, when the princess of the snake clan saw him and fell in love. Her name, there are many names according to different traditions but one of the names that is often used is Soma.

So Soma, the moon faced one, saw him and fell in love and proposed marriage to him and so Kondinia, I suppose he didn't have too much of a choice, but he married her and started a dynasty, which led ultimately to the foundation of these great, much much later to the great Angkor and the Khmer civilization and of course the Cham civilization in southern Vietnam. What is fascinating about it also is that most of these lineages were matrilineal, not matriarchal, matrilineal, i.e. they trace their lineage through the female line, which is also reasonable because after all Kondinia's rise to, claim to royalty was through his wife and it's quite interesting, this kind of continues to be remembered through, for the next 1000 years plus, because you can clearly see that many of the kings come to power, both in the Khmer and in the Chams through the female line. So this remains embedded and this story then becomes the sort of the key myth on which much of south east Asian culture is built.

It is matrilineal but also the iconography of the snake. So and you see that everywhere, so in northern Malaysia, you have a major site called in the Bhujang valley, in a place what was the kingdom of Kadaram. Now think about this, it's called Bhujang valley, Bhujang means snake, snake valley and this term comes up everywhere, later on, much much later when the Cholas would create ports to trade with south east Asia, what would their port be called? It would be called Nagapatnam.

So it's very very important, the iconography of the snake and the importance of it, which I will show you. Now somewhere down the line, the Uriya discovered that this business of sailing along the coast was just too cumbersome and I suppose somebody who went down and that it was much much easier to in fact rather than try and go along the coast to south east Asia, it would be much easier to actually sail down south using the winter monsoon to Sri Lanka and then use the currents, the equatorial currents to go across to Sumatra and Java and so on. So now what happens, it's quite an interesting change in the orientation of Indian trade with south east Asia.

Earlier it was through Thailand, the Isthmus of Kra to Vietnam, now it's suddenly reorient going south to Sri Lanka and then swinging across using the current to Java, to Bali, to Sumatra and so on and there also you see this explosion of Indic culture happen at this time. Now what is interesting is while it is all very obvious in, if you go to Bali or Java etc., the enormous amount of Indian influence clearly suggests, shows you how much cultural flow was going back and forth, but very often in our, in India, we tend to assume that this was due to much much later Tamil influence, that is not the case. The real great pioneers of the eastern Indian ocean are really the Uriya and it shows through in many other things.

The slang word to this day used for Indians in much of south east Asia is the word Kalinga. Of course now it is, has a slightly derogatory meaning, but the word Kalinga or Kalinga, obviously derived from Kalinga, is the slang word used or the word used for Indians. The word for west in all Malay languages is Bharat.

So you can see that there is clearly memory on the Indonesian side about why they have even named their country after India. So there is clear memory on the south east Asian side. Now what is the memory that we have on our side of that period and interestingly it actually lives very much in many many ways, which till very recently we, even though it was right in front of our eyes, we didn't fully appreciate.

Now one of the biggest festivals of Odisha is Karthik Purnima. Now what happens in Karthik Purnima? In Karthik Purnima, basically when the Purnima happens, you are supposed to get up before sunrise and particularly the women and children are supposed to go to the river or sea or water body and put a small boat with a diya in it into the river or water body. Now what is the significance of this? The significance of this is the following, you see around about Karthik Purnima what happens, the winds change, they stop flowing from south to north and begin blowing from north to south.

So what is going on? So basically this is the point at which the Odia sailors used to go off on their voyage. So that was basically what are they doing? The family is saying goodbye to the sailors and merchants as they are setting sail and about at the same time in Cuttack, even today there is a fair called Bali Yatra, which literally means the journey to Bali. Just think about this, this is real civilizational memory right in front of our face and I have witnessed this myself couple of years ago, I went and witnessed a fascinating event on the beach in Kunarak.

They in fact do these plays and there is a story of Tapoi, those of you who are Odia may know this story, but it's a story about a young girl who is left behind with her sisters-in-law when her brothers and father go on this long voyage and how her sisters-in-law mistreat her and then she prays to Goddess Manasa and the brothers come back just in time before really bad things happen to her and rescue her. Anyway it's a folk tale but it's quite clear that this linkage with foreign travel, with maritime trade is very very alive in day to day cultural motifs and it is also shown in Kunarak temple. By the way one of the big panels in Kunarak temple is fascinating, there is a giraffe being handed over to the king.

So clearly they were not just trading in South East Asia, they were also at some point clearly beginning to trade in the Western Indian Ocean as well. Of course this Kunarak temple is from much later times that I am talking about, but nonetheless I just want to point out that this is not only happening in the Eastern Indian Ocean, you have similar stuff going on in the Western Indian Ocean as Indians begin to trade with the Roman Empire as well and the roots of this Roman Empire and what was going on has been left to us in a manual called the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. Now this is a manual which is fascinating, it's a Greek-Egyptian manual and it clearly tells us the roots that were taken by merchants coming from the Roman Empire to trade with India.

So where did this start off? There were two starting paths, you could start off either in Alexandria or you could start off in Tyre or Sidon. If you started off in Alexandria, you could go down the Nile a little bit and then there was actually a canal which connected the Nile across from what is now Cairo across to somewhere near where the Suez is. So the Suez Canal you see today is not the first version of the Suez Canal, even thousands of years ago there was a canal, the problem was of course it's a sandy area, so every time it was a real problem keeping it clean, but there were several attempts to keep it going.

There was another route, you could go further up, down the thing to the first cataract and then also there was another path to a place called Berenike, you had to cross by camel from the Nile to the coast, that was another route and then there was another route which I mentioned which was from Lebanon and what is now Israel area, across through the desert, through the ruins now of Petra, that was why Petra was so rich, because it was a caravan route and then it reached a place called Aqaba. Anyway whichever way you came, you ended up in the Red Sea and then you basically made your way down the Red Sea trading on either side of the, it's a thin narrow sea, so you traded your way down it. Incidentally the word Erythraean sea in Greek, Erythraean literally means red and that's what it really means.

Anyway having made that, they then came up to Yemen and from Yemen they made a short hop across to a small island called Socotra. Now why is it called Socotra? Its origins are incidentally Dweepa Sukhdara, the island of bliss and it was full of Indians and Arabs and it was a major trading point, there even today all kinds of graffiti left behind by Indian sailors in some of the caves there and from there you had a choice. Now the old route was then to go north to Yemen along the Baloch coast and then you went across to Gujarat and so on and then made your way down south.

Now somewhere in the first century AD, some smart guy called Hippolys discovered that you didn't have to do this rather circuitous route, you could use again the monsoon winds and sail right across to Kerala and very quickly a major port appeared in Kerala called Muthiri or Muziris, which is just a little north of modern day Cochin, it's in and around Kanganore, in a village actually called Pattanam, they have found a lot of archaeological stuff from that period. So this was suddenly, by certainly the early Roman period or even before the empire was still a republic, major trading routes were being set up. This was the period after the destruction of the great temple of the Jews, significant Jewish population also came and began to settle along this coast and so on.

So what were these guys trading with each other? Now the Peripolis tells us that the Indians were exporting among other things cotton, which was very very highly priced, especially from the Gujarat area, cotton, iron and steel goods, because as I mentioned, even while iron was an Indian invention, even in much later times, Indian metallurgy was considered of very high quality, so there was all kinds of steel and iron products and if you were coming from Muthiri area, they were trading spices, black pepper was particularly important, but also large numbers of spices that were brought in from Southeast Asia, but then made its way to Muthiri and then the Indians then, so these Indonesian spices, they made it to the Indians, which were then passed on to the Romans and so on and so forth. So this was what the Indians were exporting. So what were the Indians importing? Now among other things, Indians were importing Italian wines and very importantly, it turns out they were importing women for the royal harems.

So this leads us to one of the most important conclusions that we can draw from learning ancient maritime history, which is that even in ancient times, age-free trading parties used to involve foreign liquor and foreign escorts. Now this period saw such a lot of trade, that it caused a major problem, which was this, that although the Indians were importing lots of women and wine, they were still running a very large current account surplus. Now how do you in an ancient world pay for a current account surplus? You pay for it essentially in gold and the Romans were handing out so many millions of gold coins, that became a real problem, because if you are pushing out a lot of gold to some other country, then you don't have enough gold in your own country to print coins and the Roman Empire by the second century AD had a serious crisis and you have in the Senate, people like Pliny and others, really arguing, they have a real problem, don't have enough gold to print our own coins, we need to do something about these Indian chaps.

So Emperor Vespasian decided that he was going to introduce some sort of a ban on trade with India and he tried very hard initially. The problem was of course, both the Indians and the Jews very quickly figured out various smuggling routes and that whole thing failed. So after a while they opened up trade again, but the Romans now decided that the way they were going to deal with this, was to reduce the amount of gold in their coins.

So they began to debase their currencies. Now what did the Indians do in response? The Indians kept accepting these coins. So if you, when you go to archaeological sites across India, along the coast, you have lots of coins and depending on which period you go to, the amount of gold keeps diminishing, of course it goes up and down depending on the time, but by and large the amount of gold content keeps declining.

Now look at how this exactly looks like how the world is today. The Chinese keep running a surplus, the Americans keep running a deficit. How do the Americans pay for it? It's by printing dollars.

We keep complaining that this is going to lead to bad things, but the Chinese keep accepting them and the Americans keep printing them. In fact they can't print enough, because they are not printing enough because the dollar is still appreciating. So this unfortunately is the way the world works.

This was true of Roman times, it's true today. So this is another discussion, but one of the reasons I keep saying that equilibrium as a basis for economics is complete bunkum. There has never been equilibrium and never will be.

Anyway all this good stuff was going on, then around about the 6th, 7th century, the balance of power began to shift and of course it culminates suddenly, of course it starts out initially with the Arabs becoming more involved, but of course with the sudden rise of Islam, the Arabs become very very powerful and so the entire western part of the Indian Ocean suddenly comes in the control of the Islamic Caliphate and they impose them for the next thousand years or so, a little less than thousand years and almost total information blackout towards Europe and this is the reason that the likes of Vasco di Gama and Columbus would have so much trouble trying to find out information about India, because although in ancient times the Europeans knew a lot about India, they were really blacked out for a significant period of time, but that does not mean that the Arabs themselves didn't take advantage of the situation, they were heavily trading with India. Not many people realize that the second oldest mosque in the world is in India, in fact not very far from the site of Mucchiri, Muziris, it's called the Cherumen Mosque, it was built while the Prophet was still alive, in fact before he had even conquered Mecca, he was still in Medina and very likely the merchants who built it may have personally known the Prophet, so it's quite amazing that India actually has one of the oldest mosques in the world and the second oldest mosque in the world, it is also as I said, has the oldest continuous Jewish community world, which are also from roughly the same area, it also has one of the oldest Christian population in the world, which is also incidentally in and around the Muziris area and there is some controversy over whether or not St. Thomas actually came to India or not, but it is fair to say that early Christians did come to India and settled in India very very early on, much of their liturgy was written in Syriac, which is very similar to Aramaic, which is the language which Jesus himself would have used, so this community and I am telling you this is just one small couple of districts in Kerala, similar stories can be told all the way along the coast up north, I mean various communities, various points in time came, of course the other famous community that would come and settle here would be the Zoroastrians or Parsis and so on, so this is why, because there was such a lot of trade going back and forth, these ancient communities had a footprint in India and when many of these communities got wiped out in their homelands, India somehow managed to carry on a memory of it and with the destruction of the Syrian Christian community just in the last two or three years in Syria, it is fair now to say that the Syrian Christian community in India is now officially the oldest continuous Christian community in the world. So that's quite an amazing history to have.

Now meanwhile, a lot of trade was happening on the eastern side as well. Now very often the ideas that Indians have is that the influence of India always goes out towards Southeast Asia, that is not the case, it was not as if the Southeast Asians were sitting around saying, the Indians have arrived, let's take some Gyan from them and not at all, they were doing their own thing too. So the Indonesians for example in the 8th, 9th, 10th centuries began to do their own explorations and in fact the first human beings to colonize Madagascar, just off the coast of Africa, were actually Indonesians, it's quite surprising because Madagascar is actually right next to the origin of the human species, but somehow the Africans did not colonize Southeast Asia, it was the Indonesians who did so.

But they were also interacting with India and there was lots of give and take. Nalanda University of which we are all very very proud, was partly funded by the Sumatran Kings, the Srivijaya Kings of Sumatra. So foreign funded universities is not a new thing in India.

But even some of the most famous kings of India, may in fact have been of Southeast Asian origin and of course there is huge influence in the North East, which I am not even getting into because that's not a maritime influence, but and it can be a subject of another session. But even in Southern India, one of the greatest kings of India was a guy called, the Pallava King called Nandi Varman II. Now the story of Nandi Varman II is quite fascinating because Nandi Varman II has left us his story on the panels of the Vaikunth Perumal Temple in Kanchi, where it says that somewhere in the beginning of the 8th century, the king of the Pallavas died out and there was real panic because he died early and didn't have children and the Chalukyas were going to turn up and take over the place, there was basically chaos.

So a grand assembly was called of all the chieftains and scholars etc. and they decided that they were going to go and hunt for another line of the Pallavas, that had many many years ago gone off to a distant land. So there was a king, there was a younger brother of a Pallava King a century earlier, who had gone off to a foreign land, married the local princess and had become the king and his lineage evidently was still alive somewhere.

So very hurriedly a group of learned Brahmins were put together and they were put on a boat from Mahabalipuram and were sent off to some place to get this king and they turned up at this court of this king and they asked for one of his sons, he had 4 sons, this descendant of Bhima and the first three refused to come, but the youngest one who was only 12 years at that time agreed and that young boy then got in and made his way back to Kanchi and he was anointed as Nandivarman II and he became the great, became a great king and many of the temples of the Pallava period are from, because of Nandivarman's contribution. Now who was this Nandivarman and where did he come from? Now if you go to this temple and you wander around, you will find something very odd about all the faces that are there carved on the walls, a very significant proportion of them are clearly oriental, there are even Chinese faces there, yes, Vaikuntha Perumal temple and Kanchi. Now my guess and you know, he doesn't mention it, but there are many signs that the Pallavas reprided themselves of being of the, having their female lineage of that of the Nagas, in fact it's there in some of their inscriptions.

So while we do not know where the Pallavas themselves came from, the fact that they had this great pride in this female Naga lineage suggests that they had a, at least from the female side, a Southeast Asian origin and this is interesting because of course the Pallavas have enormous influence on Southeast Asia, you know their scripts of many countries even today are derived from Pallava script like Thai and so on. So clearly they had a lot of influence and there is in fact even an inscription of Nandivarman II in Malaysia and it's very interesting where it is, it's in Bhujang valley, the valley of the snakes. So my guess is that he was possibly from Cambodia, Malaysia area and he came in the 8th century and took over this kingdom and it's quite amazing that today, we would not imagine that one of the great kings of Southern India was actually from that part of the world.

Now history of course kept going and then a somewhat better known episode happens which is the rise of the Chola Empire and the great raids that the Cholas did in Southeast Asia in the 11th century. Now why did the Cholas, were the Cholas doing raids on Southeast Asia in the 11th century? We don't know for sure but one of the reasons, very likely reasons and there is some circumstantial evidence to back it up is that it's very likely that the Cholas and the Song Empire of China were trading heavily with each other, there are in fact lots of remains of Hindu temples along the coast of China from roughly that period and it seems like the Srivijaya may have been kind of getting in the way and asking for too much toll. Now like all Indians when faced with high tolls, they go berserk, you see that every day on Indian highways.

So not surprisingly they got up and said we must do something, so they got all their friends together at Nagapattinam, sailed across and beat those chaps up and it clearly says at Kadaram, there was the, you know, the king of Kadaram was defeated, his elephant and all his various treasures were taken away and they were brought back. But this does not seem to have caused too much problems because a little bit later, the Cholas seem to have built a fairly strong alliance with the Srivijaya and the kingdoms of that area and this is an interesting thing that is going on here, in the context of understanding the geopolitics of that area. You see the way we think about the history of Sri Lanka and the southern tip of India is that there was a Sinhalese-Tamil conflict.

Now we tend to be coloured in this because of much more recent episodes of separatist movement in northern Sri Lanka. What actually was happening for almost all of history, except this recent episode, was in fact the Pandyas of Madurai and the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka were in a pact against the Cholas who were from the further up the Kaveri Basin and the Cholas seem to have had allies who were in Southeast Asia. So basically this was the geopolitics of the time, the Pandya-Sinhalese alliance against the Chola-Southeast Asian alliance and you can see that it goes back and forth quite a lot.

But it's quite fascinating that the geopolitics of that area was driven by these very complex alliances. Now the question is what was the basis, what are the structures, the economic structures that were allowing all this trade to go back and forth. Now you may get the impression that it was all heroic traders and merchants who were putting their money on life, on line and were trading with making these great voyages.

But in fact it was a lot more sophisticated than that. Many of these voyages actually happened not by individuals going back and forth, but through corporatized guilds, they were almost like companies and many of them were caste based companies, most of them were in fact not caste based companies, some of them had names like the 500 and so on and so they were almost like corporates and the multinational corporates and many of them lasted hundreds of years, who were doing this trade going back and forth. Some of them hired mercenaries to back up their and protect their trade routes and they were very very powerful and there were several of them in southern India and what is even more fascinating is that much of the financing of this was done by the temples.

Now the general impression is that the temples were rich because the Rajas were all handing over large amounts of money to these temples, but that may have been the seed money. But one of the reasons many of these temples had such a lot of gold was that in fact they functioned as banks and we have lots of copper plate remains of contracts between the guilds. So there were merchant guilds, there were artisan guilds and they had contracts, then there were contracts between the merchant guilds and the financiers which were the temples and that was kind of the structure on which much of this was going on.

But then around about the starting with the 11th century, but really taking off in the 13th century really, this whole structure suddenly came undone. In India of course there was the Turkish conquest and that completely threw the whole, it was not just political control, but one of the things that seems to have happened was that the destruction of the temples really messed up the financing of this whole network. So I have for many many years wondered why after the Turkish conquest there is a dramatic decline of Indian, particularly Hindu merchants who are sailing back and forth.

The historical explanation is, oh you know it was because of caste restrictions and you know these Brahmins are bad chaps, didn't allow anybody to cross the seas and all that, but that of course makes no sense. For the simplest reason that the upper caste were some of the biggest beneficiaries of this trade. They were the merchant class of course, but the ruling classes, the Kshatriya classes at various points in time, benefited from the revenues, but the biggest beneficiaries of course were the Brahmins themselves, because they were enormously high, highly regarded in Southeast Asian courts and many of them sailed across, I have mentioned, in fact one of the pioneers, Kondinya was himself a Brahmin.

So there was no real reason for them to perhaps suddenly stop and I think a large part of this perhaps had to do a collapse in the network of financing that was holding this whole thing together. There is also a similar collapse just a few years later in the Middle East and this happens interestingly just like when the Turks were invading India and conquering it, about the same time Islam itself was an enormous crisis, because just 20-25 years after Mahmud Ghori came into India, you had the Mongols who were sacking large parts of Iran and then ultimately sacked Baghdad and so on. So that whole network, the whole set up suddenly just was in complete crisis and it was just about recovering from this a century later, when suddenly very large ships turned up.

This is in the early 1400s, led by a eunuch Chinese general called Zheng He and he brought these massive ships, I mean these ships were really enormous, I mean they are modern scales and this huge series of treasure ships that came in the early 1400s that made voyages across through Southeast Asia to India, making its way to Africa and there were series of them, led by this general Zheng He, who was a eunuch incidentally and it was not incidentally a voyage of discovery, because many of these routes that I was talking about were very well established as I mentioned earlier. What they were trying to do was really showing who was the boss and so these Chinese came to this part of the world and they were going around essentially one by sheer scale overriding the locals, but very quickly they began to also meddle with the politics of this area. So they captured one of the claimants to the throne of Sri Lanka and took him back and then they brought him back and then tried to place him on the throne.

They may have changed the Zamorin or Samudrin of Kerala, they may have of Calicut, Kozhikode is the correct word I think or may be not the correct pronunciation, anyway. So they may have interfered there, so they were messing around with the politics of various places using their muscle, but possibly the biggest influence of that however was in Southeast Asia and the Islamization of Southeast Asia, which as I will show you was really a Chinese project. Now remember after the 12th, 13th century, the Hindus of India became much less important in the trading networks outside of India, but the Southeast Asian Hindus particularly of Java were very very active and in fact it was really in the 13th, 14th century where you have this massive expansion of the Majapahit Empire based out of Java and basically took over fair section of what is now Indonesia, even parts of what is Malaysia and they were the guys who when Zhang He was making these great voyages were looking on all of this very very suspiciously and in fact on a couple of occasions they captured some Chinese envoys and decapitated them just to send a signal.

It didn't go down very well with the Chinese who then began to encourage an alternative center of power in a place called Malacca, which is in Malaysia, just north of Singapore. They had a king called Parmeshwara, who they encouraged to convert to Islam. In fact Parmeshwara also visited the Chinese Emperor and they gave him a lot of money and then as consequence of with Chinese backing, the kingdom of Malacca became increasingly more powerful and the Majapahit began to withdraw and so over the next two centuries there was a dramatic shift in the religious composition of Southeast Asia.

But the Chinese themselves didn't hang around to benefit from this, because while they may have been very successful with these great voyages, with these big ships, as always what really gets you is not military power but politics back at home. Now what happened is that the Emperor who was backing Zheng He died and the next Emperor was essentially under the influence of the Confucians lobby in the court and they were very suspicious of the eunuch lobby who were mostly, they were particularly in the trading business. So the Confucians essentially came up with the idea that the rest of the world had been engaged with and nothing of great value had really come back from these great voyages.

The rest of the world was clearly too backward to be engaged with, so the great treasure fleet was essentially allowed to rot and the records of Zheng He's great exploits were actually suppressed. It's only really in the 20th century that we began to rediscover them and so that was essentially the end of Chinese naval power in the 15th century which opened up the space for Vasco de Gama who turned up in the end of the 1400s. Now much of this is well known and I am running out of time, so I am going to skip through a bit here.

As you all know that Vasco de Gama came to Calicut and very quickly within a decade or little more than a decade, the Portuguese created a bunch of these, what should I say, staging points, outposts along the coast all around Southeast Asia. They also established a reputation for extreme cruelty. Now this is not a time where people got easily scared of cruelty, I mean these are people who have just gone through the Turks and the Mongols, but even in that context the Portuguese were thought to be way off the charts.

Just to give you an example, Vasco de Gama would routinely, I mean and other Portuguese, Vasco de Gama himself did this, would take ships taking Muslims for the Hajj across from the Indian coast to Arabia and they would simply set the ships alight in mid-ocean with all the people on them, just to create terror in the minds of people who were not listening to them. So very very quickly they began to establish these outposts and using maritime power and cannons which they had, they established this network and for about the first, I would say 130-140 years or so, the Portuguese were the great maritime power in the Indian Ocean. Now this does not mean that they didn't get any resistance at all, they did.

There was the Sultans of Gujarat who tried to get the Turks to send in ships to try and fight them, fight the Portuguese. There was a great battle just off Diu, in which the Portuguese essentially destroyed the Turkish fleet. But there were other indigenous attempts as well and one of the most successful of them is almost entirely forgotten today, was actually a warrior queen called Abakka.

Now she and her daughter and granddaughter for almost 80 years resisted the Portuguese from their kingdom and outpost in a place called Ullal, which is very very close to Mangalore and this warrior queen, she was a queen of course, remember this coast has a very strong matrilineal and occasionally matriarchal tradition and she, using coastal ships, she used to essentially trap Portuguese ships, occasionally sinking them, capturing them, on several occasions defeating the Portuguese. The first queen Abakka was herself captured and killed but her daughter and then her granddaughter kept up the war. Now the oral histories of that coastline have lots of stories about Abakka, in fact there are dance drama and Yakshagana and other performances done in the name of Abakka, but there are almost no histories written about her, certainly not in English.

I believe there are some in Tulu, which is the language of that area. But it is quite shocking that we Indians do not remember these stories of resistance, we would much rather actually know a lot more about the European side of the story. Oddly enough the Europeans themselves do mention occasionally Abakka, but we very rarely talk about it.

So I think one of the things that I want to do through this attempt to at least document some part of our maritime history is to bring out some of these stories. Now the Portuguese control on the Indian Ocean however did not last much into the 1600s because the Dutch and many people forget the Dutch East India Company arrived in the scene and through the 17th century they became the dominant power, maritime power in the Indian Ocean. The Dutch East India Company was so powerful that it could essentially dictate terms to everybody else including the English East India Company and on several occasions defeated them, sank their fleets and did other bad things to them.

By this early, late 1600-1700s they had basically taken over what is now Indonesia, they had taken over Sri Lanka and they were beginning to eye India, particularly the Kerala coast which was the source of black pepper, when they came up against a very tiny kingdom ruled by a chap called Marthanda Varma, Marthanda Varma again unless you happen to be from southern Kerala you probably have never heard of him, but Marthanda Varma decided that he was going to take on these guys and he trained his soldiers to take on European fighting tactics and he defeated the Dutch in a major battle in a place called Kolachal, which is very close to Kanyakumari, just north of Kanyakumari and he completely decimated them and if it hadn't been for Marthanda Varma, I would have been given this lecture to you in Dutch. Now following this defeat, he somehow also managed to convince their Dutch commander to switch sides to him and he then began to train his army using European tactics and European guns. So using this Dutch Delanoy was his name and he basically got very tiny kingdom, but he very quickly then uprooted the Dutch from all along that coastline and the shock of that was so large that essentially from this point onward, the Dutch East India Company went into decline and opened up the space for the French and then ultimately the English East India Company.

Now I am going to stop here because a. I think it might be fun to have a conversation and secondly my throat is beginning to hurt. Thank you so much for a wonderful talk, you can have a small question after the session. How much the Savishabhis have shaped the Siddhant mission spreading from the Marathas? First of all you got to remember one thing, this idea that Buddhism and Hinduism and all these things are separated out, as separate things is not quite true in ancient history.

They were seen as being part of the same continuum and they very much spread together, even in places where you would think that it was Buddhism that was spreading, it's actually a mixture of sometimes. So even in Sri Lanka's, you know, ancient Buddhism and even in many ways modern Buddhism in Sri Lanka, very much got lots of mixtures of Hinduism in it. In fact the most sacred temple of the Sri Lankans which is in Kandy, the Temple of the Tooth, if you visit it, you have to first pass through a series of Hindu shrines before you reach the main temple and this is in various ways true even in South East Asia, even in Japan, the Japanese one would think the main influence is Buddhist but in fact you go to both Shinto and Buddhist shrines in Japan even today and there are shrines to Saraswati, Vedic homes are done in many of these temples.

So this separation first of all I would like to point out is a fairly arbitrary separation. They were seen as being generally part of, you know, some people had a preference this way, some people had a preference that way but they flipped around quite a lot. Now Shaivism however in particular had a stronger influence in certain parts, certain periods of Cambodian and Khmer history and Cham history, that's the Vietnamese history was heavily strongly influenced by Shaivism, although the Cham kingdom was sacked in the 15th century and then went into severe decline in the 17th and 18th centuries, there still is today about 50,000 Vietnamese Chams who follow Hinduism and they mostly follow, they entirely follow Shaivite Hinduism.

About a year ago I actually visited Vietnam and met some of them and they told me a very fascinating story that to this day they believe that when a Cham dies, Nandi comes to take their souls and takes it to their holy land in India. So there remains a very strong influence of Shaivism but this is also there scattered across, of course Bali remains a major centre of Hinduism in South East Asia but there are scattered communities of Hindus even in Java and then there are other sort of second order influences which are there, which are there in many other ways even in Buddhist countries. So there is enormous influence of Shaivism to answer your question.

Yeah, I will go down that way and then you, yeah. In 17th to 18th century before the British came to the picture, the state of Hormuz and others, they were a connect of Tipu Sultan with Umanis, 18th century, late 18th century and they eventually were well known for building the ships, big, very large, big ships and those ships were the catalysts of carrying out for all the trade in the inter-region. So this link between India and the Umani is much, much older than that, much older than that.

Going back to Harappan times. Exactly. And in fact the 18th, 19th century ships are the last phase of this and the earlier phase of this.

And they have been logging the Indian woods from Himalayas. Yes, and it's also, exactly, in fact they would very often get the ships constructed on this side and taken across and not, just south of Bombay there are still that old style of making ships is still alive. And you have been mentioning about the large ships coming out from Greece to this part of the hemisphere.

Actually those logs, the ships were built of the Himalayan woods. No, not Himalayan woods. There were two types of heading.

There was a chaining between one and two thousand millimetres. Yes, but not Himalayan. So I've looked into this.

There were two types of ships going back and forth. So there were the Roman and Egyptian ships, which were built very often with Lebanese wood was one of the ways and they were nailed together very often. But the Indian ships and the Umani ships and the Arab ships were not built by nailing them together.

So, they were either made from some wood coming from parts of Africa or from the Western Ghats, but they were actually interestingly tied together, they were stitched together. Stitched together. Yeah.

There was a reference I read somewhere that the ship building techniques, well those days there was a technology act per se, were actually taken from Oman to Egypt and Egypt was entirely dependent on Oman. Yes. So, there was two different types of ships going back and forth.

Quite right. So, the European style, but the Indo-Arabic style was basically of stitching. So and there is a lot of controversy over why did the Indians and Arabs prefer a stitched, stitching system because ultimately it cost these guys a lot because if the cost was very high, no it came as a cost because it could carry cannons later on.

So, later on when the Portuguese came, one of the reasons the Indians could not adapt quickly was their ship building technique did not allow, the stitched ships couldn't take cannons. But why did they for the previous almost 1,500 years build this peculiar kind of ships because after all they knew what iron, iron is actually an Indian invention, they even knew how to rust proof iron as we know from the stone in Qutub. So why did they use nails and the reason for that is quite, the most logical reason for it is the following.

You see they were sailing back and forth during the monsoon because they were using the monsoon. Now if you look at the Indian coastline, there aren't very many harbours. So when you came towards, very close to the coast or if you were trying to take it up a river, you were dealing with sandbars or since there were no harbours, you would have to basically drag these ships onto the, onto the, no you would have to drag it onto the beach.

Then you had to go through the Maldives, there was a high risk that you would get stuck in an atoll. So basically what you wanted was a ship who had somewhat flexible hull that would not fall apart if you hit a sandbar and the premium of this was high enough that you were willing to take the inefficiency of having a stitched ship. So that is the most likely reason why this is, in fact this technique is still alive in a few villages along our coast.

I am trying to document it and I am trying to encourage the Indian west coast and even in one or two places in the east coast, I am trying to encourage the Indian Navy to help me build one of them so that I can sail it, while I am still young enough to do it. Yes there was a gentleman there. Why are the prestigious books, NCIT books, state board books, you don't say anything? Because you see, no dynasty in Delhi came from Odisha.

So it is not part of the NCIT book. All the NCIT books are the history of all the dynasties from Pataliputra, followed by dynasties in Delhi. If you are not a part of this narrative, it is entirely your fault.

I am just trying to help you along. I am trying to encourage you to do a good job and put one of your guys up there and you rest in a hill. Not my fault.

Sir, MPs are paid to do less. But anyway, jokes apart. Even in Odisha, you will be surprised, significant proportion of this history is actually being reconstructed relatively modern times.

They have been remembered in oral history, but it is relatively modern times that some of this is being put together. Even these archaeological finds around lake Chilika for example, are actually not very old. Just I think 2-3 few weeks ago, we found a major site just outside Bhubaneswar.

You may have read in the newspapers of a bronze age site, which is interesting because there aren't too many bronze age sites in this part. So, it suggests that there was some bronze age at least in Odisha. But yes, that history is finally being rewritten.

It is also, many other things need to be rewritten about this. For example, this whole idea about Ashoka and his relationship with Kalinga. I have said this in other, in a previous lecture that this whole idea that Ashoka went to Kalinga, sacked it, then felt very sorry for the Uriya and changed his religion and became a pacifist.

There is in fact no evidence of this at all. By all indications, Ashoka was a Buddhist when he attacked Kalinga. Having attacked and caused mayhem by his own admission and there is actually, there is now the site of Tosali has been found.

So, there is even archaeological evidence of the carnage. He then did not become a pacifist at all for the very simple reason, none of the Ashokan inscriptions in Odisha mention his regret. None of them.

If you wanted to have such great regret and you wanted to apologize to the Uriya, surely the place to apologize to them was in Odisha. In fact, the only place where he expresses his regret are in inscriptions which are now far away in places like Pakistan. And even those inscriptions, you have to read properly.

So, yes he does, does this one nice paragraph which is there in all your NCRT books about how he felt regret. But, just a couple of paragraphs down, he then says that, you know, you forest tribes remember that notwithstanding the regret I am feeling for what I did to those chaps, if you behave badly, I will do the same thing to you. So, now if you think that is pacifism, that's your way of thinking.

You know, I am a freedom of expression, but I have a different view. Yes, the gentleman there and then you. I think it's Madison Road's economic history in which he documents that India ruled the economic history at least from 1st century to 15th century.

Though not much is said about how, you know, how the symmetric relations were there. So, I am just guessing, if India had so much of maritime power, how were the economic relations, were there relations, relations included the gunboat diplomacy and the hard power as well. So, once in a while, yes, I mean the Cholas theory.

Connected one is, so we know the strategic culture from the North. For instance, we talk about Dardashtra and Kautilya. There is also lot of strategic culture between Cholas and Pandavas, but that is not so much documented.

Pandayas. Pandayas, that is not so much documented. How much of the influence do they have with the Southeast Asian.

Enormous influence, I mean you are talking about strategic culture. Yes, there is. So, off the top of my head, I can't quite remember.

I think Suryavarman II, I think, don't hold me to it, was one of the major kings of the Khmers of Angkor and he in fact sent his chariot, his war chariot as a gift to one of the Cholas, which was a major deal because, I mean, you know, you don't send your war chariot. So, clearly these guys were sending these major gifts back and forth, they were signing all kinds of, they were dealing with all kinds of strategic maneuvers. Very often against, first the Chinese were doing the same thing.

I just gave you one example, but the Chinese were trying to build a relationship with the Srivijaya, while the Khmers were trying to do with South India, then the Pandayas on the other side were doing with Sri Lanka. So, all of this kind of interlinkages and movements were going on. In the middle of all of this, of course, there were the corporatized guilds, which were basically multinational companies, which also had their own armed forces.

Many of them had, particularly Tamil mercenaries, which you see them popping up everywhere, including in the Sri Lankan army, very often their crack troops were Tamil mercenaries. But you also see that on the other side. So, I talked about Indian metrology, which is very, very influential in ancient history, but even in medieval times, the Middle East was importing lots of steel weapons and so on from India.

In some ways you could say, the sword of Islam was Indian made. So, and the technique of the Damascus sword, which was used in the crusades, during the crusades by the Islamic side, was essentially made with Indian steel technology and it's very likely, they imported the metrologists also, who were again, I am guessing here, but genetics and other proofs, circumstantial proofs suggest, these guys were, then became the ancestors of the gypsies. The Roma, essentially the descendants of Indian metrologists and arms makers, steel workers, who went there during the crusades, they then later on worked with the Turks, who then when they invaded Eastern Europe, they went to Europe and that's how they spread.

And even in Turkish records, you can clearly see, the Roma are clearly involved in metrological type things. Their problem was, of course, they couldn't deal with the Industrial Revolution, which completely made their technology irrelevant. But even into the 19th century, they were very much involved in making small iron mongering kind of activities.

So, that is possibly the link to that. By the way, there were lots of Indian mercenaries everywhere as well. This is forgotten, even in ancient times, there were Indian mercenaries, Indian Mahouts and Indian elephants going all over, fighting wars in the Middle East.

In very ancient times, the Greeks were using them, the Macedonians and Greeks. Later on, even in Karbala, there is a tradition amongst one group of Punjabi Brahmins, that one of their ancestors had fought for the Shia side in Karbala and had died there. So, there are all kinds of things and there are Indian mercenaries in many other places as well.

So, this tradition that we have to this day, if you go, India is the largest contributor to the UN peacekeeping missions. So, this is a very old tradition. Yes.

So, when you were saying about the Turkish invasion and the destruction of the temple that was crippling down the financial thing. Yes. What I have studied from one, well, I tried to read from so many sources, it was like the temple and those other buildings, palaces, once represented the power of the dynasty that existed before.

Their destruction was inevitable, so that… No, may be inevitable, but you see what was happening, it was a network. So, I am sure some temples were in good times, bad times and other things, but what happens is, in a very relatively short period, Malik Kafur particularly, in one series of raids, he just demolishes it. So, what may have been much more an organic process, is suddenly uprooted in one shot and just doesn't recover.

Now, I am guessing here, I mean at the very least it would have caused serious financial havoc. But it was for a very limited territory, it took a lot of time for the Turks to make a massive empire. No, it didn't.

So, this is one of the interesting things about this, is that the Indo-Turkic interaction for a long period of time is actually fairly balanced. So, you have a Hindu kingdom in the 10th century, in as far as Afghanistan and they get evicted by Mahmud Ghazni's father, Sabukta Jinn and then Mahmud Ghazni and then in the early 11th century, between 1000 and 1025, they make these raids, which are famously 17 raids. Incidentally, he didn't win all of those raids, some of those raids he actually got defeated, particularly in Gujarat.

Also, I would like to ask about Nandivarman, which shows in a very concrete manner, says that he was brought up from somewhere. So, he tells his own story, in all these inscriptions, he doesn't mention specifically what his homeland was. That was my contribution to the conversation, that look at all the faces of these people, they look suspiciously South-East Asian.

And even the names as well, like Angarwad was built by Suryavarman, Pallavas also had these Varman's. And about Shanghai, I would like to ask. Sir, about Admiral Shanghai, you said, I forgot the name of that chap.

You have to ask one question. Sir, this is my last question. One chap was written completely about him, he is not even regarded as a historian, his generation is now regarded as pseudohistory.

And also like… I think his name is Jaya Gulatun or something. He has written this. He was a marine.

About 1428 or 1426 or something like that. Yes. Well, he makes the case that the Chinese went to America before Columbus did.

Now, my reading of that book is, they certainly had the technology to do it. But having read the book, I was not quite convinced that they actually made the journey. The fact that you can do it does not mean you actually did it.

So, I think the evidence that they actually made that journey is much more circumstantial and I think quite deep. But there is no doubt that they had the technology. I mean, in fact, the ships that the Chinese were using in the early 15th century are like, you know, few hundred years ahead of what the Europeans would use to, you know, conquer the Americas.

So, yes. I am going to let some people here. Yes.

Tell me about the maritime contribution of the Chinese. Satavahanas and yeah. The thing about the Satavahanas is, in fact, they are very sad that the Satavahanas are not more talked about in Indian history because Satavahanas were one of the great dynasties.

They ruled over most of peninsular India for hundreds of years, much longer than the Mauryas existed. And between them and an Uriya king called Kharavela, they basically destroyed the Mauryan Empire at about two generations after Ashoka. I mean, after Ashoka, it already was in decline, but between Kharavela and the Satavahanas, they destroyed it.

But having said that, the Satavahanas then went on to rule these areas and they were, of course, given their geography, very much maritime. They were in charge of much of southern India when many of these Roman trade and other things were really starting off. So, yes, they were very, very important.

Similarly, the Vijayanagara Empire was absolutely critical when the Portuguese turned up in Indian coasts. Much of southern India, the southern half of peninsular India or the southern one third of India, whichever way you like it, but basically was ruled by the Vijayanagara and Vijayanagara, the city of Vijayanagara was in the 15th and early 16th century till it was destroyed, the largest city in the world and we have plenty of records and Portuguese and Iranian ambassadors and travellers have written about it. There's plenty written about it.

It's one of the most fascinating places to visit. In fact, two places you should see before you die, which I have linked to this. One is Angkor and the other is Hampi, which is Vijayanagara.

Yes. We are knowing that you are going to talk about maritime. So, I have very small question, two questions, sir.

One question mainly because I have run out of time in exactly five minutes. Okay, sir. Actually, in your speech, you talked about Mujres.

So, there is a project, sir, in Kerala, Mujres heritage project, okay, sir, which is going to deal with the spies of Kerala and they are going to again revive that legacy, that heritage, I can say in that word, that heritage to Egypt, that country, sir, Gulf country and even west. No, no. So, Kerala has always had this link with middle east and with the west.

At one point in history, this port which I mentioned Mujres or Mucchiri Patnam from the Indian pronunciation, was the biggest port in the world, this and Tamrulipti and so yes, they had these links with the Romans first, later on with the Arabs and so on, till about 1300 and something, when the Periyar river, there was a big flood and it completely destroyed, as I said climate can be quite a devastating thing, it destroyed this port and as a result of which the main port activity shifted to Cochin and to Calicut. But before those, the main port was this Mucchiri. Yes, last question and we have to… Kashmir port in Gujarat and the JNPG in Chennai, little bit, I would say in Vishakhapatnam and Chennai.

Why it is in the eastern side of Chennai, not as developed? Because it would be easier… Historically not necessarily true. The point is, if you look at long enough history, there have been points in history where the west coast was more active and the east coast was more active. So it's not like they are always even.

There are flows and ebbs and all kinds of things going on. It happens to be that in present recent times, the western coast is more industrialized or entrepreneurial but even in colonial times, remember the capital of India was Calcutta. So these things ebb and flow.

So I wouldn't read, even in the grand scheme of history, it probably doesn't matter. I have got to literally stop now because I have got to go somewhere. Thank you so much.