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Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 53 (2010) 109-145

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Ports-of-Trade, Maritime Diasporas, and Networks of Trade and Cultural Integration in the Bay of Bengal Region of the Indian Ocean: c. 1300-1500 Kenneth R. Hall*

Abstract This exploratory study addresses the trading networks in the Bay of Bengal region of the Indian Ocean during the 1300-1500 era. In this case it is less about the exchange of products than the membership of trading communities, the relationships among the regionally networked ports-of-trade and their merchant communities, and the regional cultural and economic consequences. The focal issue here is the transitional nature of maritime trade and cultural identities in this sub-region of the international East-West maritime route immediately prior to the Portuguese seizure of Melaka in 1511 (see map 1). This article addresses the alternative understandings of this era’s Bay of Bengal regional trade relative to maritime diasporas and other networked relationships; in doing so it incorporates the latest discussions of early urbanization in this region by focusing on networking between secondary and primary centers.1 Cette contribution s’adresse au Golfe de Bengale dans la période 1300-1500, notamment à l’ensemble de ses littoraux, et le considère comme une unité. Pour cette raison elle aborde à peine les ports individuels. Cet espace vit des Chinois, des Perses, et des Yéménites s’associants au visiteurs du Moyen-Orient, et les activités des diasporas issus de l’Inde du Sud et du Sri Lanka. Le maillage de ses réseaux régionaux étant fluides et perméables se modifiaient suivant les événements et s’adaptaient au fluctuations entre les diasporas euxmêmes. Ses communautés actives dans le Golfe de Bengale seront perçues au niveau conceptuels comme des espaces peuplés par des individus, des familles, et la multiplicité des leurs circuits politiques et socio-économiques dérivées, eux, de leurs pays d’origine ainsi que de leurs destinations. Keywords Indian Oean, Bay of Bengal, commercial networks, diasporas, urbanization

*) Kenneth Hall, Department of History, Ball State University, USA, [email protected]. 1) K. R. Hall, ed. Secondary Cities and Urban Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm, c. 1400-1800 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010

DOI: 10.1163/002249910X12573963244287

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Bay of Bengal Regional Trade and the Indian Ocean Maritime Network Scholars today generally accept that in the 1000-1500 era new nautical technology (larger capacity and better-made ships paired with better geographical knowledge of the passageway) and newly centralizing civilizations in the Asia regions created regional marketing opportunities that resulted in the segmentation of the East-West maritime route.2 Ships sailing from the Persian Gulf to India and on to Southeast Asia and China could make the trip in one season, using the longer southeast monsoon (April to September). In contrast, their return western voyage required two years via the northeast monsoon. This return voyage led from China to the Straits of Melaka and then on to India, where sailors had to wait until the southwest monsoon allowed them to navigate back to the Persian Gulf, where they waited until the next year’s southwest monsoon to sail east again. This route disadvantaged Red Sea-based mariners, who, as the early sixteenth-century Portuguese scribe Tomé Pires reports, normally had to make their way to the Gujarat coast on the northwest India coastline in one season, where they would wait until March to sail to Straits of Melaka ports via the southwest monsoon, and could thus only reach the Straits of Melaka in a single year. Consequently, they rarely went beyond to China, which would have required a round-trip sailing commitment of at least three years.3 As an alternative, Red Sea mariners from the eleventh century used the waq waq winds from the Indonesian archipelago to East Africa, via the Maldives,4 which in earlier centuries had carried Indonesian seamen to 2) M. Tompoc, “Tracing the Silk Road of the Sea: Ceramic and Other Evidence from the Partner Ports of the Western Indian Ocean (Eighth-Tenth Centuries A.D.).” In Sri Lanka and the Silk Road of the Sea, eds Senake Bandaranayake et al. (Colombo: Sri Lanka Institute of International Relations, 2003): 77-95. 3) Tome Pires, The Suma Oriental of Tome Pires, ed. and trans. A. Cortesao (London: Hakluyt Society, 1944): 42-6; K. R. Hall, “Coastal Cities in an Age of Transition: UpstreamDownstream Networking and Societal Development in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Maritime Southeast Asia.” In Hall, Secondary Cities: 176-204. K. R. Hall, “Local and International Trade and Traders in the Straits of Melaka Region: 600-1500.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 47 (2004): 213-60. 4) Zhou Chufei, Ling Wai Dai Da (1178) as variously incorporated into the subsequent Chao Ju-kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu-fan-chi, trans. F. Hirth and W. W. Rockhill (New York: Paragon Books Reprint, 1966); and the collective geographies collated in al-Dimashqī (c. 1300), see A. F. M. Mehren, Cosmographie de Chems-ed-Din Abou Abdallah Mohammed ed-Dimichqui (St. Petersburg: Académie Impériale des Sciences, 1866).

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Map 1. Eastern Indian Ocean regional trade networks, c. 1300-1500 the east coast of Africa and back. Using this route, a ship could sail from south China in November on the northwest monsoon, reaching northern Sumatra by late December, and from there make its passage to Dafur or Aden by February, roughly a sixty-day voyage. By avoiding the equatorial storms in the 8-15 degrees of latitude caused by the southwest monsoon, Red Sea sailors could sail directly to the Maldives and reach China by August or September. While this extended voyage was possible (as this route was followed by the Chinese Eunuch Admiral Zheng He to the African coastline in the early fifteenth century), most sailors were content to reach the Maldives, from where they might travel to the southwestern India Malabar coast or Bay of Bengal regional ports-of-trade. Duarte Barbosa recorded in 1501-7 that ships from China, the Moluku, Myanmar, Sumatra, Bengal, and Sri Lanka all sailed to the Maldives on their voyages to the ports of the Red Sea.5 Thus in 1283, Bhuvanekabahu I, king of Sri Lanka, sent an envoy to the Mamluk ruler of Egypt seeking a diplomatic and trade exchange, trying to bypass Persian Gulf-linked India west coastbased middlemen: 5)

Duarte Barbosa, A Description of the Coasts of East Africa and Malabar in the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century, ed. H. Stanley (London: Hakluyt Society, 1866): 166.

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K. R. Hall / JESHO 53 (2010) 109-145 I have a prodigious quantity of pearls and precious stones of every kind. I have vessels, elephants, muslins, and other stuffs, wood of baqam [Brazilwood], cinnamon, and all the objects of commerce, which are brought to you by the banian [Indian] merchants.6

To further promote Sri Lanka as a trade destination over the Indian coast, Bhuvanekabahu promised to construct twenty large ships a year for the Mamluk Sultans. Ibn Battuta (1325-54) sailed to Bengal (Chittagong) from the Maldive Islands via west coast India, avoiding a Sri Lanka stopover, because of regional piracy and the unfavorable trade policies of Sri Lanka’s rulers (they laid claim to, or taxed, the remains of any shipwreck in Sri Lankan waters).7 In the early fifteenth century, Parakramabahu VI (1412-67) sent at least five diplomatic missions to the Ming court in China, claiming to have eliminated the practice of piracy that was operated from the Sri Lanka and Tanjavur region of the southeastern India Coromandel coastline. Zheng He’s stopover in Sri Lanka was in some way a result of this issue. As a notable recognition of the significant trade communities active in this southern Bay of Bengal region at that time, Zheng He left a local inscription in three languages: A Chinese language record of his donation to a local Buddhist shrine, a Persian language recording of his donation to the shrine of a Muslim saint, and a Tamil language record of his donation to a Hindu temple. It is highly notable that he omitted a Sinhala language accompaniment.8 In overview, the 1990s scholars studying the Bay of Bengal trade networks have agreed that in the 1000-1500 era earlier dominant East-West maritime trade between India and China (a conceptual “Maritime Silk Road”)9 gave way to a North-South regional trade in tropical products, 6)

H. W. Codrington, “A Sinhalese Embassy to Egypt.” Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 28 (1919): 83. 7) H. A. R. Gibb, Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa 1325-1354 (New York: Robert M. McBride and Company, 1929): 254, 267. R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, “Seaways to Sielediba: Changing Patterns of Navigation in the Indian Ocean and their Impact on Precolonial Sri Lanka.” In Sri Lanka, Bandaranayake et al.: 29. Gunawardana cites a contemporary Chinese account (the Daoyi Zhilue) by Wang Dayuan, who traveled from China to east coast Africa in 1334-9: “Sailors who have had the misfortune to be wrecked, and who have had to sop for a while in this place, are fleeced by the ruler of whatever merchandise their junk may have on board, even the gold and jewels are sent to him.” (ibid.) 8) Epigraphica Zeylanica: 3: 331-41. 9) J. Abu Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250-1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989): passim, which, representative of earlier studies,

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with notable infusions of spices, woods, grains, gems, and pearls, which were exchanged for Chinese porcelain and silk and Indian cotton textiles, and intersected with the primary East-West Indian Ocean route in the Straits of Melaka. The rise of more port-centered regional states took place at the end of this era, which was in contrast to earlier times when polities were based in their productive agricultural hinterlands and viewed maritime trade as an appended source of tax revenues and exotic luxury goods.10 There was no hierarchical trade structure corresponding to markets with a single clearing house or a single core with peripheries with which it traded on terms of unequal exchange. The Bay of Bengal regional trade was rather a poly-centric networked realm.11 Bay of Bengal Networked Communities Bay of Bengal trade in the pre-1500 era depended on networked, extended multi-ethnic communities that commonly accepted some degree of subordination to a primary port-of-trade. The primacy of a focal port in the network was in part due to its strategic location adjacent to the vital passageway on the China-to India-to Middle East international trade route. The focal center held its prominence even more because it structurally linked a number of secondary ports and port-polities across substantial maritime space. Archeological evidence of the ports-of-trade in the Bay of Bengal region does not commonly include fortifications, despite a history of piracy throughout the region dating to this era.12 Early coastal urban centers were focuses on the preeminent East-West maritime passageway over the duration of the pre1500 era, without consideration of the route’s important North-South linkages. 10) K. R. Hall, “The Textile Industry in Southeast Asia, 1400-1800.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 39 (1996): 87-135; K. R. Hall, “Unification of the Upstream and Downstream in Southeast Asia’s First Islamic Polity: The Changing Sense of Community in the Fifteenth-Century Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai Court Chronicle.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 42 (2001): 198-229. 11) By the fifteenth century Bay of Bengal ports included Pulicat, Kanjimedu, Naguru, Masulipatnam, Mrauk U, and Pegu. See J. Gommans and J. Leider, eds, The Maritime Frontier of Burma: Exploring Political, Cultural, and Commercial Interaction in the Indian Ocean World, 1200-1800 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002): passim. 12) J. Heitzman, “Secondary Cities and Spatial Templates in South India, 1300-1800.” In Hall, Secondary Cities: 303-34. As discussed below, open piracy or aggressive militancy negated the commercial potential of Bay of Bengal ports-of-trade, as traders pursued parallel

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appendages to their adjacent hinterlands, and their significance regularly fluctuated rather than demonstrated societal commitment to any one single place. A region’s differentiated centers of political power (royal courts), religious authority (temples), and marketplaces were normally insulated in the port-of-trade’s productive agrarian hinterlands.13 Regional commercial centers were typically separate, often located at coastal river mouths rather than in the distant upstream regions, and, depending on the local geography, might network with multiple coastal centers of relatively equal stature rather than with an omnipotent center.14 Instead of addressing the development of urban hierarchies that are comparable to urban developments in other regions of the world, scholars of the Straits of Melaka region have found it fruitful to consider the networked heterarchy and cosmopolis as meaningful alternatives. A heterarchy is defined as including horizontally linked equitable urban centers that shared common goals, acknowledged the political independence of its “members,” and included multiple networked power centers that had different levels of connectivity, and were based upon some degree of acknowledged cultural homogeneity.15 Heterarchies distributed privilege

port options. Heavy regional piracy and militant fourteenth-century succession disputes in Sri Lanka created the opportunity for Zheng He’s intervention in 1411, which resulted in maritime stability along the Sri Lanka and south Indian coastline until the late fifteenth century. The newly arrived Portuguese exploited local rivalries, and they and European trading companies that arrived thereafter fortified their regional ports-of-trade. 13) K. R. Hall, “Secondary Cities and Urban Networking in Cola-Era South India.” In In Honour of Thomas R. Trautmann, ed. Cynthia Talbot (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2009). 14) Gommans and Leider, The Maritime Frontier of Burma: passim; Hall, “Unification of the Upstream and Downstream.” 15) O. W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1999). Wolters’s conception of heterarchy represents his opposition to historians “who detect (. . .) change in the form of centralizing tendencies” (Ibid.: 152). Other heterarchy-like options are Stanley Tambiah’s “galactic polity” (S. J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand Against a Historical Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976)); Clifford Geertz’s conceptual “Negara” [C. Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)]; Leonard Andaya’s exploration of the “cultural state” (L. Andaya, “Cultural State Formation in Eastern Indonesia.” In Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power and Belief, ed. A. Reid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993): 23-41); and P. Wheatley, Nagara and Commandery, Origins of the Southeast Asian Urban Traditions (Chicago: University of Chicago Department of Geography Research Papers 207-8, 1983).

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and decision making, in contrast to hierarchies in which power and privilege were concentrated in its higher members. Arguably, the heterarchy network was ideal in a period of rapid change, as its fluid and normally equitable (“horizontal”) linkages allowed for a good deal of flexibility and encouraged cooperation among its members rather than leading to submission to a single dominant port in a networked hierarchy. Heterarchies could be characterized by multiple organizational patterns, types of knowledge, and means of acknowledgment. They were thus ideal in encouraging linkage of extended communities across some substantial space, in this case maritime space, as defined by movements of goods and religious (Hindu-Buddhist and Islamic) and cultural (Indic, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Malay, or Javanese) ideas. The conceptual early maritime heterarchy was a religious, ideological, and commercial world that spanned space and overcame isolation by linking communities with common interests—communities that were commonly initially tied by their participation in the international maritime trade. In contrast, several historians have posed the conceptual alternative of the cosmopolis, which in their minds also refers to a multi-centered linked community based upon the pluralism of its members.16 Their conceptual cosmopolis is based upon commercial networking among coastal ports that shared in their international orientation, their dual functionality as both ports and political entities, their flexible capacity to rapidly adapt to new circumstances, their centrifugal and centripetal roles in relation to uplands, jungles, and outlying regions away from the metropolis, and as collection points for the forest, the sea, for agricultural products, and manufactures of their dependent regions. In contrast to the pre-modern heterarchy, those proposing the cosmopolis alternative put stress on the hierarchical elements of the cosmopolis urban networking, with a focus on the lesser centers’ linkages to a “most-among-equals” paramount center that exercised a degree of political and economic hegemony over other members of the network but fell short of fully institutionalizing these relationships. Current application of the cosmopolis model focuses on political and economic linkage (e.g., Singapore) as appropriate to the post-1500 era, 16) A. Reid, “Cosmopolis and Nation in Central Southeast Asia.” ARI Working Paper Series 22 (Singapore: Asia Research Institute, 2004); E. Tagliacozzo, “An Urban Ocean: Notes on the Historical Evolution of Coastal Cities in Greater Southeast Asia.” Journal of Urban History 33 (2007): 911-32.

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and omits consideration of the significant role of cultural networking in pre-1500 South and Southeast Asia which is, however, the networked heterarchy model. In contrast, another group of scholars, inspired by the writings of Sheldon Pollock, has been less concerned with early political and economic linkages, but instead addresses the conceptual cultural cosmopolis, which revolves around a “shared vernacular” among culturally networked urban centers in the South and Southeast Asian region, based on localizations of common Sanskrit religious texts.17 In a recent doctoral dissertation, Ronnit Ricci takes Pollock’s conceptual, culturally based cosmopolis analysis one step further, by applying it to the transitional era from roughly 1200-1600, which coincided with the spread of Islam throughout the Bay of Bengal and Straits of Melaka regions. By demonstrating the creation of a common “literary culture,” Ricci argues that the earlier trans-local “Sanskrit cosmopolis era” was displaced by the spread of the “Arabicized cosmopolis” in the Bay of Bengal and Melaka Straits region, notably in the Tamil region of south India, Bengal, and the Malay and Java cultural regions of the Straits of Melaka, where a new regional “literary culture” was made possible by, and sustained through, regional political and economic linkage.18 However, missing from Ricci’s analysis is the coincident spread of a “Theravada Buddhist cosmopolis” that had its base in eleventh-century Sri Lanka, and had displaced earlier Mahayana Buddhist and Hindu “literary cultures” in the Burmese and Khmer regions of the northwest Bay of Bengal by 1300. This networked Buddhist cosmopolis included local Theravada Buddhist “secondary center” institutional and ritual links to the Sri Lanka sangha, which went beyond the symbolic and personal linkages between regional Islamic communities and Mecca.19 In this light, Zheng He’s omission of a Sinhalese language 17)

S. Pollock, “The Sanskrit Cosmopolis, 300-1300: Transculturation, Vernacularization, and the Question of Ideology.” In Ideology and Status of Sanskrit: Contributions to the History of the Sanskrit Language, ed. J. E. M. Houben (Leiden: Brill, 1996): 197-247; “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular.” Journal of Asian Studies 57 (1998): 6-37; and for its application see S. Pollock, “Cosmopolitan and the Vernacular in History.” In Cosmopolitanism, eds C. A. Breckenridge et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002): 25-53. See also P. Richman, ed., Questioning Ramayanas, A South Asian Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 18) R. Ricci, Translating Conversion in South and Southeast Asia: The Islamic Book of One Thousand Questions in Javanese, Tamil and Malay. Ph.D. dissertation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2006). 19) S. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer. See also Gommans and Leider, Maritime Frontier of Burma: passim; and T. Frasch, “A Buddhist Network in the Bay of

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component in the noted Sri Lanka inscription was purposely symbolic in its use of the Chinese language to record his endowment to a local Buddhist shrine, in its assertion of China’s claim of being India’s successor as the new international center of Buddhist scholarship in the Mahayana tradition, as against the alternative “Theravada Buddhist cosmopolis” that was centered in Sri Lanka.20 A key ingredient that is overlooked in both the economically and politically focused heterarchy and cosmopolis models is the vital role that maritime diasporas assumed in the creation of these new culturally networked communities as this was implicit in the heterarchy and cosmopolis potential in the Straits of Melaka realm. This study adds consideration of the human dimension of networked maritime communities in the Bay of Bengal region to the heterarchy or cosmopolis discourse, with a specific focus on the religious pluralism that was a distinctive feature associated with the activities of networked merchant sojourners in the 1300-1500 Bay of Bengal. Depictions of regional diasporas in this study are based on the notion of autonomy among these mercantile communities, and the existence of some equilibrium based on mutual indifference between them and those who held political power, in contrast to a system in which a state and its agents could be, and often were, active participants in trade. During the 1300-1500 era, Indian Ocean maritime diasporas could be identified by their spatiality, distances traveled, itineraries, temporality, fixity, rootedness, and sedentary qualities. In this context, “place” must be understood as an anchor point, a settlement spot where a number of people gathered “temporarily” or “permanently”—with the implication that “permanently” is really temporary, and subject to better opportunities elsewhere, or an ultimate return to the ethnic homeland. Like the application of the heterarchy and cosmopolis models, diasporic studies address original

Bengal: Relations Between Bodhgaya, Burma, and Sri Lanka, c. 300-1300.” In From the Mediterranean to the China Sea: Miscellaneous Notes, eds C. Guillot, D. Lombard, and R. Ptak (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998): 69-93; and C. Wheeler, “Missionary Buddhism in a Post-Ancient World: Monks, Merchants, and Colonial Expansion in Seventeenth-Century Cochinchina (Vietnam).” In Hall, Secondary Cities: 205-31, on the importance of linkage between Chan Buddhism and the Chinese maritime diaspora based in south China in the development of the Hue-based realm of south and central Vietnam (with substantive multi-dimensional networked connections to Tokugawa Japan). 20) T. Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 6001400 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003).

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cores (“homelands”) and networked “secondary cores,” where a number of migrants stay, but are likely candidates for subsequent dispersal and remigration. Thus this study is less concerned with specific regional ports as places of trade, but addresses the inclusive Bay of Bengal regional coastlines as the operative spaces where Chinese, Persia- and Yemen-linked Middle Eastern sojourners, and south India and Sri Lanka based diasporas were active.21 In the Bengal region Persian Muslim merchants became prominent over Chinese and other sojourning diasporas; the Tamil coastal region of southeast India’s Coromandel coast was “home” to Muslim, Hindu, and other multi-ethnic regional sojourners who were active on the Malay Peninsula and northern Sumatra; and the island of Sri Lanka was the center of connected Theravada Buddhist religious and maritime trade networking with the Burma (Myanmar) and the upper Malay Peninsula coastlines. Each of these networked spaces had porous boundaries that could change in association with intra-diasporic contexts and events. The evolving diaspora communities active in the Bay of Bengal region are herein seen as populating conceptual activity spaces in which individuals, families, and varieties of political and socioeconomic networks derived from places of origin as well as from their destinations.22 In approaching the Bay of Bengal in the 1300-1500 era, consideration of maritime diasporas is especially vital, since neither the regional trade nor the trading networks were the equivalent of the inclusive “Mediterranean world” as described by Braudel,23 despite early Arab and Persian geographies that referenced the inclusive region as the “Green Sea” (al-bahr al-akhzar) which remained ill-defined until the sixteenth century.24 While

21)

This study is preliminary to my forthcoming book-length study, Ports-of-Trade, Maritime Diasporas, and Networks of Trade and Cultural Integration in the Bay of Bengal Region of the Indian Ocean, c. 600-1500. 22) H. Clark, “Maritime Diasporas in Asia before Da Gama: An Introductory Commentary.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49 (2006): 385-94. 23) F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols (London: Collins, 1972). 24) The conceptual “Green Sea” lay beyond the “Red (Erythean) Sea” that was east of the Mediterranean world as described in Roman-era geographical texts. Continuing this conceptual tradition, Arab geographers to the sixteenth century usually considered the western Indian Ocean, including the “Red Sea” and the waters east of the India and Sri Lanka coastlines to China, as the “Green Sea.” Pirouz Mojtahed-Zadeh, “The Persian Gulf in the Geographical Views of the Ancient World.” Unpublished paper, International Seminar on the Historical Cartography of the Persian Gulf in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries

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one may make the case that in the 1000-1200 era Tamil merchant associations—or merchant associations based in south India—were a significant factor in regional networking,25 from 1300 to 1500 this was no longer the case. In contrast to past incorrect generalizations that the 1300-1500 Bay of Bengal trade was dominated by an Arabia-connected Islamic diaspora, the Bay of Bengal regional trade involved multiple groups, including several Muslim diasporas. Some maritime traders had Middle East connections to Arabia and Persia, while others were South Asian Muslims (e.g., Gujaratis and Tamils). There were also Syrian Christians, Egyptian Jews, Chinese from Fukian, and Sri Lankan, Burmese, Thai, and Mon Buddhists. Bay of Bengal Sojourning Communities c. 1300-1500 A. Chinese Wang Dayuan’s Daoyi zhilüe 島夷誌略 (Brief Records of the Island Barbarians) account of his 1330s travels with Chinese sailors in the Straits of Melaka and Bay of Bengal regions, published in 1349, reports that Bengal (Pengjiala 朋加剌) was by the early fourteenth century a destination of note for Chinese traders: The Five Ranges 五嶺 (i.e., Rajmahal Hills) have rocky summits and [are] covered by a dense forest. The people [of the kingdom] reside around these [hills]. [They] engage in plowing and sowing throughout the year, so there are no wastelands. The rice fields and arable lands are spectacular. Three crops are harvested every year. Goods are all reasonably priced. . . . The official tax rate [there] is twenty percent. The kingdom mints silver coins called Tangjia 唐加 [tangka], two of which weigh eight hundredth of a tael [a Chinese ounce], that is circulated and used [by the court]. They can be exchanged for more than 11,520 pieces of cowrie shells. The lightness of the[se] coins is convenient and very beneficial to the people. [The kingdom] produces [fabrics such as] bibu 苾布 (bairami/bafta), gaonibu 高你布 (kain cloth?), tuluojin 禿羅錦 (malmal), [and also] kingfishers’ feathers. [Chinese traders] use southern and northern [varieties of ] silks, pentachrome taffetas and

(Tehran, April 2004); M. W. Lewis, “Division of the Ocean Sea.” The Geographical Review 89 (1999): 188-214. 25) Hall, “Local and International Trade and Traders.”

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K. R. Hall / JESHO 53 (2010) 109-145 satins, cloves, nutmegs, blue and white porcelain ware, white tassels and such things [to trade with native merchants]. . . .26

Chinese traders who transacted business in Bengal do not seem to have been permanent residents, but traded in Bengal based out of their networked Southeast Asia bases. This is demonstrated in two Ming-era dynastic records concerning the Chinese merchant sojourner Song Yun, who was active in a Bengal coast port-of-trade. The record in the Yingzong shilu 英宗實錄 (Veritable Records of [Emperor] Yingzong), reports that Song Yun 宋允 first visited the Ming court as the deputy envoy of a tributary mission from Bengal in mid-1439, and asked for and received funding to repair his embassy’s damaged ship as well as a guarantee of protection for its return voyage from the Ming emperor. This imperial beneficence is said to have been his personal reward for conveying useful goods of the Bengal tributary state to China.27 A subsequent 1446 record in the Yingzong shilu provides further retrospective details about this Chinese trader’s activities, noting that he was actively trading in Bengal, but was networked with Samudra (Samudra-Pasai) in northern Sumatra, where he had married a local woman (with a Malay name) who had accompanied him on his mission to China.28 These passages and others in the Chinese records indicate that the maritime network linking the coastal regions of south China and Bengal was distinct from the maritime networking between China’s ports and the Malabar and Coromandel coasts of southern India.29 In a fashion similar to Song Yan’s agency on behalf of Bengal’s China trade, so too does the Yingzong shilu report on the role of a Chinese inter-

26)

I.e. Daoyi zhilüe: 330. For the rest of the reference to the hard-working people of Bengal, see P. C. Bagchi, “Political Relations between Bengal and China in the Pathan Period.” Visva-Bharati Annals 1 (1945): 96-134. 27) Yingzong shilu: 54.7b; Ming shilu: 24: 1046, trans. G. Wade in Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu (http://epress.nus.edu.sg/msl/entry/949). 28) Yingzong: 141.1a; Ming shilu: 28: 2783; see also K. R. Hall, “Multi-Dimensional Networking: Fifteenth-Century Indian Ocean Maritime Diaspora in Southeast Asian Perspective.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49 (2006): 461. Song Yun was murdered in China by a Javanese merchant; his Samudra-based nephew, who had the Malay name Ai Yan, petitioned the Chinese court on her behalf for funds to allow Song Yan’s wife and her entourage to return to the family’s Samudra-Pasai home. 29) T. Sen, “The Formation of Chinese Maritime Networks to Southern Asia, 1200-1450.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49 (2006): 421-53.

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preter who accompanied another Bengal tributary mission to the Ming court in 1438: The interpreter Chen Deqing 陳得清 and others from the country of Bengal [who are members of their country’s tributary mission] has advised that they have long been traveling far away from their homes and that their bags are empty. They have thus requested that cotton clothing to protect them from the cold of winter be conferred upon them. As the Emperor felt that people from afar should be very well-treated, he ordered the Auxiliary Ministry of Rites to not restrict themselves to the [usual restrictive] regulations, but to confer on these people cotton clothing and other items for keeping out the cold.30

Chen Deqing’s and Song Yan’s Bengal presence, and the active trade between China and Bengal in the Ming era, is well-accounted in the list of more than two hundred Bengali words transcribed in Chinese found in the sixteenth-century Siyi Guangji 四夷廣記 (Extensive Record of the Four Barbarian [Regions] ). As compiled by Shen Maoshang 慎懋賞, the Siyi Guangji provides a detailed record of Bengal, much of it borrowed from previous Ming sources, followed by a discussion of Indian script (in which Bengali script and their pronunciations are supplied) and a list of Bengali words in Chinese transcriptions.31 Even though Zheng He’s early fourteenthcentury voyages did not include Bengal, the variety of Chinese sources demonstrates that the upper Bay of Bengal region was considered to be one that supplied the Chinese marketplace with goods of note.32 Bengal may have been exporting as many as sixty items, including cotton and horses, to China during the Ming period.33 Chinese ceramics dating to the Ming era are readily found along the route from Bay of Bengal ports to the Delhi 30)

Ming shilu: 24: 916. In Southeast Asia, Wade: 733. His sources include Ma Huan’s account of the Zheng He voyage, the Yingyai shenglan (The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores [1433], the Yingyai shenglan, Xiyang chaogong dianlu 西洋朝貢典錄 (Record of the Tribute Presented by the Western Ocean [Kingdoms]), and the Shuyu zhouzi lu 殊域周咨錄 (Record of the Dispatches Concerning Various Regions). See Narayan Chandra Sen, “Accounts of Bengal in Extensive Records on Four Foreign Lands.” In Hawai‘i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture, eds V. H. Mair et al. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005): 505-13. 32) Tatsuro Yamamoto, “International Relations between China and Countries along the Ganga in the Early Ming Period.” The Indian Historical Review 4 (1977): 13-9; and Haraprasad Ray, Trade and Diplomacy in India-China Relations: A Study of Bengal during the Fifteenth Century (New Delhi: Radiant Publishers, 1993). 33) Ray, Trade and Diplomacy: 131. 31)

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Sultanate capital.34 The detailed itinerary of a Ming mission visiting the Delhi Sultanate in 1412-3 illustrates the position of Bengal as the networked gateway to India’s Gangetic plain hinterland.35 B. Persia and Yemen-linked sojourners The Arab navigator Ahmad ibn Majidi had this to say about the Muslims who were active in the Bay of Bengal region in the fifteenth century: These are bad people, who do not know any rules; the Infidel marries the Muslim, and the Muslim the Infidel woman; and when you call them “Infidels”, are you really sure that they are Infidels? And the Muslims of whom you speak, are they really Muslims? They drink wine in public, and do not pray when they set out on a voyage.36

Moreover, as the above citation indicates, Islam’s regional character in this era was heterodox rather than orthodox, as was similarly the case among the other maritime diasporic communities active in the Bay of Bengal region. In the 1200-1500 era Muslim influence in the Bay was divided among Persians, who were prominent in the northern Bay regions, those with Arabic connections to Aden and Hormuz (including the Keling community in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century accounts of the resident communities of the Melaka emporium) based in south India who were prominent in the southern Bay regions, and Gujarati/Gujarat-networked merchants who were major factors in the Sri Lanka, Malay Peninsula, and northern Sumatra regions of the Straits of Melaka (e.g., Samudra-Pasai and Melaka).37 The Persian/Afghan presence in the upper Bay was centered in Bengal, which became an appendage to the Delhi Sultanate that was populated by 34)

See B. Gray, “The Export of Chinese Porcelain to India.” Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society 36 (1964): 21-36; J. Carswell, “China and Islam: A Survey of the Coast of India and Ceylon.” Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society 42 (1978): 25-68. 35) Yamamoto, “International Relations”; and Sen, “Chinese Maritime Networks to Southern Asia”: 443-5, for discussion of early fifteenth-century Ming dynasty diplomatic networking with the Delhi Sultanate court. 36) As quoted in L. F. F. R. Thomaz, “Melaka and Its Merchant Communities at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century.” In Asia Merchants and Businessmen in the Indian Ocean and the China Sea, eds D. Lombard and J. Aubin (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000): 42. 37) E. Lambourn, “From Cambay to Samudera-Pasai and Gresik-The Export of Gujarat Grave Memorials to Sumatra and Java in the Fifteenth Century.” Indonesia and the Malay World 31 (July 2003): 221-89; Thomaz, “Melaka and its Merchant Communities”; Hall, “Unification of the Upstream and Downstream.”

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numbers of Persian and Arabic speakers, but where Persian was the prevalent language of the court and its dominant port of Chittagong.38 Persianspeaking Muslim merchants with Bengal connections were also active in the neighboring Arakan region (lower Burma—there were resident Persian-speaking communities in other river delta ports including Dagon, Cosmin, and Marabanan in the late fifteenth century), Bihar, and Golconda (a secondary center of trade in the fifteenth century that became a major commercial hub in the sixteenth century).39 The Persian commercial networking based in Bengal also had a religious dimension. This is demonstrated in the fifteenth-century ritual and pilgrimage networking following the missionary efforts of Shaikh Badr al-Din (Pir Badri-I Alam), a disciple of Firdausi Sufi of Bihar, Shaikh Sharaf al-Din Yahya Maneri, in Bengal and Arakan. He died in Bihar in 1440, and subsequently, though buried in Bihar, was recognized as the patron saint of regional Muslim sailors, notably around Chittagong, and in a series of symbolic tombs spread along the eastern Bengal and Arakan coastlines.40 Newly discovered documentation from Yemen adds yet another dimension to the understanding of the Bay of Bengal Muslim maritime diaspora networking. The Nur al-maarif (Light of Knowledge) is a set of late thirteenth-century documents from the customs house ( furda) at Aden in Yemen under the Rasulid Sultans, which have been described and evaluated in the recent scholarship of Elizabeth Lambourn and Eric Vallet. These Yemeni documents include a list of stipends, salaries, and other awards to named Islamic judges (qadis) and clergy (khatibs) who served Islamic diaspora communities resident in urban centers along the western and southeast Indian coast. The recipients of these awards were affiliated with autonomous residential Islamic communities that agreed to name the 38)

R. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994): 40-70. 39) Gommans and Leider, The Maritime Frontier of Burma: passim; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “‘Persianization’ and ‘Mercantalism’: Two Themes in Bay of Bengal History, 1400-1700.” In Commerce and Culture in the Bay of Bengal, 1500-1800, eds Om Prakash and D. Lombard (New Delhi: Monohar, 1990): 47-85. 40) R. C. Temple, “Buddermokan.” Journal of the Burma Research Society 14 (1924): 1-33; M. Siddiq Khan, “Badr Maqams or the Shrines of Badr-al-Din Auliya.” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Pakistan 8 (1962): 17-46; T. K. Stewart, “Alternate Structures of Authority; Satya Pir on the Frontiers of Bengal.” In Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia, eds D. Gilmartin and B. B. Lawrence (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2000): 21-54.

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Rasulid Sultans in their Friday sermons (khutba) and in their Friday prayers (Id), as a public declaration of their diasporic community’s special reciprocal relationship with the Rasulid Sultans. This arrangement was seemingly foundational to their ability to maintain and formalize relationships with local communities of non-Muslims, and above all institutionalized their trade networking, if not their religious networking, with the Yemenites as their preferential trading and cultural partners. Thus, this khutba ritual networking exemplifies the multi-dimensional relations between primary and secondary Islamic urban centers in the western Indian Ocean, and the transitional Muslim identities and memberships created and negotiated in what was then the Islamic maritime frontier.41 Specific to this study, the Rasulid khutba list identifies several centers of Islamic residence in the Coromandel coastal region of southeast India. This region is called al-Saliyan in the Yemeni sources, the “region of the Cola rulers” as also referenced in the fourteenth-century account of the Arab geographer al-Dimashqi (Nukhbat al-dahr), which was certainly an antiquated reference since the Cola were no longer the dominant regional polity by this time.42 Among the listed networked communities is Qaqil (Qail), a prominent port on the Coromandel coast during this era, which is called Cail by Marco Polo in his contemporary account of his visit to this region.43 This place has been the site of recent archeological work by Mehrdad Shotkoohy, who has demonstrated the existence of several early local mosques and graveyards. Muslim settlement here is believed to date to the eleventh or twelfth centuries, although the earliest epigraphic evidence dates to the early fourteenth century.44 Fatan is an as yet unidentified regional south Indian port also mentioned in the Persian histories written in the Mongol era by Rashid al-Din 41)

E. Lambourn, “India from Aden: Khuṭba and Muslim Urban Networks in Late Thirteenth-Century India.” In Hall, Secondary Cities: 55-98; E. Vallet, “Les communautés musulmanes de la côte indienne face au Yémen (treizième-seizième siècle).” In Hypothèses. Travaux de l’École doctorale d’histoire de l’Université de Paris I (2004): 147-56; E. Vallet, “Les sultans rasūlides du Yémen, protecteurs des communautés musulmanes de l’Inde (septièmehuitième/treizième-quatorzième siècles).” Annales Islamologiques, forthcoming. 42) K. R. Hall, ed., Structure and Society in Early South India: Essays in Honour of Noboru Karashima (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001): passim. 43) As cited in Lambourn, “India from Aden”: 90. 44) Mehrdad Shokoohy, Muslim Architecture in South India: The Sultanate of Ma’bar and the Traditions of Maritime Settlers on the Malabar and Coromandel Coasts (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003).

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(1247-1317, the author of the Jami’ al-Tawarikh, Universal History) and Vassaf ul Haziet (1257-1323, the author of the Division of Countries and Transition of Centuries) as the chief port of the contemporary Pandya kingdom, which is believed to have been located north of contemporary Deviapatam near Ramnad. Malayufatan (Malifatan or Mali Fatan), identified by Rashid al-Din and Vassaf, and in Abu al-Fida’s fourteenth-century Taqwim al-buldan as Manifattan, is believed to have been Mandurifattan, a port on the shore of the Palk Bay. Haram al-Malabarat, or the “sacred precinct of the Malabars,” also appears in a 1145 letter of a Jewish merchant that identifies other regional ports. This may perhaps have been Mylapore, a suburb of modern Chennai, which at that time was a center of Christianity, and the celebrated site of the burial of the Apostle Thomas.45 Eric Vallet suggests that these Yemeni court documents indicate that the Rasulids were positioning themselves as Sunni champions in the western Indian Ocean subsequent to the fall of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad. He also argues that this was an intended network of Rasulid patronage, via the dispatch of Yemeni judges.46 But Vallet also acknowledges that the South Asian diaspora communities had well established systems of autonomous operation that allowed them to represent their interests among their host polities. In this era, as he points out, “visiting” Muslims were honored and protected among the South Asian polities, because their trade knowledge and connections were valuable in serving local interests. Thus, he posits, was there really a need for the supportive political patronage as implied in the Rasulid patronage list? Vallet contends that it is likely that the Muslim diaspora communities desired alliances with external Islamic polities as a protective measure against the new Turkish Delhi Sultanate to their north, thus indicating to their non-Muslim hosts that they had other allegiances and interests. It is unclear how this might have been significant in south India prior to the Khalji fourteenth-century conquests; it is also unknown how much their host polities knew about intra-community Muslim linkage, whether between Muslims exclusively or within a mosque community. Nor is it known whether the local rulers would have associated the largely Arab, 45)

Lambourn, “India from Aden”: 90; S. D. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973): 64. 46) Vallet cites evidence of a Rasulid sultan’s intervention on behalf of a Muslim in China over issues of circumcision. Vallet, “Yemeni ‘Oceanic Policy’ at the End of the Thirteenth Century”: 293, and as discussed in Lambourn, “India from Aden”: 81-4.

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Persian, and Indian Muslim diaspora communities in south India with the Muslim Turks to their north. Available evidence does suggest, however, that at that time South Asians did not define Muslims as a separate and single collective grouping, but normally distinguished them on the basis of their ethnicity.47 Elizabeth Lambourn adds, here as a follow-up critique of Vallet, that some element of common identity and belonging may have been reflected in the local decision to negotiate these alliances with the Rasulid court, as recently arrived groups wished to continue invoking the name of the same ruler they cited “at home.”48 Yet she points out that in reality most Muslim residential communities in the Indian Ocean realm were cosmopolitan places where inhabitants had multiple regional origins and sectarian affiliations, and where coexistence was a necessity in order to support their common trading interests. She also notes that contemporary Cairo Geniza documents of Jewish merchants document collaboration across faiths and sectarian divides. She presents a contemporary letter from Calicut on the southwest Indian coast, wherein merchants from Hormuz, Samudra, and Bengal are mentioned in a community decision to approach the Rasulids for an alliance.49 All of them were competitors—one group consisted of specialists in the Bay of Bengal maritime region, another operated in the western Indian Ocean by providing connections between the Straits of Melaka and India, and the third specialized in linking Indian ports with the Persian Gulf via Hormuz. Although their common Sunni heritage may have been of importance, Lambourn was unable to identify a shared Yemeni ethnicity or a shared Islamic school of law (the ShafiʾI madhhab) that would have been foundational to their Rasulid alliance. Lambourn further concludes that this alliance would most likely have been an economic decision, in promoting their trade with a trading partner. As Lambourn notes, these southern regions of India were subject to seasonal monsoons that were crucial to the annual transit from south India to the Arabian coast, and was based on a prominent spice trade between the Malabar region of southwest India and Egypt via Aden. In her summation, the kutba alliance network was a strategic local decision that could 47) See B. Chattopadhyaya, Representing the Other? Sanskrit Sources and the Muslims (Eighth to Fourteenth Century) (New Delhi: Manohar, 1998). 48) Lambourn, “India from Aden”: 81-4. 49) Ibid.: 73-6; ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥasan al-Khazrajī, al-ʿUqūd al-luʾluʾiyya (The Pearl-Strings; A History of the Resuliyy Dynasty of Yemen), vol III., eds. Shaykh Muhammad ʿAsal and J. W. Redhouse, E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series (Leiden and London: Brill and Luzac and Co., 1907-18): 244-7.

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change with economic and political conditions, both at the micro-level of a single port and at the macro-level of the Indian Ocean. Her follow-up tracks the Calicut community’s shifting allegiances over time among Hormuz, Delhi, and Yemen, and then back to Hormuz, which are all a reflection of the changing commercial circumstances in the western Indian Ocean. Thus the diaspora’s first consideration was a networked trade relationship that was more important than group “identity” and a sense of “belonging.”

Map 2. South Indian ports-of-trade c. 1300-1400 (evidence from Yemeni and archeological sources)50 50)

E. Lambourn, as discussed below, and Noboru Karashima, ed., In In Search of Chinese Ceramic-Sherds in South India and Sri Lanka (Tokyo: Taisho University Press, 2004): passim.

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C. South India-based maritime diaspora By the twelfth century the activities of south India-based merchant guilds were widely recorded in insular Southeast Asia and the Malay Peninsula inscriptions. These guildsmen were vital initiators of the region’s wider connections to the Straits of Melaka region and China.51 In the twelfth century merchants who proclaimed their south Indian origin financed the construction and endowment of a Hindu temple modeled on the Meenakshi temple of Madurai at Quanzhou, the premier China international port of that era.52 After the thirteenth century there are no further records of the guilds; by the fifteenth century numerous sources describing the Melaka emporium detail instead the critical role of two south India-based networked merchant communities: the Chulias (Tamil-speaking Muslims) and the Kelings/Klings (chetti, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada Hindu merchants).53 The Italian traveler Niccolo Da Conti, who sojourned much of the Bay of Bengal c. 1421-2, described the Chulia traders as “. . . very rich, so much so that some will carry on their business in forty of their own ships, each of which is valued at 50,000 gold pieces.”54 51) J. Wisseman Christie, “The Medieval Tamil Language Inscriptions in Southeast Asia and China.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 29 (1998): 239-68. 52) J. Guy, “Tamil Merchant Guilds and the Quanzhou Trade.” In The Emporium of the World: Maritime Quanzhou, 1000-1400, ed. A. Schottenhammer (Leiden: Brill, 2001): 283-309. 53) J. Raja Mohamad, Maritime History of the Coromandel Muslims, A Socio-Historical Study on the Tamil Muslims 1750-1900 (Chennai: Government Museum, 2004), raises the very interesting possibility that these “Hindu guilds” included diverse trading diasporas, including Muslims. The Aihole (Aiyavole)-linked guildsmen were variously known by the term anjuvannam, which Mohamad argues is derived from anjum, Persian for “assembly” (71-2). See “Nellore Inscriptions: Gudur 45.” In Annual Report on Indian Epigraphy 1963-1964 (New Delhi: Government Printing Office No. 78), dating to 1279, as translated by Karashima, “Machilipatnam/Motupalli/Krishnapatnam/Kottapatnam/Pulicat.” In In Search of Chinese Ceramic-Sherds: 7. See also Noboru Karashima, ed., Ancient and Medieval Commercial Activities in the Indian Ocean: Testimony of Inscriptions and Ceramic-Sherds (Tokyo: Taisho University, 2002): 27-34, 72-88, and Appendix 2, nos. 19, 20, 28, 29. 54) Tapan Raychadhuri, Jan Company in Coromandel 1605-1650: A Study in the Interrelations of European Commerce and Traditional Economies (Leiden: Nijhoff, 1962): 76-7. Conti crossed from southern India (Mylapore) to north Sumatra (Pedir), and from there voyaged to Tenasserim and on to Bengal; he made a voyage back through the Melaka Straits to Java and points beyond to Vietnam and China. On his return voyage he sailed from the Melaka Straits through to India’s southwest (Malabar) coast ports. K. McPherson, “Trade and Traders in the Bay of Bengal: Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries.” In Politics and Trade in the Indian Ocean World, Essays in Honour of Ashin Das Gupta, eds Rudrangshu Mukherjee and

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Reports of the initial sixteenth-century European visitors to the Straits region substantiate that south India and Gujarat-linked merchants were active throughout the Bay of Bengal region in the fifteenth century, and were especially prominent on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula.55 This fifteenth-century south Indian presence may perhaps have been a legacy of the earlier pre-thirteenth-century age demonstrated in regional Tamil and Sanskrit inscriptions. Certainly in the fifteenth century south India and Gujarat-linked merchants were vital sojourning intermediaries who supplied a variety of highly desired cotton cloths, luxurious and common, to the ports-of-trade on the Malay and northern Sumatra coastlines.56 In return they received local tin, timber, and tropical products (e.g., gum resins and medicinals) that they would market in other Bay of Bengal ports-of-trade. Pattani and also the Tenasserim regions to its north were both strategic gateways to the Burmese (Begu) region to the north, and the Khmer and Thai realms to the northeast.57 Whether there was a Gujarati or Tamil prominence in these regions in the pre-1500 age is unclear,58 but various sixteenth-century European visitors to the Melaka emporium commonly report that after the Portuguese took Melaka in 1511, they forced Muslim Chulia out of Melaka in favor of the Hindu Keling, who became the principle financiers of Portuguese trade at Melaka in the sixteenth century as well as the source of slaves to support Portuguese military activities in the region. The Chulia in turn relocated to other regional port polities.59 Lakshmi Subrahmaniam (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998): 183-209, characterizes the fifteenth-century Melaka Keling community as prior ship owners who were then the financial brokers of shipping and trade, often in partnership with Chulia seamen and traders. 55) McPherson, “Trade and Traders”: 187. 56) McPherson does not discuss a contemporary Chinese diaspora presence that needs to be equally factored. See D. Heng Thaim Soon, “The Trade in Lakawood Products between South China and the Malay World from the Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries A.D.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 32 (2001): 133-49. 57) G. Green, “Angkor Vogue: Sculpted Evidence of Imported Luxury Textiles in the Courts of Kings and Temples.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 50 (2007): 424-51. 58) In Barbara Andaya’s view (personal communication) the pre-1500 era pluralistic Gujarat-linked sojourning communities competed with Chinese sojourners in upper Malay Peninsula coastal marketplaces. See also B. Andaya and L. Y. Andaya, A History of Malaysia (London: Macmillan, 1982): 39-55. 59) Eventually the Portuguese, in need of additional local business allies, relented, and by the seventeenth century Chulia had relocated to Melaka. McPherson makes the observation that European “country traders” who entered the Bay of Bengal marketplace

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Studies of the south Indian Coromandel region’s past have almost exclusively focused on the history of Hindu society and culture,60 but recently international scholars have begun to explore the region’s Muslim history. Among the most notable studies are Susan Bayly’s historical reconstruction of Muslim religion in south India, Mehrda Shokoohy’s compilation and study of early south Indian Muslim architecture, 61 and the important work in comparative literary analysis of the south Indian Tamil, Arabic, and Arabic Tamil texts from roughly 1200 that have been cited above. These new historical studies document the emergence of south Indian Muslim society, by drawing distinctions between local populations who converted to Islam, Muslims from the Middle East and north India who migrated to, and settled in, south India, and those maritime diasporamembers who spent varying degrees of time as residents in south India. The decline of the south Indian Cola and Pandya Hindu dynasties at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries provided a window of opportunity. The Pandya kings at Madurai fell to Deccan Plateau-based Muslim warriors in the service of the Delhi Sultanate in 1323. In 1333, the Sultanate’s appointed Kotwal (“military governor”) of Madurai declared his independence, and proclaimed the Sultanate of Madurai (1333-78). During this era the Madurai Sultans and their military commanders encouraged Telegu speakers (Hindus and Muslims) from the southern Deccan Plateau to migrate to and settle the underpopulated frontiers of the region, and merchants who networked with these same regions acted as the Sultanate’s market agents.62 from the sixteenth century had to find a place as competitors and partners, since at this point in time they could not control the regional markets, production, or sea lanes. See also Nordin Hussin, Trade and Society in the Straits of Melaka: Dutch Melaka and English Penang, 1780-1830 (Singapore: NIAS/NUS Press, 2007), which provides documentation and discussion of continuing regional diasporic relationships on the eastern Bay of Bengal coastline, based on his research in the Dutch and British East India Company and Colonial Office records. 60) K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar (Madras and London: Oxford University Press, 1966); Noboru Karashima, South Indian History and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984). 61) S. Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Shokoohy, Muslim Architecture of South India. 62) Mohammad, Maritime History: 53-4. See also A. Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, vol. III: Indo-Islamic Society, Fourteenth-Fifteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2004): 203-11.

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The Sultanate fell to the Vijayanagara Hindu prince Kumarakampana’s troops in 1378, and the region was subsequently ruled by Vijayanagara military governors (nayak) until 1439. To the end of the century Vijayanagara government agents were periodically challenged by the troops of neighboring Malabar port-polity monarchs. By the early fifteenth century, the rulers of the Malabar emporia of Kollam (Quilon) and Calicut, both with well-established external commercial connections with the Yemeni court in Aden as well as Ming China, contested Vijayanagara’s regional authority. Consequently Malabar Mappilla Muslims favorably networked (via marriage, agency, and otherwise) with the ports of the former Pandya southern Coromandel coastline. In contrast, along the northern Coromandel coastline that had once been under Cola sovereignty but remained subject to Vijayanagara rule, networked Muslim and Hindu Chetti merchant communities became the Vijayanagara rulers’ commercial partners.63 Muslim traders on the Coromandel coast (Ma’bar, “the crossing place” in reference to the Palk Straits “landbridge” between the Coromandel coast and Sri Lanka) were prominent in the thirteenth century. Muslim merchants were especially notable as the source of imported Middle Eastern horses for the Cola and Pandya rulers and their militaries, as these arrived at the then Pandya port of Kayal.64 The roots of Tamil Muslim society derive from this era, which was based upon the Rawthar (“horsemen”) Muslim community associated with the horse trade and was subsequently inclusive of those who claimed ancestral linkage to the mounted Muslim warriors who came from the northwest Deccan Plateau to south India by migration or by political assignment. Two powerful and distinctive south Indian Muslim communities 63)

R. M. Eaton, “Multiple Lenses: Differing Perspectives on Fifteenth-Century Calicut.” In Autonomous Histories, Particular Truths: Essays in Honor of John R. W. Smail, ed. L. J. Sears (Madison: University of Wisconsin Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1993): 71-85; Wink, Al-Hind: 206-10. 64) See Karashima, Chinese Ceramics: 24-7, for discussion of the contested location of the Kayal port at that time, which is not current Kayalpattinam, as potentially documented by concentrations of shard remains of imported Chinese ceramics. See also S. Jeyaseela Stephen, “Medieval Trade of the Tamil Coast and its Hinterland, AD 1280-1500.” The Indian Historical Review 25 (January 1999): 1-37. This was also an age of heightened Chinese sojourner presence on the Coromandel coastline and elsewhere in south India and the Bay of Bengal region; there are no Chinese or other references to Chinese merchant activity on, and diplomatic contact with, the Coromandel coastline after the 1440s. See Sen, “Chinese Maritime Networks to Southern Asia”: 421-53; “Maritime Contacts between China and the Chola Kingdom (AD 850-1279).” In Mariners, Merchants, and Oceans: Studies in Maritime History, ed. K. S. Mathew (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995): 25-41.

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associated with the maritime trade were formed. The self-proclaimed Marakkayars (Kayalar) elite asserted their Middle Eastern Shafi’ite Sunni origin to distinguish themselves from the lesser “native” Tamil-speaking Muslims, the Labbais. Marakkayars sought marriages within their community, or to those with clear Middle Eastern bloodlines; Labbais were mostly Hanafi Sunni Muslims, who sought marriage alliances that entailed commercial benefits and partnerships with Muslims from Sri Lanka, insular Southeast Asia, and the Mappila Muslims of Malabar.65 The Coromandel Muslim and Chetti Hindu-dominated ports66 were populated by resident pearl merchants, chank (shellfish, similar to oysters) divers,67 boat builders, fishermen, and salt manufacturers. Ports on the lower Coromandel coastline were centers of pearl fishing; pearl fishermen worked on fishing vessels owned by Marakkayars, who controlled the south Indian pearl export trade. Nagapattinam and Kilakkarai were notable centers of Muslim ship construction industries. Furthermore, prominent Marakkayars and Labbais were networked with, and were members of, the Melaka Chulia community, while Tamil Chetti with Coromandel roots became the most prominent among Melaka’s Keling community.68 Sri Lanka Centered Buddhist Networking There, friend, Feast your gaze on the great Lord Parakramabahu Who is to the Sun’s Race as the sun is to the lotus-pon In whose bosom Lakshmi the goddess lies always Radiant, his beauty unblemished, like Ramba’s lord. Wearing all sixty-four kingly insignia, including the crown, Like Visnu incarnate, he graces the lion throne. Bow low at his gracious feet and take leave of this king Who came down from Manu in unbroken line.69

65)

Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: passim; Mohammad: 73-5. Bayly in Saints, Goddesses and Kings, calls them “Marakkayar ports,” since they were dominated by Marakkayar Muslims. Early Western visitors called them “Moor ports.” 67) Chank, the specialty of Kilakkarai, was shipped to Bengal in substantial quantities. 68) For further discussion of the Melaka Tamil communities see Hall, “Multi-Dimensional Networking”: 466-70. 69) J. Clifford Holt, The Buddhist Visnu: 49, translation of a late fifteenth-century honorific poem composed by the Buddhist scholar Sri Rahula of Totagamuva. 66)

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Thus the Buddhist scholar Sri Rahula honored the Kotte-based Sri Lankan monarch King Parakramabahu VI (r. 1412-68) with his sandesa “message poem,”70 which is representative of similar poems composed by fourteenthand fifteenth-century Sri Lanka Buddhist clergy to cultivate divine favor on a royal patron’s behalf. Sanjay Subrahmanyam has speculated that the mutual spread of Islam and Theravada Buddhism in the 1000-1500 era, religions that mutually stressed the individual and individual salvation, indirectly influenced social perceptions of the positive role of trade and profits in the upper Bay of Bengal region.71 In the case of Theravada Buddhism, the critical maritime connection was that between lower Burma and the upper Malay Peninsula with Sri Lanka, which involved overlapping commercial exchanges and Theravada Buddhist networking among the Burmese, Thai, Khmer, and Sri Lankan cultural realms.72 When Ibn Battuta visited Sri Lanka in 1344, he found it divided among rival Kotte, Kandy, and Jaffna polities. A Muslim network of agents connected the hinterland and ports, with notable initial connections to the Malabar coast and beyond.73 This would change substantially by the late fifteenth century, as the first Portuguese sixteenth-century account distinguishes between the initial “Ceylon Moors” of Arabic and west coast Indian ethnic heritage (early traders who intermarried and acculturated), as opposed to fifteenth-century Muslim migrants from the Tamil regions of southeast India, whom the Portuguese called “Coastal Moors.”74 Ibn 70)

These poems are in the tradition of Kalidasa’s Gupta-era Sanskrit kavya “Cloud Messenger” extended poem, in their description of the political geography landscapes that bird “messengers” pass over on their way to their destinations—see for example the earliest Hamsa sandesaya, “Message of the Swan”; the initial citation is from the Parevi sandesaya, “Message of the Pilgrim” by Sri Rahula, which asks Visnu to provide suitable sustenance to Purakramabahu’s reign. See Holt, The Buddhist Visnu: passim. 71) Subrahmanyam, “ ‘Persianization’ and ‘Mercantalism’ ”: 56. 72) See T. Frasch, “Coastal Peripheries during the Pagan Period.” In Maritime Frontier of Burma, In Gommans and Leider, Maritime Frontier of Burma: 74. 73) The fifteenth-century “messenger poem” Gira samdea provides a description of a Sri Lanka port-of-trade where multi-ethnic Muslim merchants were prominent, and includes reference to Berbers (baburan, as distinguished from those of “the land of the Arabs”) “who consumed quantities of opium and cannabis [prior to] whirling round and round to their hearts content . . . wearing flowers in their ears, twirling their mustaches and swinging batons.” Gunawardana, “Seaways to Sielediba”: 30. 74) Duarte Barbosa, A Description of the Coast of East Africa and Malabar: 167, describes the activities of Malabar-connected Muslims at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

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Battuta’s record of his early fourteenth-century experiences in Sri Lanka document the characteristics of the earlier Muslim commercial elite, who maintained warehouses at Mannar, a small island off the Sri Lanka west coast in the Gulf of Mannar south of the Palk Straits, and owned armed ships, which were alternatively engaged in maritime trade and regional piracy. The wealthy Muslim merchant lord of Colombo (Kalanbu), described by Ibn Battuta as having five hundred Abyssinians (Africans) under his command, was the “prince” of this port. In contrast, an inscription from the contemporary rival Dondra port provides information on the affairs of the port’s marketplace; it reports that it was administered by a Mahapandita officer, who collected customs duties on merchants in return for his assurance that they would be protected from illegal market practices. Only those from foreign countries who received his permission were allowed to do business in the local “administered” marketplace; officials were not allowed to accept gifts (bribes) from foreign merchants.75 At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the East-West maritime network, which at that time depended on port facilities on the southern tip of Sri Lanka, was disrupted by dynastic warfare and piracy, which was resolved by Zheng He’s intervention in 1411. According to Chinese sources, Zheng He made a stop on his outward voyage in 1409 and was rudely treated, if not ambushed, by the would-be Sri Lankan monarch. On his return voyage in 141l, Zheng He settled the score, and took the claimant to the southwest Kotte throne back to China as his prisoner.76 Subsequently Parakaramabahu VI (1412-68), backed by the Buddhist sangha, consolidated the power of his new Kotte-based cosmopolitan court, and its Colombo port-of-trade. He eventually provided “unified” peace over the island, by eliminating remaining south Indian Vijayanagara overlordship in 1432, and subsequently brought both his rivals, the northern Jaffna and central Kandy regions, under his authority. He is celebrated in Sri Lankan tradition for having established the last unification of Sri Lanka prior to its post-World War II independence. Parakaramabahu sent five confirmed 75)

S. Paranavitana, “The Shrine of Upulvan at Devundara.” Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of Ceylon 6 (1953): 63-4. 76) Evidence is supplied in cross reference between the account in the Ming-shi and the “Galle Trilingual Inscription” erected by Zheng He in 1411 (“The Galle Trilingual Inscription.” Epigraphica Zeylonica 3.35: 331-41), as discussed by Mahinda Werake, “Sino-Sri Lankan Relations during Pre-Colonial Times.” In Bandaranayake et al., Sri Lanka: 217-8; the translations of the trilingual inscriptional text are provided in this collected volume: 209-11.

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tributary missions to the Chinese court between 1412 and 1459,77 perhaps as reassurances to the Chinese of his realm’s continuing stability as well as to maintain his kingdom’s profitable China trade. There were no subsequent missions as by that time the Ming were discouraging lavish tributary missions and were no longer interested in pursuing an aggressive diplomatic policy in the Southern Seas.78 Parakaramabahu’s reign is significant for his promotion of eclectic Theravada Buddhism, as documented in the sandesa (“messenger”) poetic literature that was composed under his patronage—two of the most notable were written by his court poet, the Buddhist monk Sri Rahula, who was the head of that era’s most prominent Buddhist monastery at Totagamuva.79 With Parakrahabahu’s backing, Sri Lanka Buddhism effectively assimilated the Natha bodhisattva cults that had their origin in tenthcentury northern India, as the Theravada tradition internalized aspects of Mahayana Buddhism and Hinduism, by fusing the Buddha Avalokitesvara and the Hindu/folk goddess Pattini as his consort into the Nantha compassionate bodhisattva (with aspects of the Manjusri bodhisattva of monastic and yogic wisdom), who was also the Buddha-to-be Maitreya.80 In sum, the syncretic royal Theravada cult provided an inclusive religious unity 77)

There were definitely five missions in 1416, 1421, 1433, 1436, and 1459 as reported in the Ming court records. There is debate, however, based on Sri Lanka chronicle evidence, if there was a sixth mission during which the new monarch himself visited the Chinese court on command of the Ming emperor. 78) J. Chaffee, “At the Intersection of Empire and World Trade: The Chinese Port City of Quanzhou (Zaitun), Eleventh-Fifteenth Centuries.” In Hall, Secondary Cities: 99-122. 79) H. B. M. Ilangasinha, Buddhism in Medieval Sri Lanka (Delhi: Satguru, 1992); J. Holt, Buddha in the Crown (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Holt, The Buddhist Visnu. 80) Gananauth Obeyesekera, The Cult Goddess Pattini (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984): 289-90. Obeyesekera posits Parakramabahu’s Kotte kingdom trinity, consisting of Natha (The Buddha), Upulvan (Visnu), and Vibhisana (“Guardian of the Law”) as the guardian deity of the capital city. See also Holt, Buddha in the Crown: 115 on Natha as the royal guardian deity, and Holt, The Buddhist Visnu: 67, where Holt argues that the Sri Lanka Upulvana, the “Buddhist Visnu,” worshipped at a royal temple in Devundara, was an indigenous Sri Lanka divinity that took on a variety of the Hindu god Visnu’s attributes, while the goddess Pattini was similarly a local divinity incorporated in the Indic pantheon. Many of these fifteenth-century religious revisions were the result of Sri Lanka’s longstanding connections to the Kerala coastline, either via Sri Lanka immigrant residents who had merchant family links to the western India coast, or others who held “military chieftainship” positions due to their own initiatives or by their delegated nayak assignments by the Vijayanagara court.

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that embraced Sri Lanka’s cultural and ethnic pluralism. Parakramabahu commissioned the writing of new Tipitaka (“scriptures”) with commentaries on the Faith, established Buddhist monastic educational institutions called Sunetradevi Prirvena, and provisioned the individuals and institutions responsible for these with substantial income endowments. In the initial poetic citation, the poet envisioned the king himself to have divine qualities, whether as the embodiment of the intervening bodhisattva, the Buddha-to-Be, or as the spiritually empowered Vedic avatara.81 Parakaramabahu’s inclusive cultural and political innovations had direct consequences for the Bay of Bengal region, as the king’s religious initiatives attracted Buddhist monks who traveled to Sri Lanka to study. There are three notable examples of such regional networking implications. The first, which illustrates Sri Lanka’s fifteenth-century maritime connections to Bengal, involved a Brahmin from Bengal, Sri Ramacandra Bharati, who made a pilgrimage to study the new inclusive Sri Lanka Nantha cult that was centered at Totagamuva. At Sri Rahula’s initiative, Parakaramabahu bestowed special recognition on the visiting Bengal scholar for his grammatic writings.82 The second example derives from a sixteenth-century Thai chronicle record, which documents the mid-1420s expedition to Parakaramabahu’s realm by thirty-nine monks from the upper Malay Peninsula and adjacent mainland Southeast Asia, twenty-five from Chiangmai (Nabbispura), eight from the Khmer Cambodian realm (Kamboja), and six from the Begu region of lower Burma (Ramanna). They came “knowing of Sri Lanka and its authoritative scriptures, traveling to the island to be reordained, to be schooled in the Doctrine, and to gain the correct [ritual and monastic order] practices.” They returned with two Sinhalese monks who proceeded to re-ordain all the monks of the Thai Ayudhyan realm.83 81)

Despite the fact that his court engaged the administrative services of Brahmin and Buddhist scholars, he was honored in the sandesa literature as the Sangharatna, “the defender of the Sri Lanka sangha,” for defending the Theravada tradition from Mahayana, Hindu, and Islamic threats. Ilangasinha, Buddhism: 35-6. 82) Holt, Buddha in the Crown: 114. Implicitly, the Bengal scholar returned home to share his knowledge of the Sri Lanka Natha cult. 83) From the Jinakalamali [ Jinakalamali: Transcribed from a Siamese text and edited by A. P. Buddhadatta Mahathera of Sri Lanka, 1962] as cited in W. M. Sirisana, Political, Religious, and Cultural Relations between Ceylon and South East Asia, c. 1000-1500 (Leiden: Brill, 1978): 108-10. This text was written in 1576 by the Thai elder Ratanapanna, who belonged to the Sinhalese sangha. Michael Vickery (“Cambodia and its Neighbors in the

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The third example dates from the period immediately following Parakaramabahu’s reign, during that of his successor Bhuvanekabahu VI (146980), as documented in the 1478/9 Kalayani Sima Inscription now displayed in Begu. This inscription records the endowment by King Bhammaceti (1472-92) of Ramasnnadesa to commemorate the initiation of a similar sangha-wide re-ordination ritual sequence. The inscription, consisting of ten stone tablets—three with Pali inscriptions and the remaining seven in the local Mon language—begins by noting the previous impurities of the realm’s sangha and the monastic sects’ inability to conduct their own internal reforms. Consequently, the king commanded twenty-two monks and thirty-three novices to sail in two ships to Sri Lanka for their re-ordination. The king sent with them offerings for the sacred Tooth Relic and honoraria for the leading Sri Lanka monks. Their upasampada re-ordination ritual took place over four days in 1476. On their return voyage one of the ships was shipwrecked on the south Indian coastline, but all the monks eventually returned to their homeland (as the regular maritime networking between south India and the northern Bay of Bengal coastline would have facilitated their voyage home).84 In preparing for the upasampada, the king had a massive re-ordination hall built, and there over a three-year period (1476-9) 15,666 monks were ordained, among these eight hundred leading monks, 14,265 young monks, and six hundred and one novices. The point of this exercise was to assert royal power over the Buddhist Church, by curtailing the variety of monks’ non-ecclesiastic activities, such as those the inscription highlighted, including their practice of medicine, arts, and

Fifteenth Century.” ARI Working Paper 27 (2004)) focuses on the key role of Chiangmai in the development of Ayudhya’s Thai Buddhism over the course of the fifteenth century, and the significance of networking between the Mon regions of southern Myanmar, specifically the Martaban region, and Chiangmai. Here the vital source of reference is the Jinakalamali, which concentrates on the foundational role of the Thai monk Sumana, who studied under a Sri Lanka monk at Marataban and then returned to his Thai homeland to found the Sihala Sanga at Sukhotai, as the predecessor to the Ayuddhya-era sangha. Vickery’s insistence on the importance of the Martaban connection is in contrast with the alternative thesis that strategic Nakkom Si Thammarat on the Kra Isthmus East-West overland passageway of the Malay Peninsula was the vital link that connected early Thai civilization to Sri Lanka, and emphasizes the Peninsula’s role as the inspiration for subsequent Thai Buddhist temple construction, iconography, and temple murals. 84) Ranabir Chakravarti, “Rulers and Ports: Visakhapattanam and Mottupalli in Early Medieval Andhra.” In Mariners, Merchants, and Oceans: Studies in Maritime History, ed. K. S. Mathew (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995): 57-78.

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crafts, or other potentially personal or sangha-wide profitable activities that were incongruent with their monastic vows of material and secular denial. The inscription included threats to punish the relatives, friends, and supporters of deviant monks.85 In ways similar to the pluralistic patterns of communication common among the region’s Islamic diasporas, in this as in each of the two other fifteenth-century examples, Buddhist networking overlapped and reinforced Bay of Bengal commercial and political activities. Conclusion The point of this study is that the integrity of the early Indian Ocean maritime port-polity networks was less the product of political, economic, or cultural initiatives of local elites, but was more due to successful networking among the sojourning merchants and religious clerics who traveled to, and traded in, the regional ports. Rather than focusing on the structure and function of political institutions that might define early urbanism in the Bay of Bengal, the alternative proposed here is that research on maritime diasporas provides a better human perspective of early regional developmental patterns. As depicted in this study, the Bay of Bengal’s maritime diasporas were the product of movements of commercial commodities and accompanying religious ideas; confrontations between alien cultures; formations of pluralistic societies, dual loyalties, and multiple affiliations; and demonstration of early globalization. The representative but as yet preliminary case studies cited above are indicative of the expansive human networking common to the maritime Bay of Bengal region in the 1300-1500 era, when the region was a vital source of products that were in heavy demand by international traders, who supplied foreign consumer goods and money in exchange. In line

85) Taw Sein Ko,The Kalyani Inscription, erected by King Dhammaceti at Pegu in 1476 A.D: Text and Translation (Rangoon: Government Printing Office, 1892). On the importance of this re-ordination ritual see M. Aung-Thwin, “The Role of Sasana Reform in Burmese History: Economic Dimensions of a Religious Purification.” Journal of Asian Studies 38 (1979): 671-92; against this view, see V. Lieberman, “The Political Significance of Religious Wealth in Burmese History.” Journal of Asian Studies 39 (1980): 753-69; see also M. Aung-Thwin, The Mists of Ramanna: The Legend That was Lower Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), for a revisionist view of early Myanmar history.

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with the heterarchy and cosmopolis models, none of the named fifteenth and sixteenth-century Bay of Bengal regional port-polities developed into elaborate institutionalized “states.” In each case, regional secondary centers held their prominence because they were linked to a number of parallel or subordinate ports-of-trade across substantial maritime space. Consistent with the heterarchy and cosmopolis models, these fifteenth and sixteenthcentury Bay of Bengal port-polity networks may be thought of as extended communities that commonly shared in a linked series of regional ports-oftrade and human and cultural networks that connected to the international Indian Ocean East-West mainstream. While fifteenth-century Sri Lanka under Parakramabahu VI assumed significance as the acknowledged center of a conceptual Bay of Bengal Theravada Buddhist cultural cosmopolis network, Kotte’s Colombo port-of-trade was not equally significant as a focal commercial emporium, but was one among other Bay of Bengal regional secondary ports ultimately networked with the Melaka emporium, which fulfilled the essence of the networked cosmopolis model.86 The evidence of regional networking in the 1300-1500 Bay of Bengal region cited in this study suggests that maritime diasporas were acculturating into local societies, or negotiating relationships with their neighboring communities, as these early commercial interactions were the source of subsequently stable pluralistic communities, which contributed to the Indian Ocean trade boom that coincided with the increasing European presence in the post-1500 era. This study has demonstrated that networks based in maritime diasporas need not be exclusively commercial. Though the networks examined here were essentially commercial, and this was indeed their chief purpose, the multifaceted interests of the networked participants can nevertheless be meaningfully understood in the context of intersections of different types of community interests.87 This study has specifically highlighted the overlap of commercial, societal, religious, and political affiliations that were vital to the coexistence of, and which were necessary in the support of, common trading interests. The complexities faced by fifteenth-century Bay of Bengal merchants, and their local resolutions, 86) As argued in Hall, “Multi-Dimensional Networking” and “Coastal Cities in an Age of Transition.” 87) See S. Morrillo, “Autonomy and Subordination: The Cultural Dynamics of Small Cities.” In Hall, Secondary Cities: 17-38, who provides a graphic representation of the multi-dimensional urban networking discussed in this study.

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