We talk about Indians Hinduising Southeast Asia. But Indians also converted region to Islam

The advent of Islam in India, and its spread in Southeast Asia, are much bemoaned as end of the “Indosphere”, supposedly breaking these ancient networks. But the opposite is true.

View of the great mosque of Aceh, sketched around in 1650 | Wikimedia Commons

In India’s long history with Southeast Asia, there’s one half that we’re very comfortable with: the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism. From Rabindranath Tagore to Narendra Modi, Indian writers, diplomats and politicians have waxed romantic about the ancient religious and commercial ties between the subcontinent and the landmasses of the Eastern Indian Ocean.

The advent of Islam in India, and its rapid spread in Southeast Asia, are much bemoaned as the end of the “Indosphere”, supposedly breaking these ancient networks. But, if anything, the opposite is true. Indians were just as influential in spreading Islam in Southeast Asia as we ever were in spreading Hinduism. And Islam spread along the same networks that Hinduism once had, deepening and widening the oceanic web of ideas and influences. 

Gujarati and Tamil merchants, Sufi inquisitors, Malayali fakirs and mercenaries — Muslims from across the Indian subcontinent made lives and careers in Southeast Asia, directly shaping the region’s cultures for centuries until colonial rule.

The fakir from the Coromandel

One of the oldest surviving Malay texts, the 14th-century Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai, minces no words about where Islam arrived from. Receiving divine portents, the legendary Sultan Muhammad of Ma’bar in the Coromandel—supposedly a descendant of Caliph Abu-Bakr—renounces his throne. He puts on a fakir’s clothes and sails to Samudra (Pasai) on Sumatra’s northern tip, on a ship coming from Mecca. There he anoints a chief named Merah Silu as Sultan Malik al-Salih. The ship returns to Mecca laden with gifts, while the fakir remains, in the chronicle’s words, to firmly “establish the religion of Islam”.

Indians, referred to as “Kling”, appear again and again in this Hikayat, as they do in many other Malay Muslim chronicles. A Kling trader arrives and locates the gold that makes the infant Pasai Sultanate rich. A Kling yogi comes to display his magic and loses to the sultan’s sanctity, converting on the spot and granting the Sultan the title of “Perumudal Perumal” (Perumal is the name by which the god Vishnu is known in the Tamil country). 

Historian Anthony Reid, in his paper “The Indian Dimension of Aceh and Sumatra History,” suggests that this story was invented to circumvent the sultan’s South Indian origins.

All this is to say that just because Indian Ocean ports transitioned from Sanskrit to Arabic, it didn’t mean that Indians had any less of a key position. In 1393, the Qazi (specialised maritime magistrate or judge) of the port of Calicut (present-day Kozhikode) wrote a letter to the sultan of Yemen. Historian Elizabeth Lambourn studied the letter in her “Khuṭba and Muslim Networks in the Indian Ocean”. 

The qazi’s letter mentions that envoys from Bengal, Hormuz, and Samudra-Pasai had spent vast sums trying to have their rulers’ names recited in Calicut’s Friday sermon—only to be turned down. Why? Such a recitation, in a port home to a cosmopolitan Muslim diaspora, would have signified the Sultan’s pre-eminence among other rulers, carrying the news to all ports linked to Calicut. 

This is an echo of the “religious diplomacy” practised by earlier Malay kings. In 1006, the kings of Kedah had similarly established a Buddhist monastery at Chola-ruled Nagapattinam, a gesture of their Buddhist piety in a key Indian port. Centuries later, in a world where Islam and Arabic had established themselves, a South Indian port remained a crucial hinge.

Khambhat’s other arm

When we imagine Gujarati merchants today, we typically think of Jains or of Hindu Banias. As I wrote in an earlier column, Bania firms were eminent in the Persian Gulf. About a third of the houses in the Persian port of Bandar Abbas were Indian, and the Persian authorities prohibited public cow slaughter on their behalf. But Gujarat’s Khambhat, as historian Ruby Maloni puts it, stretched out two arms — one toward Aden, the other toward Malacca. Banias ran the western one, but Gujarati Muslims dominated the eastern.

Before the Portuguese seized Malacca in 1511, the six largest cloth ships arriving there each year were Gujarati. The Portuguese targeted these Gujarati Muslims, importing European attitudes that saw so-called “Moors” with suspicion. These merchants then moved to a new, militant port: Aceh. 

The English merchant James Lancaster counted sixteen to eighteen Indian vessels in Banda Aceh harbour in 1602, about half of them Gujarati Muslim ships trading Indian cloth for Sumatran pepper. A few generations later, the buccaneer William Dampier found that most resident merchants and goldsmiths in the city were Indian, and that no foreign trader could handle Aceh’s many competing currencies without a Gujarati agent to keep him from being cheated.

Gujarati Muslim scholars travelled the same route as the merchants with their cloth. In the early 1580s, a Gujarati teacher of Hadrami Arab descent, Muhammad Jilani, arrived at Aceh to teach logic and rhetoric. As Azyumardi Azra writes in The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia, he found that his potential students wanted Sufi mysticism instead. Jilani sailed to Mecca forthwith, learned the subject, and came back to teach what the market wanted. The demand was Southeast Asian; the Indian simply adjusted his stock.

To be clear, what Jilani and his nephew—Nur al-Din al-Raniri—brought was not the cosy, ‘syncretic’ Sufism we romanticise in India. Nuruddin al-Raniri, born at Ranir on the Gujarat coast, was appointed Shaykh al-Islam—the city’s highest Islamic authority—at Aceh in May 1637. He spent seven years hunting a rival school to near-extinction, branding them as heretics, burning their books, and having those who refused to recant killed. 

At the same time, al-Raniri was also responsible for outstanding early Malay works, such as the Bustan al-Salatin, a world history. Sufism came to Southeast Asia as often in the hands of Indian inquisitors as of accommodators.

The end of an ancient relationship

Aceh’s intimate relationship with India continued over the centuries. Tamil Muslim merchants gradually became dominant there, supporting sultans by importing mercenaries from the subcontinent. Fugitives from the failed 1857 revolt received shelter and refuge there. But ultimately, European colonial power ended this exchange that had outlasted empires and witnessed the rise and fall of religions and languages.

The Dutch declared war on Aceh in 1873 and blockaded it, ending the most lucrative exchanges with the Coromandel Coast. Harsher regulations in the 1890s finished the smaller traffic. Tragically, though, India and Indonesia’s independence from the Europeans changed nothing. Neither Jawaharlal Nehru’s India nor Sukarno’s Indonesia wanted open borders. 

In the 20th century, Indonesian scholars sought ‘purer’ Arab and Persian antecedents for Islam in the archipelago. Meanwhile, Indian intellectuals obsessed over ancient “Indianisation”, renouncing our presence in the Indian Ocean’s recent Muslim history and claiming Hindu and Buddhist heritage alone — often on much weaker evidence. 

But hard evidence dams the tide of nationalist ink. On the Isthmus of Kra, the strip of land separating the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Siam, archaeologists have found carnelian beads dating to the fourth century BCE, Indian materials manipulated with Indian techniques, perhaps from as far away as Khambat. Art historians have also traced white marble epitaphs from Khambat to graves at Gresik and Pasai in the 15th century CE — 18 centuries later, still exporting hard-stone craft eastward.  Can 1,800 years of exchanges be forgotten with lines drawn in the ocean?

Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of ‘Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire’, and the award-winning ‘Lords of the Deccan’. He hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti and is on Instagram @anirbuddha. Views are personal.

This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.

(Edited by Saptak Datta)