The trade network of India and Southeast Asian lands and islands in early history gave rise to the growth of trade centres visited by various foreign peoples. Around the fifth century two famous routes known as the (overland) “silk roads” stretched from China, through Central Asia, and Turkestan to the Mediterranean Sea. These roads were connected to the Indian caravan tracks. Another route ran through the sea, extending from China, through the Malacca Strait and Indonesian waters, towards India and the western Indian Ocean (Sjafei 1981–82, pp. 49–50).

The continuous trade activities and voyages caused the emergence of a number of seaports in the Indian Ocean. According to Wolters, this development was responsible for the birth of the Sumatran Sriwijaya kingdom (Wolters 1967). Indeed, Sriwijaya came to be a significant transitory trading seaport much frequented by merchants from across the globe. Sriwijaya was the first power in Indonesian history successful in dominating the Malacca Strait areas and in holding the key to the trade and passages to China, India, and other countries.

Sumatra had been strategically located for international trade across the oceans since prehistoric times, most likely due to the trade of spices, a commodity much sought after across the world. Rouffaer's research unfolded (1900) a series of findings of bronze drums from Southeast Asian soil, continuing along a curved line through Sumatra, Bali, Nusa Tenggara, to the Kei Island in Southeast Maluku, demonstrating evidence of a busy spice trade. Rouffaer also mentions that some European sources had knowledge of spices produced by the Indonesian archipelago (Lapian 1979, p. 96).

A country that relies entirely on trade heavily depends on the trade patterns it develops. Inscriptions from the time Sriwijaya was enjoying its peak of prosperity (early seventh century) suggest the kingdom's expansion into surrounding territories. Its northern extension, for instance, was not only intended to keep watch over the exit and entrance to the strait, but was also meant to control the overland crossing of Tanah Genting Kra. In addition, the expedition planned to conquer Bhumi Jawa may be construed as an effort to subdue West Java, that is, a strategy to annex the lands on both sides of the Sunda Strait to the kingdom (Lapian 1979, p. 97).

Next to the study of the continental Silk Road, the Indian Ocean and its “Maritime Silk Road” have been the main focus of global, and in particular, Asian history in recent decades. But strangely enough, Indian Ocean studies still remain oddly bipartite. They emphasize predominantly the “classical” period, with its strong Mediterranean connections on the one hand, and the “early modern” period, with its rise of European dominance in the Indian Ocean on the other. The long millennium from the fifth to the sixteenth centuries, when the Indian Ocean finally emerged as an Asian Mediterranean Sea, still remains underrepresented in international studies. The present volume about the naval expeditions of the South Indian Chola dynasty to Southeast Asia in the eleventh century is meant as a modest contribution to fill this historiographical gap.

The great naval expedition of the Chola king, Rajendra I, who claimed in his inscriptions to have “despatched many ships in the midst of the rolling sea” and conquered more than a dozen harbour cities altogether of the famous Southeast Asian kingdom of Srivijaya in Sumatra, and on the Malay Peninsula in about AD 1025, was a unique event in the otherwise peaceful and culturally exceedingly fruitful relation of India with its neighbours in Southeast Asia. Already the last centuries of the first millennium BC witnessed increasingly extending trade activities between India and Southeast Asia, and the peacefulness of the spread of India's culture across the Bay of Bengal throughout the first millennium AD is unparalleled in world history. Buddhism and Hinduism alike left their deep and lasting imprint on the emerging cultures of mainland and maritime Southeast Asia. The first distinct South Indian influences are usually linked with the famous Buddhist art of Amaravati, and the Pallava Grantha of present-day Indonesia's earliest inscriptions in the fifth century AD, followed by the strong impact of Pallava and Chola art and architecture in Southeast Asia.

In view of these lasting peaceful relations of India, and of South India in particular, with Southeast Asia, the great Chola invasions of Srivijaya in 1025, followed by another smaller naval expedition in c. 1070, are an issue that still remains a conundrum for historians.

Commerce and business prompted the Indians to cross the eastern seas. The economic contact with Southeast Asia was opened by South Indian people in pre-historic times. In bringing India and Southeast Asia closer an important part was played by the sea link. This connection was used most effectively by the Cholas who combined maritime and mercantile expertise. A glimpse of Rajaraja and Rajendra Chola's world of foreign trade and their connection with Southeast Asia is a fascinating chapter in history. The Cholas, who were one of the most powerful kingdoms in South India, ruled in the first two hundred years of the first millennium. They were first mentioned in the Ashoka inscriptions 200 years BC as having friendly relations with Ashoka. They then were eclipsed for several centuries until the rise of Vijayalaya around AD 850 who established the imperial line of the Cholas, with Tanjavur as their capital, governing the entire Coromandel coast. (The name stems from Cholamandalam, the land of the Chola empire.)

THE BEGINNINGS OF TRADE

Throughout this period, trade was the hallmark of the Cholas. Commerce from the Chola country is mentioned in Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (a handbook written by an Alexandrian merchant between AD 81–96). Nearly half a century later, Ptolemy talks of the Chola country and its ports and inland cities. The Cholas controlled the most extensive shipping from the Coromandel coast across the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea. They employed ships of various sizes. Colandia were large ships used on the voyage up the Ganges, light coasting boats were for local traffic, and big ocean-going vessels reached Malaya and Sumatra.

Kaveripattinam and Nagapattinam were the two flourishing port towns of the Chola kingdom that became hubs of commerce. The reference to Kaveripattinam, the city par excellence on the Coromandel coast, figures in Buddhist literature. It is described as a great emporium of the Chola kingdom in early Tamil literature. Pattinapalai (an early Tamil poem from the second century) talks of Puhar (Kaveripattinam) having a big colony of foreign merchants and mentions the items of trade. A poet addressing the Chola king says, “big ships enter the port of Puhar without slacking sail and pour out on the beach precious merchandise brought from overseas”.

INTRODUCTION

In the late thirteenth century, a Tamil-speaking community in southern China's coastal city of Quanzhou built a temple devoted to the Hindu god Siva. The temple is no longer intact, but over 300 carvings are still within the city, on display in the collection of the local museum, and rebuilt into the walls of the city's main Buddhist temple. The known carvings are distinguishable by their South Indian style, with its closest parallels in thirteenth century temples constructed in the Kaveri Delta Region in Tamil Nadu, and are dispersed across five primary sites in Quanzhou and its surroundings. Almost all are carved with greenish-gray granite, which was widely available in the nearby hills and used frequently in the region's contemporaneous architecture. The remains attest to the presence of a settled South Indian community in southern China during the late thirteenth century and indicate an even longer history of cross-cultural exchange between China and India.

Scholars have charted the movement and motivations of the twelfth to thirteenth century Sino-Indian exchange, analyzing the Indic carvings to show persistent cultural and mercantile relations between the two regions. However, existing scholarship stops short of reading from the carvings a fresh politics of culture and identity, one that challenges today's regnant theories in philosophy, history, and political theory. For, as I will show, the carvings resist a binary understanding of cultural interaction, where bounded, definable cultures or ethnicities “influenced” one another. Indeed, I argue that neither the temple patrons in Quanzhou, nor the city's local artisans, viewed themselves as culturally distinct selves or others when they interacted. Quanzhou's Indic carvings, I argue, index an active translation of ideas and images in built-form.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

What little we know of the community of Siva worshippers in Quanzhou comes directly from the carvings themselves; apart from the material remains of a Siva temple, history has not documented or referenced its creators. The strongest evidence for its construction date is a bilingual inscription found in Quanzhou, written in both Chinese and Tamil on a block of diabase stone, which records the consecration of a Siva temple in 1281.

The evidence for the naval expeditions of the Chola rulers comes from the brief references in the eulogistic introductions of their inscriptions, very rarely corroborated by some literary evidence. From the early tenth century, the Chola kings took some military expeditions into Sri Lanka, obviously by carrying their warriors in boats across the Palk Strait or Gulf of Mannar. Here, of course, the sea distance to cross is only about 50 to 150 kms. If the Twelve Thousand Ancient Islands conquered by Rajaraja I is identified as the Maldives — and there is some good circumstantial evidence to do so (Nilakanta Sastri 1955, p. 192; Indrapala 1985, p. 51) — then this sea expedition was made over a distance of about 800 to 1,000 km. Therefore when Rajendra I sent his naval forces to the Srivijaya kingdom about 1026, the Chola navy already had some experience in travelling over long distances. But apart from these informed guesses, we have practically little explicit information from any contemporary source to understand the organization of the Chola navy, the nature of their sea vessels, the numerical strength of the warriors involved in the expeditions, or the port towns used as their naval bases.

It is a known fact that the history of medieval South India mainly depends on the contemporary inscriptions. True, there are several thousands of inscriptions in the south. The inscriptions, being mostly records of gifts of land, animals, gold, and other material to temples or other charitable institutions, give good information about the agrarian activities of the times, the temple rituals, and several aspects of religious culture. Some details about the society, economy, and the government of the day may also be gleaned from them. The nature of the inscriptions is such that we are not able to tell much about the science and technology of those times.

The eulogistic preambles of the inscriptions give some information about the personal achievements of the king and his retinue, the military exploits, the enemy countries that were attacked, and so on. But when it comes to the actual mode of land warfare, the strength of the army, the weapons that were used, and the mode of transport of men and material over long distances, the available information is meagre and fragmentary.

In the civilizational history of India, the role of the Chola kings, particularly Rajaraja I and Rajendra Chola I in building a military maritime capability was unprecedented. The architecture of their pre-eminence was built through a series of expeditions in India — in the north, deep into the Indo-Gangetic plains through Odra-visaya (Orissa), Kosala, and Dandabhukti (Midnapur), in southern Radha near the mouth of Ganges; and from Venga (East Bengal), a westward expansion that saw the defeat of the Chera kingdoms on the Malabar coast; and well into the Deccan Plateau, with the defeat of the Chalukyas and the capture of their critical strongholds. In the west, the Cholas expanded towards the Arabian Sea, occupying the Lakshwadeep-Maldives archipelagos that sit astride the ancient Indian Ocean trade routes. They also made successive southward surges into Ceylon, attacking various Sinhala kingdoms.

In its expeditionary context, the 1025 naval raid in Southeast Asia in Sumatra, Indonesia, and Malaysia was a singular display of the power of the Chola king, Rajendra Chola I, who possessed and wielded strong political and military power in India. Under Rajendra Chola I, the Chola empire was perhaps the most respected Hindu State that possessed, though only for a brief period, “inconsiderable dominion over the Malay peninsula and the Eastern Archipelago”. The success of the grand foray in Southeast Asia was the result of a consistent and aggressive maritime mercantile policy of Chola kings, particularly Rajaraja I (AD 984–1014) and his son Rajendra Chola I (AD 1014–44).

The Chola kings had encouraged overseas maritime trade through trade missions, sea-based commerce, and opening the Chola heartland to the overseas trading systems from the Mediterranean and Persia in the west, and Malaya, Sumatra, and China in the east. This resulted in a powerful maritime capability built around ships that were marshalled for the 1025 expeditionary naval raid in Southeast Asia. It should be pointed out that the Chola kings did not have a navy comprising warships exclusively for naval combat, but an armada was put together with ships taken up from trade (STUFT), the modern term for such activity.

Polonnaruva was the capital city of Sri Lanka for about two and half centuries from the late tenth century AD to the mid-thirteenth century AD. It was the centre of the Chola administration of the governors of King Rajaraja I (AD 985–1014) and his successors for over seventy years after which it became the centre of the second Sinhalese kingdom under King Vijayabahu I (AD 1055–10). It was then ruled by seventeen kings and queens including the Great Parakramabahu (AD 1153–86) and Nissankamalla (AD 1187–96), until it was usurped by Magha of Kalinga in AD 1215 who ruled for twenty-one years. Though the city was restored and reoccupied for some time in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it was gradually abandoned and forgotten (pp. 54–90; UCHC 1959, pp. 392– 580). It was rediscovered in the early nineteenth century by a British military officer, and at that time, was only a ruined city in a forest area (Ievers 1899, p. 213; Forbes 1994, p. 391).

Polonnaruva contains both Hindu and Buddhist monuments and they have been preserved in fairly good condition. The largest collection of inscriptions in Sinhala or Tamil from Sri Lanka was found in Polonnaruva. The history of Polonnaruva has been relatively well documented in the Mahavamsa, the Pali chronicle of the Island. The large-scale archaeological investigations of the site started at the beginning of the last century and systematic excavations with regular recordings have been carried out since 1980 (Burrows 1899; Bell 1903; Prematilleke 1982).

The city has appeared in history since the seventh century AD as a regional centre of the Anuradhapura kingdom and developed gradually during the following centuries as an alternative city to Anuradhapura (UCHC 1959, pp. 333–38). Some kings of the late Anuradhapura period favoured Polonnaruva and periodically settled there for ruling the country, although Anuradhapura was still the capital city of the island. Unlike Anuradhapura, Polonnaruva was not a holy city for Buddhists; hence its selection to replace Anuradhapura would have been understood in a different paradigm (Manatunga 2007, pp. 1–5).

The Chola king Rajendra (1012–44) is known to have launched several military expeditions against kingdoms in the Indian Ocean. This paper focuses on his raids on the Srivijayan ports in the context of growing commercial activity between southern Asia and Song China (960–1279). It argues that Rajendra Chola launched two attacks on the Srivijayan ports, one in 1017, and then a more extensive raid in 1025, in retaliation for Srivijayan interference in the direct trade between southern India and Song China. Scholars such as K.A. Nilakanta Sastri and O.W. Wolters have already proposed this motive for the Chola military campaigns against Srivijaya. However, the details about the Srivijayan interference that resulted in these raids by Rajendra Chola's navy have not been fully explained. By analysing relevant Chinese sources, this paper will provide some specific examples of ways in which the Srivijayans might have attempted to prevent direct commercial (and perhaps diplomatic) links between the Cholas and the Song court.

THE ALLURE OF CHINESE MARKETS

In the early eleventh century, the markets and ports in China emerged as some of the most lucrative places for international commerce. Traders from almost every region of Asia gathered at these places to procure Chinese commodities such as porcelain and silk, and sell foreign goods ranging from spices to horses. In fact, trading activity in China during the tenth and eleventh centuries had begun to affect the local economies of several Indian Ocean kingdoms and shaped the lives of merchant communities as far away as the Mediterranean Sea. Rajendra Chola's military raids on the Srivijayan ports must be understood in this context of an international trading system that linked markets in China to the economies and societies elsewhere in the world.

Although foreign traders had been frequenting Chinese markets as early as the Han dynasty (see, for example, Yu 1967), significant expansion in their numbers took place after the middle of the eighth century. This increased interest in Chinese markets and the upsurge in foreign trade during the eighth century were intimately liked to the abolition of an extremely rigid economic system that had previously existed in China. The An Lushan rebellion of 755 against the reigning Tang dynasty, although unsuccessful, had significant impact on the existing political and social structure.

INTRODUCTION

We have assembled here sixteen Tamil and Sanskrit inscriptions relating to Southeast Asia and China during the ancient and medieval periods. Out of the sixteen inscriptions, seven come from Southeast Asian countries and China, and the remaining nine from South India. We have given the full text and English translation for the inscriptions from Southeast Asia and China, except for one in Champassak, but we have given the text and translation of only the relevant parts of the inscriptions from South India and Champassak, as their references to Southeast Asian matters are very short and casual, though the inscriptions are long.

The sixteen inscriptions are divided into two broad categories: Nos. 1–9 come from South India and relate to Kadaram (Srivijaya) or Kamboja, and nos. 10–16 are all those discovered in Southeast Asia or China. In each category, we have arranged the inscriptions in chronological order. Most of the inscriptions are written in Tamil, but two copper-plates (nos. 1 and 3) are partly in Sanskrit, and the Champassak inscription (no. 9) is fully in Sanskrit.

Except for nos. 2–4 (Nagapattinam), no. 6 (Tirukkadaiyur), and no. 16 (Neusu Aceh), the text and translations of all the inscriptions have been published in some epigraphical journals or books that we have given for reference at the beginning of each section, or in footnotes. However, we have made some alterations in the text and translations wherever necessary. Texts and/or translations of nos. 2–4, 6, and 16 are prepared here by us for the first time.

Though the date of the Kadaram expedition made by Rajendra I has been controversial, we may suggest the date as sometime in 1026, since the first reference to the expedition in stone inscriptions appears only in those which have the date of the fourteenth regnal year of Rajendra I (1026). Its appearance in inscriptions of the thirteenth year is doubtful. Even in the fourteenth year, up to the seventieth day of that year, only the pre-Kadaram expedition is given (South Indian Inscriptions, V, No. 651).

It gives me great pleasure to present a paper at this plenary session of the Conference on Early Indian Influences in Southeast Asia, since I have been working for a long time on the early historical relations between Southeast Asia and India as one of my important research topics. In the 1990s I organized a project on this topic and took Indian scholars to Southeast Asian countries to study early Indian influences on Southeast Asia, exactly the same topic as that of this Conference. If you are interested in this project, please see my publications on that — (1) “Indian Commercial Activities in Ancient and Medieval Southeast Asia”, in Contributions of Tamil Culture to the Twenty First Century: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference-Seminar of Tamil Studies, Thanjavur, 1995, edited by Karashima, Annamalai, and Rajaram. Chennai, IATR, 2005 (yet to be released), and (2) Ancient and Medieval Commercial Activities in the Indian Ocean, published by Taisho University in 2002 as a combined report of three projects, namely the one mentioned above, a second on Chinese ceramic-sherds in India and Sri Lanka, and a third on merchant-guild inscriptions in South India and Sri Lanka. The topic of my paper today, however, concerns mostly the latter two projects.

In China they started to make trade ceramics in the ninth century and their export overseas greatly increased from the thirteenth century. Reflecting such development of ceramic trade is the great number of Chinese ceramic sherds that have been discovered in Southeast and West Asian countries, not to mention Korea and Japan in the East. However, in South Asia, particularly in India, their discovery had been reported only sporadically until the discovery by chance of a good number of high quality Chinese ceramic-sherds in 1985 in Periyapattinam near Ramesvaram in South India. (Figures 2.1, 2.2) Encouraged by this discovery I organized a research project for surveying the South Indian and Sri Lankan coasts to search for Chinese ceramic sherds, through which we have been able to obtain a great number of them in many medieval port sites and dynastic capitals.

I am delighted to welcome a valuable addition to the limited canon of books on India's interaction with Southeast Asia. Indian Ocean studies still remain unexplored, though the Indian Ocean and its “Maritime Silk Road” have been the main focus of global and in particular Asian history in recent decades.

The book titled Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa: Reflections on the Chola Naval Expeditions to Southeast Asia deals with several fascinating subjects, amongst them: