Abstract
This article urges a rethinking of South Asian cosmography to counter our notion of seascapes lying outside notions of sovereignty, territoriality and technologies of control. While seas have emerged as central to economic and political security for most of the worlds’ states, this is seen as a comparatively new phenomenon because South Asia’s territoriality has always been seen as land-based. The emphasis on the modern has resulted in a neglect of South Asia’s rich tradition of maritime expressiveness and generates a ‘maritime blindness’ affecting policy formulation, despite works on seafaring which trace diverse maritime perceptions from Pali and Sanskrit literature, sculptures, coins, paintings and epigraphy.
This article claims that waterscapes were not absent in Asian ideas of territoriality, but differentiating between awareness in literary expressions of political selfhood wherein rulers saw the sea as boundary or even space of overlordship, and actual instances of ordering and controlling maritime spaces is important. By contrast, China’s example as keeper of meticulous records pertaining to maritime matters shows attempts at actively controlling maritime spaces and provides new ways of reading South Asian perceptions of the sea.
This article urges a rethinking of South Asian cosmography to counter our notion of seascapes lying outside South Asian notions of sovereignty, territoriality and technologies of control. The sea having never apparently featured as a source of social power, South Asia’s territoriality is seen to be land-based (e.g., Ludden, 2000; Subbarayalu, 2012). This lack of visibility generates a ‘maritime blindness’ affecting policy formulation, despite R. K. Mookerji’s work on seafaring which traced diverse maritime perceptions from Pali and Sanskrit literature, sculptures, coins, paintings and epigraphy (Khurana, 2009; Mookerji, 1912/1962). By contrast, China’s example as keeper of meticulous records pertaining to maritime matters shows attempts at actively controlling maritime spaces and provides new ways of reading South Asian perceptions of the sea.
I. The Beginnings: A Diffuse Territoriality over the Ocean-Sea
While seas have emerged as central to economic and political security for most of the worlds’ states, this is seen as a comparatively new phenomenon. Concerns such as understanding the nature of oceanic transits to establish strategic hubs, exercise control over sea-lanes, fight rising sea levels and tighten jurisdiction against smuggling, terrorism, piracy and migration in the coastal belt are seemingly recent concerns, and this emphasis on the modern has resulted in a neglect of South Asia’s rich tradition of maritime expressiveness.
This article claims that waterscapes were not absent in Asian ideas of territoriality, but differentiating between awareness in literary expressions of political selfhood wherein rulers saw the sea as boundary or even space of overlordship, and actual instances of ordering and controlling maritime spaces is important. To better appreciate the idea of control, China’s perceptions of near and far seas (inner versus outer oceans), or the South Asian notion of coastal zone versus deep sea, can be referenced. China’s ‘near sea’ was not just physically close; it was a familiar coastal belt with multiple, overlapping networks connecting to an imperial topos—the capital. South Asian territoriality, by contrast, was seemingly composed of sacred and agrarian power centres surrounded by ideologically construed empty spaces to be territorialized into civilization. While the sea was empty space, the consensus is there was little need or incentive, despite a ‘pull towards the coast’ (Chakravarti, 2011), to territorialize it because it was so vast. Seas thus remained outside the technologies of control which emerged only in the late eighteenth century, became important in the nineteenth and were refashioned in the postcolonial era (Prestholdt, 2015), explaining why European naval powers found it easy to make inroads into South Asia. Even this ‘modern’ territoriality was limited in nature. Law, one of the defining components of modern territoriality, was patchily imposed in the imperial maritime domain (Benton & Ford, 2016; Bishara, 2018). Also, enforcing uniform revenue-generating realms was hindered by the absence of a standardized system of property rights in British India (Bishara, 2017; Travers, 2007). Studies of legal or economic concepts underpinning early territoriality will therefore not be of much use.
Maritime territoriality in early South Asia was based not on law but on an uncodified body of knowledge manifested in cosmic expression. The cosmic realm saw an unnavigable ocean-river stream surrounding the earth within which continents floated. Oceans, rivers and seas were seen as symbiotic elements of this natural world; Vedic god Varuna ruled heaven and earth as lord of light and time, commanding rivers, winds and waves, and controlling the passage of ships across seas (Rig Veda 7.6.7). Noted in Asokan inscriptions, the notion of the all-encompassing ocean-river was widely assumed by most post-Gupta dynasties and elaborated and systematized in subsequent centuries when cities and states emerged and a reformed Vedic cult swept the subcontinent (Ali, 2008, p. 119). Chandraketugarh’s Kharosthi–Brahmi ship seals and Satavahana double-masted ship coins show familiarity with this ocean-sea. Furthermore, depictions of waterscapes in sculptures and paintings on temple walls—the churning of the ocean and the nectar of immortality provided by the waters; the descent of the Ganga on earth and her journey to meet the ocean—underline a political vision of territory in a universal empire.
Ambiguous terms for waterscapes, as for example in Rig Veda where samudra signified a generic ‘gathering of waters’, make us wonder if people in early South Asia were really aware of the maritime domain. Any mass of more than one drop was samudra—water in a jar, a small pool, large soma vessels (RV 6.69.6), a reservoir, a lake or the ocean. Samudra signified Western and Eastern Oceans (RV 10.136.5–6; Satpatha Brahmana 1.6.3.11). ‘Jaladhi/jalanidhi’ was a generic term. The Indian Ocean was dakshinatsamudra/dakshinajalanidhi (Southern Ocean). Compounding the confusion, the idea of catuhsamudra (four oceans, a geographical absurdity in the context of South Asian geography), meant also a lake or a ‘sea of sand’ to the north in Central Asia (Sircar, 1971, pp. 8, 236, 339). Kashmir and Kurukshetra lowlands were inland seas (samudra) but the waters into which the Ganga flowed was ocean (sagar; Bhargava, 1964). Chandra Gupta II is described in Vakataka Prabhavatigupta’s Poona Plates as a matchless warrior and exterminator of kings, whose fame had tasted the water of the four oceans (Thapar, 2003, p. 296).
The later Vedic period saw more ambiguity. The ocean-sea’s circumambient nature is documented in texts invoking samudra, for example, in Satpatha Brahmana (VII, 1, 1, 13; 5; 11–12; 6; 13). Mahabharata invoked sagar instead in formulaic expressions: the earth is defined as ‘ocean-belted’, ‘ocean-dressed’ and ‘ocean-bounded’ (Mahabharata II, 5, 115; IX, 4, 21; XII, 28, 15). Mahabharata (III, 114, 2) sees the sea appearing in the middle of 500 streams where the Ganga flows into it (sagaram gangayah samgame nadisatanam pancanam madhye). Images of the sea as the earth’s belt, perimeter and boundary are reinforced by waves which drive back the ocean; this is compared with the valour of the hero who withstands enemy attacks. Passages where sagar depicts the ocean-sea in epics are philologically uncertain, probably occurring later (Pontillo, 2007, pp. 302–303; Pontillo & Rossi, 2003, pp. 171–173, 185).
Compounding ambiguities, both terms were interchangeably used in political contexts. The Prayag bas-relief representation (c. 400
II. A Formulaic Sovereignty?
The consciousness of space and sovereignty was implicit in formulaic expressions of seas as territorial limit. First century
Although we stated at the outset that an issue of premodern territoriality revolves around claims over genuine control of the maritime zone, the persistence of the cosmic ocean-river metaphor raises the question of actual maritime awareness. Badami Chalukya Pulakesin II’s Aihole inscription (634 Endowed now with the three powers—energy, mastery, and good counsel—after conquering all the quarters, dismissing the lords of earth, and doing homage to gods and Brahmans, he entered Vatapi and now rules this whole earth as if it were one city, its moat filled with the dark blue waters of the rolling ocean. (Pollock, 2006, pp. 243–244)
The eighth century Dharmapala Deva announced his control of the oceans ‘forming the encircling ditches of the earth’ (Ray, 2013, pp. 21–22). For the eleventh-century Western Chaulukyas:
May the king Tribhuvanamalla, by the ocean (jalanidhi) of whose spotless fame the world is encircled, render subject to his control the bride, which is the earth girt about as if by a zone, with the ocean, which is marked with sea-monsters, both male and female resembling elephants. (Ray, 2011, p. 31)
An imperial parasol (chatra; Tamil kavikai) hangs above figures in Chola seals. Rajaraja’s inscription claims that the ocean itself, surrounding Jambudvipa, became his parasol, implying that the world had been brought under that universal king’s sway (Ali, 2000, p. 202). The ocean-river metaphor persisted into Pingala Suranna’s late sixteenth-early seventeenth-century Telugu text Kalapurnodayamu which describes Narada’s entry into Dvaraka:
They proceeded into the city via the moat where the raucous cries of waterbirds fused with the moaning and splashing of the waves, sputtering with white foam, as if to mock the very ocean just beyond. Through the spray cast up by the breakers, you could see rainbow-like flashes snaking through the sky. (Rao & Shulman, 2002, p. 19)
III. States, Coastal Seas and Territorial Waters at the end of the First Millennium
If the cosmic formula persisted, how did different trajectories of state formation influence maritime perceptions? China, divided for over 150 years among Southern and Northern Dynasties, was reunited under the Sui (581–618). Emperor Yangdi (r. 604–618) initiated a state-regulated cartographic project, issuing a formal call requesting commanderies to report their customs, products and maps to the Department of State Affairs (Shangshu Sheng; Lin, 2017, pp. 12, 13). As boundaries shifted from imperial contours to regional polities in sixth-century South Asia in a reverse direction, new visions of land-sea interactions appeared. The break-up of Harsavardhana’s empire in 647 saw peninsular polities initiating China contacts (Sastri, 1940, p. 255); Badami Chaulukya Vinayaditya’s embassy (692) and Pallava Rajasimha’s investiture by China (720) are just two examples. As pilgrimage and commercial circuits were interleaved, temples were constructed at Somnath, Mamallapuram and Nagapattinam. Since many ports were trans-shipment points, and land portage was important as in the Palghat Gap or Kra Isthmus, local geographies, not always codified, reconstituted knowledge of the coast and its overland links (Chaisuwan, 2011; Deloche, 2010).
Coastal seas came to represent regional identities and boundaries. Buddhavarasa’s Sanjan copper plates at Umbergaon (671) categorically mention a donated plot of land (sthavara) located on the seashore (sagar tate; Ghosh & Sharma, 2017, p. 71). C. sixth-century the Vajrayana Buddhist text Araya Manjusri Mulakalpa saw a Kalingodra or Kalinga Sea. Bengal was seen as a region bordering the eastern sea (prāksamudra) in Dharmaditya’s sixth-century Faridpur copper plates. The Haraha inscription (554) mentioned Kanauj’s Maukhari ruler Ishanavarman defeating the maritime Gaudas (Gauḍān samudr-āśrayā). The Dubi inscription of Kamrup’s Bhaskaravarman saw Gaudas particularly strong in naval warfare (Sircar, 1971, p. 124). C. eleventh-century Prabodhashiva’s Gurgi inscription saw the Lord of Gauda ‘lying in the watery fort of the sea’ (jalanidhi jaladurggam Gauda rajo dhishete; Sircar, 1990, p. 124), the term evokes Raghuvmasa I, 30: parikhikrtasagaram … urvim … sasasaikapurim iva (fortress whose moat is the ocean; Pontillo, 2007, p. 306). Once trade, travel and naval warfare increased, the coast shed its mythic attributes and became known as the Arabic bahr Harkal, derived from Harikela, Bengal’s easternmost geo-cultural unit. Coastal circulations in the Mangal Kavya also affirm a regional itinerary.
But premodern South Asian territoriality remains an under-defined concept despite such ‘geographical expression(s) of social power’ (Pollock, 2013, p. 68). Early in the seventh-century, Pulakesin II captured Puri (Elephanta) island, signalling a push from inland Karnataka with a view to controlling Konkan’s ports which hosted traders from across the Arabian Sea (Thapar, 2003, p. 328). Diplomatic exchanges with Sassanid Khusru, the successful Lata (southern Gujarat) invasion and Puri’s conquest assume significance with reference to the prominent Persian Gulf network—an event important enough to be represented as the capture by his ships of the western sea’s goddess of fortune (aparajaldherlakshmi; Chakravarti, 2011, pp. 21–22). Yet a certain ambivalence toward the sea is discernible among peninsular polities, despite North and South Konkan kings’ continuing claims as ‘lords of the western sea’ (paschimasamudradhipati) and Goa Kadamba Shivachitta Permadideva’s (1147–1172) Demgave copper plate record proclaiming him paschima-dakshina samudradipathi (lord of the Western and Southern Oceans; Chakravarti, 2011, p. 25).
IV. Geographical Orderings at the Start of the Second Millennium
Knowledge, text production, preservation and evidence increased at the end of the first millennium (Ludden, 1994, pp. 8–9). As the coast became progressively known names were reconstituted, sagar replacing samudra as the familiar coastal belt. Dangerous since the sea was unknown, the belt had to be propitiated. Varuna-prastha, a Tantric pilgrimage intimately connected with the seven seas of popular lore, sanctified Ganga-sagar-sanagam, Ganga’s confluence with the Bay of Bengal and Sindhu-sagar-sanagam, Indus’ confluence with the Arabian Sea in the eleventh-century Gulf of Kachchh, mentioned in Kalyana’s King Somesvara III’s (1126–1138) encyclopaedia Manasollasa (Ahmad, 1983, p. 123; Garrett, 1871, pp. 683–686; Sircar, 1971, pp. 116, 335, 337).
By the second millennium, coastal belts defined territorial limits as spaces needing active regulation by emergent powers: Cholas (850), Khmers (Angkor, 944), Songs (960), Fatimids (Egypt, 969), Ly (northern Vietnam, 1009), Burmese (Bagan, 1044; Hall, 1978, pp. 79–82; Ma, 2015, pp. 73–74; Ray, 2014, pp. 16–17). Harbour protection and suppression of piracy and highway robbery dictated an active engagement with the sea. Mints facilitating trade were established near or at port-towns. Rules governing tax payment, market function and mint operation were formulated, as in Kakatiya Ganapati’s 1245 Motupalli inscription. Coral reefs, underwater rocks and sandbanks were identified, underwater obstructions removed, guide-pilots made available to tow passengers and goods to shore, portage arranged, warehouses, inns and roadways constructed, and forests and swamps cleared. Although Visvarupasena’s (r. c. 1206–1225) copper plate (Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, Kolkata) mentioned samudra as boundary for a plot of land, Srihatta’s Govinda Kesavadeva’s eleventh-century Bhatera copper plate inscription used sagar, evoking haor as boundary (Sircar, 1971, p. 164). Srichandra’s 971 Madanpur copper plate charter no longer saw a purva/prak samudra, it was instead Vangasagara or ‘Bengal Sea’. C. tenth century in the Kalika Purana an inland sea, Lauhityasagar (lit. river-sea designating the Brahmaputra’s lower course), appeared, connected to the Bay through large waterbodies called haor—a vernacular term for the Bengali ‘sagor’ (Das, 2009, p. 38; Sen, 2003, p. 87; Sharma, 1978, p. 189; Sircar, 1971, p. 165).
This type of geographical ordering through growing familiarity with coastal belts was also visible in peninsular India—a time when ‘maritime space formed an integral part of political thinking and conceptualisation of the inhabited world—a world that was certainly claimed, but not always controlled’. North Konkan inscriptions dating to the reign of the twelfth century, Silahara ruler Aparadityadeva portray active maritime engagement with a sea that often became a war theatre (Ray, 2016, pp. 128–129, 132). Silahara custom to call themselves lords of the western sea (paschimasamudradhipati) without effectively controlling a maritime zone shows a coastal, not a maritime, orientation. Drawing lineage from Tagara (Ter, Maharashtra), they were Tagarapura mahesvara or paramesvara, preferring to call themselves lords of Konkandesa (Chakravarti, 2016, p. 137; Ghosh & Sharma, 2017, p. 70). This awareness coincided, accidentally perhaps, with increasing awareness in late Song China (eleventh to thirteenth centuries) and suggests rulers became aware of the economic potential of the coast. Attempts at compiling comprehensive gazetteers in the reigns of Shenzong (r. 1067–1085) and Huizong (r. 1100–1126) were visible even in the diminished Song state. Song division of the realm into circuits, prefectures, counties—a spatial distribution of state activity that served military purposes well—differed sharply from the spatial distribution that served the production of revenue, encapsulating ‘distinctive fiscal and military geographies’ (Mostern, 2011, pp. 20–22).
The Southern Song, traditionally thought to have lost momentum in local control, proactively maintained regular checks on local geography through mapmaking. The Office for the Editing of the Map Guides and Records of the nine Regions (Jiuyu tuzhi suo) was created in the imperial library during the Chongning era (1102–1106), revealing the close relationship between cartographic discourse, production of empire at the local level and attempts to define local identity in the context of an imagined imperial whole. The supposedly ‘natural’ landscape of the famed Song paintings offered a site where court painters could ‘naturalize’ hierarchical social order to project imperial claims as universal ideals. Natural landscapes and social networks were connected to imperial discourse through visual images and written words. The language used in vernacular stories must have been familiar to the literate general public and the knowledge in the Southern Song gazetteers found its way into people’s everyday lives and commercial discourse. The marking of locations on Song maps was not only practical but was also coded with political discourse so that readers would read these maps through an imperial vision (Lin, 2017, pp. 16, 22, 30–31). This seems to have been lacking not only in Silahara domains but throughout South Asia because of different notions of space and control by cosmic expressions rather than through administrative minutiae. No comparable gazetteer or mapping of space comes until Akbar Nama (1556–1572).
A third kind of ordering rose from popular perception. ‘Melayu’, appearing for the first time in literary sources as a southeast Sumatra settlement that sent a mission to China in 644 (Andaya, 2001, p. 319), designated a maritime territoriality through a social sense of belonging to a maritime space linked by a common language and ethnicity. The term ‘Jiaozhi Yang’ (Jiaozhi Ocean), appearing between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries in Chinese travel logs—but never in official documents or chronicles—embodied a historical consciousness of the oneness of the Gulf of Tonkin and the central Vietnam coast (Li, 2006, pp. 85–86). As early as the third century
V. Coastal Contestations
Increase in maritime knowledge is visible in Chola expansion in the Eastern Indian Ocean. After raiding the eastern seaboard, the Cholas leveraged the Tang decline and unsettled conditions in the Arabian Peninsula. In 878/879, 120,000 ‘Muslims, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians’ were massacred at Guangzhou (Canton), marking the end of Arab dominance at that port, the start of the Tang collapse of 907 and the appearance of South India merchants at China’s port-towns. In the west, Rastrakuta fall between 972/973 and early 980s, and the 977 Siraf earthquake presaged a temporary decline in the Gulf (Lambourn, 2016, p. 381). Between 1025 and 1030, Rajendra Chola I attacked Srivijaya either as part of a ‘plunder dynamic’ or to gain unimpeded access to the China trade (Hall, 1978, p. 89; Spencer, 1976). He took a well-known route: Lanka/Nagapattinam–Ho-ling (western Java)/Palembang (Srivijaya)–Guangzhou, illustrating linkages of the Chola coast with China through distinct shipping networks evincing existing connections between itinerant monks and seafaring merchants. These patterns endured to the end of the first millennium, with monks and warriors using maritime routes between South Asia and China (Hirth & Rockhill, 1911, p. 9; Sen, 2017, p. 543). The voyage took about three months, a month from Guangzhou to Palembang, one to Northwest Sumatra and one to Lanka; it was always made with the northeast monsoon in winter. The return to China was in summer, from April to October, with the southwest monsoon.
The northern Bay of Bengal, less known, rarely featured in these trans-maritime routes. As geographical knowledge advanced in Tang, China, a route through the Tonkin Gulf via Red River, Yunnan and Burma was used c. late seventh-century (Pelliot, 1904; Stargardt, 1971). Physical obstructions hindered maritime contacts. The Tonkin Gulf was avoided because of huge underwater rocks. Ma Yuan, the ‘Wave-Pacifying General’ of the Han Dynasty (206
VI. The China Seas
As in South Asia, China’s transformation from a relatively passive participant during most of the first millennium to a maritime power in the early fifteenth century was associated with expanding knowledge of the Indian Ocean region, development of nautical technologies, and greater willingness to engage with the sea between the seventh and ninth centuries. It saw the Indian Ocean as Western Sea (Hsi hai), not the ‘Western Ocean’, although there were Great and Small Western Oceans, the former designating a maritime space between Sumatra–Java and Lanka. The frequent occurrence, in Chinese coastal maps, of a small area of sea designated ‘yang’ or ‘ocean’ requires consideration (Mills, 1954, p. 168).
Although suggesting confusion over the extent of seas and oceans, this may have been a matter of perception. Already in the first millennium
By the tenth century, as Song vessels sailed to South Asia, seas became better known. Zhou Ku Fei (Lingwai Daida, 1178, a geographical treatise on South China) wrote:
To the south of San-fo-ts’i (Sumatra) is the Great Southern Ocean-Sea and in this Ocean-Sea there are islands inhabited by a myriad and more of peoples. Beyond these to the south one cannot go. To the east of Java (Sho-p’o) is the Great Eastern Ocean-Sea, —where (the surface of) the waters begins to go downward. It is impossible to enumerate the countries in the South-Western Ocean, but if we take Tongking (Kiau-chi) as a central point, we have to the south of it Annam (Chan-ch’ong), Kamboja (Chon-la) and Fo-lo-an. To the northwest of Kiau-chi is Ta-li (Yun-nan), the Hei-shui, or ‘Black Water’, and the T’u-fan (the Tibetans), and beyond this to the west is a big sea called the Sea of Ceylon. Still beyond (this Sea of Ceylon) there is another sea called the ‘Eastern Sea of the Arabs’. (Hirth & Rockhill, 1911, p. 26)
In late Song China, Zhao Rugua (Zhu fan shi, twelfth–thirteenth centuries) reiterated this identification as the China Seas became a closely connected and complex network of routes held together by robust networks and proactive policies. The familiar Tonkin Gulf became ‘Small Sea’ (Heng, 2008, p. 20). Although he regarded the sea as hostile, Song envoy Xu Jing’s 徐兢 (1093–1155?) report on his Korean mission in 1123—Xuanhe fengshi Gaoli tujing 宣 和奉使高麗圖經—saw it ‘intelligible, manageable, predictable, quantifiable and survivable’ (Schottenhammer, 2012, p. 77).
But with Khitan Liao (907/916–1125) and Jin (1115–1234) rise, the northeast coastal zone became separated from the rest of China and experienced a different trajectory. Yet political–commercial relations continued among the Liao, the Wu-Yue (907–978) and the Southern Tang (937–975), underscoring the importance of maritime routes. The Liao–Southern Tang tea-horse trade took place by the sea, bypassing the constraining power of the central regimes located in-between since, by that time, the Liao had annexed the Bohai kingdom with its maritime connections. The Yuan collapse fragmented the China Seas, piracy became endemic (Li, 2015, pp. 31, 34–35; Ma, 2015, pp. 64–65, 66–67 (Granados, 2006/2007, p. 112; Schottenhammer, 2012, pp. 72, 74–75, 79, 84). But by the Yuan period maritime regions were also clearly delineated, some areas clearly differentiated and an idea that seas were limited in extent as compared to oceans appeared. Contacts accelerated in the Yuan-Ming period (Sen, 2011, pp. 50–52, 54; 2017, pp. 537, 547). Terminology distinguishing different ‘oceans’ appeared before the Ming—a ‘Small Western Ocean’, covering the Gulf of Siam and East Coast Malaysia and a ‘Great Western Ocean’ (not explicitly mentioned) from Sumatra and Java to Lanka (Granados, 2006/2007, pp. 112–115), the latter including the southern Bay as noted.
VII. Nuanced Waterscapes: Divisions in the China Seas
But like South Asia, despite a maritime frontier extending over 14,000 km, China sought to limit maritime contacts (Clark, 2009, p. 32). Guangdong’s tenth-century Nan Han dynasty, rich from maritime trade, was regarded as ‘illegitimate’ in Chinese historiography (Schottenhammer, 2015, p. 2). The statecraft writings of mid-Qing official Yan Ruyi (1759–1826) evince a deep-rooted fear of the South China Sea as a hostile space, deterring permanent, sedentary habitation. Outer oceans were associated with a separate, unknown, terror-filled world of disorder in Chinese political philosophy. The water world of the South China Coast represented a different set of sociocultural values that threatened to undermine the Confucian agenda of the order (Wang, 2017). Yet, revenue generation meant the maritime frontier functioned as an interface between land and sea. Hokkien merchants and sailors from South China and South East Asian coastal people peopled the ‘water frontier’ and a ‘maritime avenue’. Another mid-Qing official Yuan Yonglun 袁永綸 wrote ‘here trading vessels from all the world meet together, wherefore this track is called “the great meeting from the east and the south”’. People were suspected of using vast, diffused maritime borders to evade taxes, engage in profitable but illegal activities and escape punishment (Lockard, 2010; Wang, 2017).
The binary of terrestrial/maritime is modified by a more nuanced view of Imperial China’s knowledge of the maritime world developing through contacts extending over centuries. China possessed a geographical curiosity about foreign lands from the start of its recorded history. Being meticulous record keepers, oral information was compiled in geographical and historical texts prepared by minor local officials, scholars and seafarers. By the nineteenth century, when Britain saw an ‘Indian Ocean’ and ‘China Seas’, China’s maritime space was divided into several sectors. Two of these were Nanyang and Da Xiyang, the familiar southern sea and the unknown European seas (Chin-keong, 2017, p. 202). The Nanyang was a nebulous maritime frontier subject to artificial administrative division and tenuous sociopolitical control. This transnational world with its open system of social ecology and political economy supported both daily life activities and extraordinarily contentious struggles across multiple boundaries. Much of the South China Sea had become an uncontrollable space where the vision and reach of the authorities were limited (Wang, 2017).
China’s maritime zone consisted of two different but vaguely separated parts: the inner (Neiyang, Neihai) and outer ocean/sea (Waiyang, Waihai) (Wang, 2017), similar to Malayalam and Tamil divisions of ull (inner) kodal or inner sea (ulkodal) and puram (out) kodal as the outer sea (puramkodal). Within Neiyang and Waiyang there were more divisions. In the Ming-Qing era, the South China Sea was formally divided into ‘Western (Xiyang)’ and ‘Eastern Ocean (Dongyang)’; there were discussions about where the two met. The division, originating in the Song-Yuan period, shows a diffuse frontier between an area of Chinese navigational activity and ‘non-Chinese’ spheres of influence. Ideas of ‘near’ and ‘far’ seas in Chinese historical consciousness endorse perceptions and claims to have historically controlled the former (Policy Tensor, 2013). Within ‘Great Eastern Ocean’ lay the South China Sea. There were also ‘Small Eastern and Western Oceans’, the latter the southern Bay of Bengal within ‘Great Western Ocean’. Later, ‘Eastern Sea’ ([donghai 東 海]) appeared, seen as the direction of the sunrise. The Eastern Seas included the Bohai 渤海 Sea, the Huanghai 黃海 Sea (Yellow Sea), the Donghai 東海 Sea (East China Sea) and the Nanhai 南海 (South China Sea; Schottenhammer, 2012, p. 67).
As political claims over maritime spaces fragmented, The Record of Things Heard and Seen in the Maritime Countries (1730) presented a new geography of the South China Sea, distinguishing between Eastern Ocean, Southeastern Ocean, Southern Ocean, Small Western Ocean, Great Western Ocean, the Kunlun area and the Nan’aoqi region. C. 1830 Illustrated Gazetteer of the Maritime Countries saw Western Ocean, Great Western Ocean, Southwestern Ocean, Small Western Ocean and Greater Southern Sea. The ‘Southern Sea’ was conceptualized as a coastal sea in the Qing period. The 1841 Hainan Local Gazetteer subdivided it into a coastal belt where vessels engaged in interport activities; a contiguous belt of shallow waters; a deeper area (inner ocean); and a vast outer ocean (Granados, 2006/2007, pp. 111–114, 117–118). C. 1840 to 1884 coastal maps show omissions, errors and anachronisms, revealing the relative stagnation in Chinese cartography at that time (Mills, 1954, p. 167).
VIII. End Words
We started with the question of figurative claims versus actual control over waterscapes, of awareness or ‘knowing the area’ as opposed to ordering or ‘ruling’ it. Much like South Asia, although China had a concept of a ‘maritime frontier’ (haijiang) or ‘littoral territory’ (yanhai jiangyu), ‘knowing about’ the sea was not the same as ‘ruling’ or owning rights to it; it did not mean sovereign authority or exclusive power. Given Japanese piracy, there were three periods of official Chinese maritime bans: Ming Ban 1 (1371–1509), Ming Ban 2 (1521–1529) and the Qing ban (1654–1684) called the Haijin or sea ban. These restricted private maritime trade and coastal settlement during most of the Ming period and for some of the Qing. However, regular pirate attacks during this time also furthered knowledge of inner seas, seen in the numerous chapters on coastal defence in gazetteers, travel guides and local histories produced during the Ming-Qing period (de Weerdt, 2003, p. 138).
By contrast, we noted that South Asian regions developed instead as institutionalized territories around major central places whose centrality in mediaeval agrarian territories was more symbolic than real. Yet, if the land vision was unidimensional, maritime space had multiple dimensions. South Asia’s maritime world was larger with three directional components: the Arabian Sea network, the Bay of Bengal network and a less expansive Indian Ocean network stretching to Lanka. These were political–commercial–religious spaces with varying weightage but a tributary space as in China was absent. Although bordering two seas, China’s maritime space was more multidimensional, connecting other seas. It was marked by three axes: first, Samudra-Pasai, Lambri and Shepo (a political–military space), second, connecting coastal tributary states, the Chinese mainland and later European settlements through the traditional east–west trade arteries around the South China Sea (tributary, commercial and diplomatic spaces) and third, connecting networked coastal cities, as in the trade route between The Philippines, North Borneo and Melaka in the fifteenth–sixteenth centuries (a networked space). All three converged on the South China Sea whose geopolitical significance in connecting other seas was clearly understood and depicted in texts such as FeiXin’s Overall Survey of the Star Raft (1436), Ma Huan’s Overall Survey of the Oceans’ Shores (1451) and Mao Yuanyi’s Treatise on Military Preparedness (1621). The South China Sea was identified in Chinese sources as a vaguely separate area and in others as part of a broader ocean encompassing East Asian, South East Asian and Indian waters conceptualized through the ‘Western Ocean/Eastern Ocean’ divide centred on Kalah or Melaka Straits, first during the Song in a general, abstract way and later, with detail, during the Yuan (Granados, 2006/2007, pp. 111, 113, 122–123).
It is now time to see our takeaways from this comparative survey of South Asian and Chinese ideas of waterscapes. The glimpses of China’s evolving notions of maritime space suggest new ways of looking at South Asian ideas of the maritime realm and propose ways in which India’s Project Mausam can move forward with a clear and definite research agenda on India’s place in the Indian Ocean world.
Tracing South Asian maritime perceptions from diverse and fragmentary sources—religious texts, epigraphy, iconography, sculpture, travel accounts, cartography—as opposed to the continuous Chinese production of texts, maps, records and gazetteers dealing with political philosophy and geography—I argued that the coastal belt (inner ocean or near sea) while not perhaps controlled, was historically known and claimed as part of the territory. Both cultures were familiar with the sea but used very different linguistic and operational strategies. Because of the elite status and political value of maps, special officers in China administered their production and preservation. The third century
China accelerated its production of maritime knowledge, stagnating only during the mid-Qing. Coastal maps dating between 1422 and 1884 show a momentum which, because of woodblock printing from the tenth century, were produced in quantity and were not restricted to imperial use and where, exceptionally, the reader looked from sea to land (Mills, 1954, pp. 151–152). By contrast, despite referencing the sea as boundary or space of overlordship, South Asian descriptions of the territory remained formulaic declarations rather than expressions of real sovereignty. Perhaps a similar dilemma of symbolic control was also apparent in the multifaceted Qing construction of oceans: whereas such natural frontiers provided convenient political boundaries separating polities from the outside maritime world, regions linked by such geographic determinants, as well as the transnational networks they supported, showed an economic, social and cultural integration often lacking in administratively defined units such as counties, provinces and states (Wang, 2017).
Why maritime knowledge accelerated in China as opposed to South Asia begs research. Different trajectories of knowledge-production lie in the nature and administrative compulsions of the state (centralization versus regionalization, centralized bureaucracy versus regional officialdom and a single topos as imperial capital with each place being defined through its distance to the central capital versus multiple, overlapping places of significance) and the role of a single language in creating a unified body of geographical thought. Imperial fragmentation in South Asia encouraged vernacular regional geographies which never attained the status of a metageography due to linguistic barriers (Pollock, 2013, p. 73, 75–76), where the topos was cultural or religious rather than imperial, and where a small polity had no initiative to compile administrative documents into monographs suitable for a larger audience. This rhetoric often appeared in the Southern Song after moving South in 1127, when map guides were increasingly named ‘gazetteers’ (Lin, 2017, p. 17). The audience-size for geographies was therefore very important.
In China, imperial philosophy—seen in tributary and networked trades as well as in its diplomatic-cum-military relations with the Asian world—dictated an active maritime engagement which nurtured consistently active maritime perspectives manifesting in a single language over centuries. Constant restructuring of territory, calibrating the balance of power between court and region, between state and subjects and territorial rejigging as the state’s regional needs and political priorities changed (Mostern, 2011, p. 20) saw China recording the management and defence of coastal belts, noting fortifications such as walls, forts, posts, bridges and beacons. Advancing levels of geographical knowledge were linked to active attempts at controlling maritime spaces, seen in texts such as Zheng Ruozeng’s Chouhai Tubian 籌海圖 編 (Compilation of Maps on Managing the Sea, 1561–1562; Torck, 2015, p. 102).
There may have been yet another reason as to why no traces remain of South Asian maritime perspectives. Here the nature of the colonial state versus the imperial state is focal. The heterogeneity of the Qing imperial elite led information to circulate in patterns distinct from those in European colonial empires. In addition to their loyal Manchu, Mongol and Han bannermen, Qing rulers summoned to Beijing, permanently or in regular rotation, Chinese officials, Mongol princes, Tibetan Buddhist clerics, Eastern Turkestani beigs and Jesuit missionaries. This diverse elite was fragmented because of different bureaucratic career tracks, social circles, languages, religious and cultural perspectives and educational backgrounds. Information commonplace to one group might be unknown to another. This is in contrast to the homogenous circulation of information in British India described by C. A. Bayly, who, drawing on the work of Manuel Castells, argued that an ‘information order’ connected ‘the colonial state’s surveillance agencies’ with ‘autonomous networks of social communicators’ in the Indian society. In this model, the most critical gaps in knowledge transmission were those separating the ‘political intelligence’ sought by the ruling elite from the ‘indigenous knowledge’ of its subjects (Mosca, 2010, pp. 149–150).
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am happy to accept Professor Himanshu Prabha Ray’s and Professor Madhu Bhalla’s editorial suggestions. I thank Dr V. Rajagopal, University of Hyderabad, for providing many of the works cited here.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.