Ambivalent engagements: The Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean world

The dynamics of the Bay of Bengal world

To uncover historical dynamics, this article tracks earlier networks through spatial relations over the longue durée. While one of these spatial levels is, of course, the nation, we must remember that the notion of the nation existed only in the sense of peoples, religion and race during the timeframe under study. Here the approach will be transnational, allowing for the play of spatial multiplicities not on land, but over sea to reveal the role played by the Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean world. ⁹

While human, animal and botanical migration can be discerned quite early across the Bay of Bengal, maritime shifts are more difficult to locate. For both Chakravarti and Lieberman, a ‘pull’ or drive toward the coast was observable in the extended bay world from the seventh century, suggesting that the maritime was overtaking the continental rather than the reverse. ¹⁰ This attraction or pull was seen in Bagan, Mon Pegu, Ayutthaya and Angkor. ¹¹ Examples from the eastern sea board of India illustrate this process.

The east coast of India has several continuous river deltas, from the Ganga delta in the north to the deltas of the Vaigai and the Tamraparni in the deep south, intermediated by the Mahanadi (Odisha), the Godavari, the Krishna (Andhra Pradesh) and the Kaveri (Tamilnadu) deltas. The deltas and the coastal tracts converge, being fertile and supporting large agrarian settlements conducive to providing vital resources to monarchical polities. The navigability of many of these rivers offers excellent fluvial networks between the seaboard and the interior, the east coast deltas being dotted with ports participating in both coastal and maritime trade circuits. Hall notes that while the term ‘pattinam’ distinguished ‘ports’, meaning ports located primarily on sea coasts, ‘ports’ of the interior were further distinguished in Tamil epigraphy by the title ‘erivirapattinam’. ¹² That is why, Chakravarti observes, the political pull towards coasts needs to be seen not in terms of maritime conquests or turning a maritime space into a lake of a particular power, but in the control – or attempts at control – over deltas and port areas. ¹³

Surprisingly, coastlines along the bay are designated geographically, and also sometimes by the polity controlling a particular coast, and not by commodities exported, as in the Slave or Gold Coasts in Africa. This implies a diversity of goods for exchange rather than a single item. ¹⁴ One exception is the Pearl Fishery Coast in the southern Bay of Bengal, stretching from Tuticorin to Cape Comorin in peninsular India. Yet another is the Mollusc Coast that appears in Northeast Sumatra in the eighth century, but strictly speaking this coast does not open out to the Bay of Bengal. ¹⁵ Generally speaking, a diversity of export-commodities – cotton, rice, aloeswood, bay leaves and long pepper – is what gave Bay of Bengal countries a commercial advantage from very early times.

The Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean world

The Bay of Bengal has played a key role throughout history in connecting China to South Asia through innumerable Southeast Asian waterscapes. Today, it is a significant maritime passage between the western and eastern Indian oceans, vehicle of India’s trade with ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries and a space of diplomatic manoeuvring between India and China. It is central to China’s maritime vision and is presently an integral part of China’s maritime initiatives in the Indian Ocean – the New Silk Road scheme, the ‘near’ seas versus ‘far’ seas strategy and the ‘string of pearls’ policy – through all of which China is forging an active presence across the Bay of Bengal. These various initiatives are summed up as OBOR, or One Belt, One Road, whereby China breathes new life into the erstwhile overland and maritime silk routes across Asia and Africa.

The Indian Ocean world, by which I mean the physical confines surrounding the ocean, comprises two evenly divided sectors, within which the centrality of South Asia is indisputable. The western Indian Ocean contains a large sea – the Arabian Sea – and a host of smaller seas and gulfs, among which the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf are prominent, followed by the gulfs of Oman and Aden, the straits of Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb, and lower down, the Mozambique Channel. The eastern Indian Ocean presents a more fragmented waterscape, stretching beyond the Southeast-Asian archipelago to the China seas and containing the Palk, Melaka, Sunda and Lombok Straits, as well as a host of smaller seas within it.

Chakravarti notes that despite its long past, the Indian Ocean has had very few nomenclatures in Sanskrit literature. The most common are the purva/prak (eastern) versus paschim/apara (western) seas, echoing the division of the Indian Ocean into the eastern and western oceans. ¹⁶ By contrast, outsiders had more precise names for this ocean: Arab and Persian geographers used the term bahr-al Harkhand or Harkal (Bay of Bengal) and the bahr al Larwi (the Arabian Sea) for the bahr-al Hind or the Indian Ocean; for China the Indian Ocean was merely the Hsi hai or Western Sea; and while Ptolemy called it Prasodes Thalassa or the Leek Green Sea, Pliny called it Mare Indicum or the Indian Sea. More multiplicities were observable as polities matured and regional maritime blocs coalesced: the northern and southern Bay of Bengal, the central Indian Ocean containing the Sea of Ceylon and the Sea of Melayu and the Jiaozhi Ocean further east. ¹⁷

The Bay of Bengal is the largest single maritime space in the eastern Indian Ocean. Its various names – indicating various levels and spatial divisions – reveal a multiplicity rarely seen elsewhere. Known to outsiders from early times, the first classical writer to designate a particular unit in the eastern Indian Ocean was Ptolemy; he used the term Sinus Gangeticus to denote the northern Bay of Bengal. Bengal has since been central in this maritime imaginary; the ninth-century Arabic ‘Sea of Harkhand’ privileged Harikela, the extreme eastern cultural and economic unit of Bengal existing from Vedic times. By contrast, a Sanskrit inscription dating to c.971 CE calls the Bay Vangasagara, or the sea of Vanga, a cultural unit west of Harikela. ¹⁸ The Chinese ‘Banggela hai’ likewise highlights Bengal once again, implying Bengal was its focal point. ¹⁹ From the seventeenth century the English ‘Bay’ of Bengal gradually replaced the Latinate ‘Gulf’ of Bengal, but Bengal still remained central in this vision too.

These names testify to various types of embeddedness within local and regional imaginaries. The naval exploits of Srivijaya, the Cholas, the Pandyas, the Southern Song and Yuan China have to be seen against this physical backdrop, as have the cultural transmissions between West, South, Southeast and East Asia, since the peninsular ports in South India also connected the western and eastern Indian Oceans. ²⁰ Old Cairo (Fustat) merchant families established branches of operation in the ports of the Coromandel coast during the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, while regular commercial exchange was carried on between the two subcontinents. ²¹

Networks fluctuated over time, but the southern bay always connected the Indian peninsula to Southeast-Asian waterscapes, making it part of trans-maritime passages for millennia. ²² In popular perception it was a Chola sea; the Chinese Chu-li-ye or Chu-lien coast, derived from the Tamil ‘Cholamandalam’, which in its turn gave rise to the English ‘Coromandel’ coast. ²³

But if we move the lens of our historical imagination we will see that the western side of the Bay of Bengal is also a connector. It is the westernmost sector of the eastern Indian Ocean before it joins the western Indian Ocean and separates monsoon Asia from arid Asia. The corresponding economies are seen as static and rural as opposed to mobile and mercantile. ²⁴ The latter has a wheat and millet-based culinary culture, with some rice cultivation along the coastal plains along the eastern-African seaboard, while the former is almost exclusively rice and fish based.

Urbanisation emerges as a key factor in change along the western Indian Ocean. This emphasis on towns is echoed in the Ottoman Evliya’s Çelebi’s description of Red Sea towns, pilgrimage, communications, trade and fiscality c.1671–1672:

Evliya regards the natural setting as something that can and should be dominated by man. His detailed descriptions of settlements even in the sparsely inhabited deserts may serve as an assertion that human ingenuity, manifested in trade and technology, can triumph over even an unpromising environment. This approach is even more obvious from his descriptions of engineering projects, both imaginary—such as the Suez Canal—or real, such as the water conduits of Mecca and Jiddah. The natural setting as Evliya perceives it is rarely inhabited by numinous creatures. Miracle-working saints and dervish convents appear, but they belong to the towns and their immediate environment, not to the open countryside or to the desert. ²⁵

Lands around the western Indian Ocean have seen fewer imperial polities as compared to those clustered around the eastern sector. Stable empires, rather than short-lived states were the norm in the eastern Indian Ocean: think of the Maurya, Gupta, Chola, Vijayanagar, Srivijaya and the successive Chinese Empires. The western sector had comparatively fewer empires in history; certainly the Persians, Arabs and Ottomans founded empires, but they varied in both time and space unlike those of the eastern ocean.

Yet, surprisingly, while there was political integration, there was lesser commercial integration on the entire eastern Indian Ocean seaboard until the sixteenth century, when agrarian commercialisation and increasing commercial participation in the First Global Age between 1400 and 1800 swept away many of these differences. Political formations in the Indian peninsula were oriented toward the control over doabs and deltas of important rivers such as the Raichur doab and the Vengi area between the Godavari and the Krishna, coveted by contending powers over centuries. In the Dakhin and South India, there were attempts to transform a single-valley power into a multi-valley political entity. The conflicts were as much economic as political, the peninsula not having vast tracts of fertile plains as in North India and, therefore, large agrarian-based kingdoms were less effective as polities. ²⁶ Deltas and coasts in the Dakhin and the south offered a significant combination of opportunities from both agrarian and non-agrarian sectors of the economy, but their control rose more from the attempt to divert these resources into the continental economy rather than to the maritime sector.

The reason for late commercial integration arises from the physical fragmentation referenced already, but also from the absence of a dominant maritime economic power in the eastern side of the ocean. Resources were well matched: southern China, coastal Vietnam, the Malay states and the Indonesian archipelago dominated flows in the eastern Indian Ocean. South Asia seems less proactive commercially. The sheer size of India and China held the balance in the eastern Indian Ocean, making it a multi-polar ocean with a ‘soft’ centre.

Despite these drawbacks, the Bay of Bengal was significant in generating cultural routes that withstood time. These encompassed a variety of relations: commercial certainly, but also religious, ideological and stylistic. They were underpinned by pilgrimage networks, not only of the great religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, but also of syncretic cults that transcended the seas by offering protection against storms and shipwrecks: Mazu from Fujian, the Nestorian-Catholic cult of Velankanni from peninsular India, Sufi shrines linking South and Southeast Asia, the shore temples of Pallava Mamallapuram that formed part of a chain of sea temples from Somnath on the Kathiawad coast in the western Indian Ocean to the Balinese shore temples of Tanah Lot and Uluwatu and, at a lesser level, the Badr Maqam shrines dotting the bay coast from Chittagong to Mergui in Myanmar. All these are examples of diverse faiths dotting the eastern Indian Ocean littoral, enabling prayers across the sea to ensure safe travel, fortune and wellbeing. The eastern Indian Ocean has always been subject to more typhoons and cyclones than its western counterpart.

Yet, my overall impression is that communication was slower in the eastern sector, perhaps due to the continental fragmentation that made polities literally islands among the various – and diverse – seas in the eastern Indian Ocean. The sea divided peoples more than the land in the eastern Indian Ocean.

Introducing spatial issues in the Bay of Bengal

A division of the bay into northern and southern sectors is crucial for our understanding of its role in the history of the Indian Ocean. The bay is distinctively shaped like a funnel with the narrowest portion at the northern end. Routes at this end were not purely maritime; rather they were a mix of maritime, coastal, fluvial and land routes, the last connecting through the Southwest Silk Route to southwest China, linking eastern India to Laos. The first variant of this route traversed Myanmar and China, the second Vietnam and the third Yunnan, Thailand and Cambodia. By virtue of this geographical quirk, the northern bay – the stretch of water fringing northern Odisha, Bengal, Bangladesh and northwest Myanmar including Arakan – not only accessed a maritime foreland, but also a sizeable hinterland as long as its network of routes leading to provisioning areas remained intact. The northern bay lay on the large continental avenue stretching from China to eastern Europe, and not on a maritime avenue as such. On the eastern seaboard of India, the ports of Odisha are crucial mediators between the northern and southern sectors of the bay. ²⁷

The southern Bay of Bengal, by contrast, is an open sea extending to the southern coast of Sumatra, after which it segues into the Indian Ocean. The Isthmus of Kra and the Melaka and Sunda Straits connect the southern bay to the extended eastern Indian Ocean, making it part of the huge maritime avenue stretching from China to the shores of East Africa. Various tsunamis originating in Aceh and extending to the Somalian, Kenyan, Tanzanian and South-African shores reveal the geological unity of this maritime avenue. ²⁸

As Taprobane, Sri Lanka very early captured the Western imagination and its ports were active in connecting Rome to China, classical writers such as Pliny and Strabo seeing Taprobane as central in the journey between West and East. ²⁹ An idea of Sri Lanka’s central position, as well as that of south Indians in the trade of the bay can be gleaned from the fact that the Roman Emperor Justinian, in 531 CE, decided to break the Persian monopoly on Chinese silk by suggesting to the Abyssinians that they buy direct from the Indians. But the Abyssinians could not ‘for it was impossible for the Ethiopians to buy silk from the Indians, because the Persian merchants present at the very ports (of Ceylon) where first the ships of the Indians put in, since they inhabit a neighbouring country, were always accustomed to buy the entire cargoes’, suggesting that Persians were trading in this region long before the advent of Islam. ³⁰ Cosmas Indicopluestes remarked that its centrality enabled Sri Lanka to control the trade of the eastern and western Indian oceans. ³¹ In 1283, Bhuvanekabahu I, its king, sent an envoy to the Mamluk ruler of Egypt seeking diplomatic and trade relations, bypassing the Persian-Gulf-linked Indian-west-coast-based middlemen and offering pearls and precious stones, vessels, muslins, brazilwood, cinnamon and elephants. ³² Sri Lanka continued to retain its central position in the trade of the Indian Ocean: in the fifteenth century, Parakaramabahu VI (1412–1468) of Sri Lanka sent five tribute missions to China between 1412 and 1459.

Sri Lanka held a special, central place within Chinese perceptions of Indian Ocean trade as well. The Chinese called the sea around Sri Lanka, comprising both the southern bay and the central Indian Ocean, the Sea of Si-lan. ³³ In the mid-Tang period, the ships of Sri Lanka were said to be the largest of foreign ships. ³⁴

For Hall, the tenth and eleventh centuries were a period of transition in Asia as new powers emerged to assume control over the major centres of contemporary civilization: the Fatimids in Egypt (969 AD); the Colas in southern India (985); the Khmers at Angkor (944), the Burmese at Pagan (1044), and the Ly in northern Vietnam (1009) on the Southeast-Asian mainland; and the Sung dynasty in China (960). Among other results, these consolidations seem to have stimulated Asia’s maritime commerce and precipitated a burst of energy among the community of international traders who travelled the navigation channels connecting eastern and western Asia. ³⁵

Linked with the impulses of a maritime economy were religious stimuli. For Hall:

… from the tenth century, three new centers of international Buddhism emerged. India’s Bihar-Bengal region, with Tibet and Central Asian connections, was the initial center in the evolution of Tantric Buddhism, under the patronage of the Pala rulers of northeast India. That there were also commercial implications to this Buddhist pilgrimage networking is demonstrated in the Cola raids against the wealthy commercial centers of the Bengal coast line prior to their naval expeditions against the Srivijaya commercial realm in 1024/5 (Sen 2001: 239; Spencer 1982). In that same era, Sri Lanka became the center of a revitalized Theravada Buddhism, which especially flourished after a period of Cola interregnum that ended in the late eleventh century (Gunawardana 2001). Meanwhile, China emerged as the new center of Buddhism’s Mahayana sects. Significantly, each of these new Buddhist schools was centered in a strategically important region of the international trade. ³⁶

Mahayanist Buddhism predominated until at least the twelfth century in China, Champa, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Pala Bengal and Srivijaya, when Yuan patronage of Tantric Buddhism added another dimension to religious stimuli along the bay: ‘Yuan patronage of Tibetan Tantric Buddhism over the prior Chinese Mahayana Buddhist schools placed the Yuan court in a position to conduct diplomatic discussions with Java’s thirteenth-century court, as fellow practitioners of Tantric Buddhism’. ³⁷ By contrast, Theravada Buddhist networks configured the southern bay. Tambralinga, once Mahayanist, became, along with Sri Lanka and Bagan, a Theravadin polity. The Maldives Islands, also Mahayanist, converted – not to Theravada Buddhism – but to Islam in the middle of the twelfth century. Ming China concentrated on its own Buddhist tradition, no longer needing legitimacy from the South-Asian Buddhist tradition. Commercial interests now steered Chinese expansion into the bay world. ³⁸

It is noticeable that the drive toward the coast referenced earlier and the division of the bay world into three schools of Buddhism coincides with this early ‘age of commerce’. ³⁹ New ports rose along the bay, for example Nagapattinam, which now became the official Chola port. While the Pallavas had designed Mamallapuram as a smaller scale Kancipuram to encourage a ‘cultural dialogue’ with Southeast Asia, Nagapattinam was clearly a commercially oriented port which was intended to form external commercial relationships alone. ⁴⁰

Sen argues that Buddhist networking rather than commercial interests dominated the early phase of China–South Asia contacts (the Tang and Song periods), although Chinese motivations were usually threefold: military, commercial and religio-cultural. The first was to secure borders with Indian help; the second was to tap the maritime route when the Central-Asian land route became hazardous and the third was to acquire texts and scholars to give authenticity to Chinese Buddhism. ⁴¹ He notes:

… after the eleventh century, records on South Asia in the Chinese Dynastic Histories change significantly. First, instead of devoting a separate section to Tianzhu, as was the case previously, the Yuan and Ming Dynastic Histories, Yuan shi 元史 (‘History of the Yuan Dynasty’) and Ming shi 明史 (‘History of the Ming Dynasty’) respectively, focus more on specific polities in South Asia. The polities of 馬八兒Mabaer (Ma’bar on the Coromandel Coast), Kezhi 柯枝 (Kochi/Cochin on the Malabar Coast), and Banggela榜 葛剌 (Bengal), for example, are mentioned more prominently than Tianzhu/Shendu. This is evidently because of the increased use of maritime routes that linked the coastal regions of China and South Asia. A second reason seems to be the decline in the Buddhist eyewitness accounts, which mostly described the inland areas of South Asia. Also important was the fact that a significant number of merchants and emissaries from China started frequenting South Asia after the eleventh century. Consequently, these non-Buddhist travellers from China emerged as the main sources of information about South Asia during the Yuan and Ming periods. ⁴²

The establishment of Nagapattinam as the primary Chola port is indicative of the peninsula’s desire to tap into the lucrative China trade, and in the process it became a significant node on the maritime avenue.

The Bay of Bengal in the maritime avenue

In antiquity and the early classical period, the Bay of Bengal was only partially known. For the author of the Periplus Maris Erythraei, as well as the early Arab sailors, the bay was known only at the peninsular end. The Bengal coast was bypassed in actual sailings across the Indian Ocean from the west and was, very likely, navigationally unfamiliar to Roman sailors as well. ⁴³ Chinese knowledge of the northern Bay of Bengal may be dated between the third and seventh centuries CE, from the time a shadowy kingdom of Tamralipta is referenced in Bengal until Tang establishment of the Annam Protectorate in 679 and various inconclusive campaigns in Yunnan that opened up a connection through the Red River between the Bay of Bengal and the Gulf of Tongkin. ⁴⁴

Tamralipta was then the most important port in Bengal, used by Fa-hien in the early part of the fifth century CE and also by I-tsing at the end of the seventh century. Despite such movements, Tibbetts writes that the tenth-century Arab sailors knew only the coast to the southwest of Bengal, that is, Orissa, and the ‘Qaqulla’ coast to the east, identified with Pegu, Tenasserim or Tavoy. ⁴⁵ There was no mention of the Bengal coast in between, suggesting it was unknown to them. If this is correct, why this strange omission?

The reason is that the northern Bay of Bengal coast did not offer an intermediate stop on transoceanic voyages, being an inhospitable coast located far north of the grand sailing routes, subject to frequent devastating cyclones and dominated by strong tides and currents. As late as the nineteenth century, European mapmakers marked the waters around the Bengal coast as ‘little known and very dangerous’. The Nicobars and then Kalah/Kedah were preferred stops, the latter into the fourteenth century. ⁴⁶ Perhaps for this very reason the Bengal coast was ignored by the Rasulid sunni stipendiary network across the Indian Ocean. It extended to the Gujarat, Konkan, Malabar and Ma’abar coasts, terminating at the last, although Bengal was by then an Islamic state, gateway to the famous shrine of Hazrat Shah Jalal, visited by Ibn Battuta in the fourteenth century. ⁴⁷ The Jorge Reinel map of 1510, known also as the Wolfenbuttel map, showing clearly the Portuguese maritime vision in the Indian Ocean, highlights only three choke points: Hurmuz, Cambay and Melaka, depicting also the ports of Goa, Dabhol, the Malabar and Ceylon. ⁴⁸ Ports in the northern Bay of Bengal are absent, since the northern bay was not part of the larger Indian Ocean maritime avenue.

By contrast, the Belitung, Intan and Cirebon wrecks found in the eastern Indian Ocean testify to the southern bay’s vital role as connector to the western seas. Ninth to mid-fourteenth century merchant associations such as the Ainurruvar, Manigramam, Nanadesi and the Anjuvannam dominated economic transactions in peninsular India and local versions of such associations are found in tenth-century Java and Bali. There are seven Javanese inscriptions dating from 902 to 1053 CE referring to local merchant associations called banigrama and the various tax concessions granted to them, these indigenous organisations being associated with local economic networks as tax-farmers. Associated with the merchant associations of peninsular India were communities of craftsmen such as weavers, basket-makers, potters, leather-workers and so on. The topographical distribution of the inscriptions is significant, being clustered in the Dharwad–Bijapur and Mysore localities of Karnataka, while in Tamil Nadu larger numbers are found in the Thanjavur, Tiruchirapalli and Madurai districts. Not only did these merchant associations develop powerful economic networks, they also employed private armies and contributed to the construction of tanks, donating regularly to temples which sometimes carried their names. ⁴⁹

The early modern Bay of Bengal world

From the fifteenth century, the bay comes into its own in the archives. New ports and networks appear. ⁵⁰ It was at this time that the riverine port of Betor in Bengal transformed from a riverine crossroads to a seasonal port connecting Saptagrama and Gaur. ⁵¹ Were such changes solely due to the Ming maritime push in the Indian Ocean? Most bay polities started sending tribute missions to China. A direct Bengal–Melaka run developed, interrupted only when the Portuguese captured Melaka in 1511.

The fifteenth century, although little studied, brought in great changes that transformed the face of maritime Asia. Cash cropping and commercialisation of agriculture were manifested in a trade boom, a demand for money and the emergence of new common means of exchange. The boom was seen in the emergence of cosmopolitan urban centres and more sophisticated financial systems, the emergence of the Southeast-Asian junk, new navigational techniques, the growing strength of Theravada Buddhism, the introduction of new religions such as Islam and Christianity, and a military revolution. Yet other changes were the consolidation of territorial powers, the emergence of a literate administration and history writing, the increased prominence of legal codes and more links between Southeast-Asian and Coromandel ports. ⁵² The bay continued to boom during Reid’s sixteenth-century ‘Age of Commerce’. ⁵³ The Cantino Planisphere of 1502 marked Satgaon (Porto Pequeno) and Chittagong (Porto Grande) – the latter as Carigaon – as the twin gateways into the northern bay. ⁵⁴ Smaller ports in between these two gateways negotiated successfully with the Portuguese for the Goa and Hurmuz runs. ⁵⁵

Despite being ignored in the Reinel map of the larger Indian Ocean, the northern bay became central to Portuguese and French projects in the Bay of Bengal during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Manrique, basing himself at Arakan, gave life to this vision of a second Portuguese Empire centred on the northern bay, but failed ultimately, in face of the second wave of Europeans coming into the bay world: the Dutch, the English and the French. The French revived Manrique’s project. Dupleix’s grand vision, centred on Chittagong in the 1730s, involved a melange of diverse methods: coastal sailings and overland crossings, as well as the utilisation of the great Brahmaputra-Meghna-Chindwin-Ayeyrawady fluvial routes to create a trading bloc away from the English-controlled Hughly zone. This putative complex stretched from Chandernagore in the Bengal delta to Arakan, Pegu and Ava, but never materialised.

Chevalier’s vision of the 1750s pushed this plan further. ⁵⁶ Chittagong was envisaged as centre of a strategic land–sea bloc linking eighteenth-century Bengal, Assam, Tripura, Ava, Arakan, Pegu, Mergui – the last as Ile de Roy off the coast of Mergui was ceded to the French in Louis XIV’s time – the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and southern China. ⁵⁷ While none of these projects materialised, it is noteworthy that the northern bay remained central in transnational projects connecting littorals and oceanic rims.

The Bay of Bengal in recorded history

Although initially a minor player in the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, as this article demonstrates, became a major participant in the flows and cultural routes of the extended eastern Indian Ocean world. Numismatics, epigraphy and archaeological traces indicate coastal units along the bay interacting with the larger Indian Ocean world from quite early times, as seen from Ptolemy’s Geographia and the Periplus Maris Erythraei. ⁵⁸

This article argues that the ‘passivity versus vitality’ debate as regards the place of the Bay of Bengal within the Indian Ocean world depends on the lens adopted for studying scales and flows. There is a temporal inconsistency depending on which part of the bay world falls under scrutiny. Wade dates commercial intensity to the ninth century, while Hall sees it linked with the new polities that emerge only in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Chakravarti’s ‘pull’ is apparent from the seventh century in South Asia, while Lieberman’s southward drive occurs roughly between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. These centuries coincide with the two-phases of transitions underscored in this article: one from the ninth to the eleventh centuries and the other in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this actually lasting into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In both cases, radical changes were detected: in the first instance, the role of the bay as cultural mediator ceded to more commercial operations, while in the second the infusion of capital during the First Global Age from 1400 to 1800 saw new routes and networks enlarging bay engagements, changing substantively the nature of exchanges.

Linked to the first phase of transition was a political shift in the bay, discernible in the pull to the coast. Chakravarti also uses the term ‘control’. Linked with this drive were religious and commercial stimuli arising from Jainism, Buddhism and Islam.

During the second transitional phase in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the attraction of the coast continued, but continental forces staged a comeback. Territories consolidated, new towns appeared and new capitals rose. The Mughal wars of this period were primarily land-based wars, despite a few maritime battles with the Portuguese which the Mughals lost. In general, all over South and Southeast Asia, so-called maritime powers lost to the maritime might of the Europeans – Melaka’s fortunes are a classic example of a failure to hold on to social and commercial networks. The last period in this transition, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, saw the primacy of the sea, as the English abandoned territorial expansion and concentrated on maritime spaces instead. The continental would come back again in the nineteenth century as the English consolidated their empire around the Bay of Bengal.