A few weeks ago, Union home minister Amit Shah made headlines by proclaiming that Port Blair in Andaman and Nicobar would be renamed Sri Vijaya Puram. According to the government, this was a move to decolonise. Among other reasons, the name is meant to recall the region’s supposed history as the naval base of the Tamil-speaking Chola empire of South India. Perhaps not coincidentally, “Srivijaya” was also the name of an ancient Southeast Asian polity—a region into which the Greater Nicobar Project will undoubtedly project Indian power. Srivijaya, too, was once shaped by Chola power. This is its story.
The origins of Srivijaya
For nearly half a millennium, from the 7th to the 12th centuries CE, the east coast of Sumatra was home to the most unique polity in the Indian Ocean World: Srivijaya, Fortune’s Victory. Srivijaya was a kaleidoscopic network of semi-autonomous lords, chiefs, and ports centred on the vast commercial centre of the same name—present-day Palembang. Most of these ports were settlements of wood and stilts near river mouths, offering shelter from the monsoon storms.
Srivijaya rose to supremacy through its intensive contact with the Sanskrit-speaking world, as William Dalrymple writes in his magisterial new work, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. The rulers of Palembang were interested in tantric Buddhist rituals and South Asian political concepts, which were brought by monks from across the Indian Ocean—but primarily from present-day Bengal and Tamil Nadu. These rituals, coupled with fine imported textiles and jewellery, brought Palembang’s kings power and prestige and elevated them over the chiefs of inland Sumatra. The kings quickly weaponised both.
In the 7th century CE, the Palembang kings forced inland Sumatran chiefs to participate in a ceremony: Water was poured over a sculpture of a multi-headed naga and the chiefs then had to sip it with a vow of loyalty to the king. If they reneged on the oath, they believed, the naga’s power would rot their insides. With control over Sumatra secure, Palembang began to look further afield, to the Malay peninsula. Maritime nomads moved through the peninsula’s coastal swamps. Archaeologists John Miksic and Geok Yian Goh, in their book Ancient Southeast Asia, write that these nomads relied on fishing and occasional preyed on passing ships. Palembang’s kings coerced them instead to patrol the waters of the Strait of Malacca in return for trade revenues, which would be collected by local ports allied together in a great confederacy: Srivijaya. It was a compelling deal, aided by the fact that Srivijaya control in Malaya was always loose.
Commerce proved far more profitable to local rulers than piracy. Soon, there was a major shift in Indian Ocean networks. Up to the 9th century or so, most trade from South India was directed toward Thailand’s Isthmus of Kra, and then went overland to the Gulf of Thailand before reaching present-day Cambodia and Vietnam. But once Srivijaya pacified the Malacca Strait, shipping traffic began to concentrate there—as it still does now, over a thousand years later.
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Srivijaya and India
As was frequently the case with loose-knit medieval polities, Srivijaya’s loose structure was its undoing. It included within it many former rivals, all of which had their own ports and networks. They were happy to work with Palembang as long as it profited them, but once they grew rich, they soon tried to flex their own power and assume leadership of the entire Srivijaya confederacy. For example, the kings of Kedah in present-day Malaysia grew powerful indeed by the late 10th century and muscled in on the trade with South India and China. At the time, South India was dominated by the expansionist Chola dynasty (850–1279).
Kedah seems to have been the Cholas’ main trading partner in Southeast Asia. As archaeologist Sureshkumar Muthukumaran writes in the edited volume Sojourners to Settlers: Tamils in Southeast Asia and Singapore, medieval Tamil writers often use Kedah’s Tamil name—Kadaram—interchangeably with Southeast Asia as a whole. But Tamil merchants were unhappy with Kedah, who wanted to control Srivijaya’s goods for themselves—particularly camphor, which was in high demand in newly-built Chola temples. By 1025 CE, the Cholas had executed an unprecedented long-range strike into Bengal to secure loot and Ganges water to inaugurate their new capital. Astonishingly, historian Y Subbarayulu writes in Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa, while Chola inscriptions frequently mention army regiments, they almost never mention a navy. This would suggest that long-range Chola strikes, like their attack on Bengal, were enabled by Tamil merchant shipping. And Tamil merchants had plenty of grudges against Kedah.
The Chola expedition to Southeast Asia was, above all, an attack on Kedah, which was attempting to become the foremost power in the Srivijaya confederacy. From 1026 CE onwards, the Chola emperor Rajendra I adopted the title of Kadaram-Konda, Kedah-Seizer, and renamed various Tamil towns “Kedah-Seizer-City”. In a long royal eulogy he commissioned, Rajendra detailed the sacking of Kedah, the capture of its ruler and the tearing down of one of its bejewelled gates. This led to a political shockwave that transformed Srivijaya: Over the next decades, Palembang completely lost any claim to leadership, and Malayu (present-day Jambi) emerged supreme.
Rajendra Chola’s eulogy also claims that his forces sacked various other cities in Southeast Asia, but does not detail any of these attacks. One of the places mentioned is “the great Nakkavaram, whose flower gardens (resembled) the girdle (of the nymph) of the southern sea”. Some historians have suggested this is Nicobar. Could this be the “Chola naval base” that Port Blair would be named after?
Not as decolonial as we think
Eulogy aside, there’s no archaeological basis for a Chola naval base in Port Blair, Andaman, Nicobar, or anywhere in Southeast Asia. Perhaps this will change with new evidence. For now, excavations reveal that there was a shift in Kedah’s settlement area around the time of the Chola invasion. But this is not evident elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Instead, excavations conducted by Singapore-based archaeologist E. Edwards McKinnon have shown that Tamil merchants were the ones who set up permanent bases in Sumatra, perhaps taking advantage of the turmoil caused by the Chola attack on Kedah and the resultant turmoil in Srivijaya.
To return to the renaming of Port Blair. Its new name, “Sri Vijaya Puram” is certainly political, but not historical—or decolonial. In fact, it appropriates history for nationalist sentiment, commonplace in Indian politics today. Even if archaeology someday finds that “Nakkavaram” was a permanent Tamil base, medieval Tamil merchants were not decolonial powers. As historian Risha Lee wrote in her pathbreaking PhD thesis, Constructing Community: Tamil Merchant Temples in India and China, 850–1281, Tamil merchants were active behind the frontier of Chola expansion in south Karnataka, northern Sri Lanka, and northern Sumatra, and were always heavily-armed. Inscriptions reveal that Barus, the main Tamil merchant settlement in Sumatra, had a general (nagara-senapati) and an elephant corps. And, as we’ve seen, such settlements were at least partially established through violence. (To be fair, medieval merchant expansion was nowhere near as horrific as the British East India Company, but it wasn’t an emancipatory force either.)
Most importantly, the name “Sri Vijaya Puram” has nothing to do with the history of the Andaman and Nicobar islanders, who were victims of British colonialism in altogether different ways from us mainlanders. They suffered diseases to which they had no immunity; they were unable to defend their cultures and languages from extinction. All 10 of the Great Andamanese languages have now essentially disappeared. The Great Nicobar Project will undoubtedly have the same effect on Shompen and Nicobarese—all while the people of the islands control less and less of their own lands and resources. Massive resorts, ports, and environmental damage can’t be branded as “decolonial”, simply by stoking nationalist sentiment using names from a distant history.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of Lords of the Deccan, a new history of medieval South India, and hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti. 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 Humra Laeeq)