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Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa: Reflections on the Chola naval expeditions to

Southeast Asia by HERMANN KULKE; K. KESAVAPANY; VIJAY SEKHUJA

Article in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies · January 2011

DOI: 10.2307/23020280

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 339

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 42(2), pp 339–371 June 2011.

© The National University of Singapore, 2011.

Book Reviews
Asia
Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa: Reflections on the Chola naval expeditions to
Southeast Asia
Edited by H E R M A N N K U L K E , K . K E S AVA P A N Y and V I J A Y S E K H U J A
Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009. Pp. xxv, 337. Illustrations,
Index.
doi:10.1017/S0022463411000099

Before European naval power began its history in Southeast Asia just 500 years
ago, there were three prior external naval assaults on this vital hinge of commerce.
Each was remarkable, and baffling in its motivation. Two came from Chinese
ports — the Mongol-led expeditions of the 1290s and the enormous fleets under
the Muslim Ming Admiral Zheng He in the early 1400s. The earliest and least well
documented was the expedition mounted by the Tamil Chola Dynasty in 1025, evi-
dently from its major port of Nagapattinam, against ports associated with Sriwijaya
in Sumatra and the Peninsula. The 600th anniversary of Zheng He’s first expedition
in 1405 came and went with much fanfare but virtually sheds no further light on the
motivation for this eccentric moment — although the consequences of that interven-
tion for Southeast Asia have now been very well covered in Southeast Asia in the
fifteenth century: The China factor, ed. Geoff Wade and Sun Laichen (NUS Press
and University of Hong Kong University Press, 2010).
This welcome volume on the Chola intervention, already 15 years in advance
of its millennial anniversary, does succeed in clarifying the likely motivation and
character of the last Indian intervention in the Southeast Asian region before the
British–Indian conquest of Java in 1811. It does this not by putting new data on
the table — the same rather few hard facts are returned to repeatedly by different
authors. The achievement of this book and the 2007 conference that lay behind it
was to bring together discourses that have regrettably engaged little in a much-needed
conversation. Indian, and particularly Tamil, scholars have focused on the inscrip-
tions and texts in Indian languages, particularly the one specific source on the
expedition, the 1027 CE Tirukkadaiyur inscription on a temple in Tanjavore (roma-
nised and translated here in an appendix, pp. 279–80). Sinologists have worked over
the often-puzzling Chinese sources describing the southern barbarian lands and their
‘tribute’ missions to the Middle Kingdom. Finally, archaeologists have recently made
considerable progress in documenting the presence of Chinese ceramics of the Song
era around the Indian Ocean, and their association with historically recorded sites.
The first two of these types of source have been assembled and translated systemati-
cally in two appendices occupying the last 45 pages of the book. The third is rep-
resented in this volume by Noboru Karashima’s work in southern India and that of
P. Shanmugam (of Madras University) in Indonesia, while other archeological
340 BOOK REVIEWS

evidence from Southeast Asia presented at the 2007 conference will appear primarily
in a companion volume on Early Indian influence in Southeast Asia edited by
Pierre-Yves Manguin and others.
Hermann Kulke’s introduction to this book records rather disappointingly that
the main upshot of the conference was to confirm ‘the conundrum’ of the Chola
raids due to lack of evidence. But his own paper and particularly that of Tansen Sen
on the Chola–Sriwijaya–China triangle, and to a lesser extent Gokul Seshadri on
Nagapattinam, Karashima and Subbaralaya Anjuvanam on the South Indian trading
guilds, and Hema Devare on Indian cotton cloth exports, do permit some greater
clarity on the problem. In essence, as Sen explains, the advent of the Song in China
(960), the Fatimids in Egypt (969) and the Cholas in South India (985) increased sub-
stantially the traffic on the sea route to China, largely displacing overland routes. For all
the key players, but particularly for the Cholas and Sriwijaya, dominating the two most
strategic staging-posts of the maritime route in South and Southeast Asia respectively,
and controlling access to the vital China market was crucial to their power. The grow-
ing traffic between them, and between both and China, is demonstrated by the increas-
ing amounts of Chinese ceramics in key South and Southeast Asian ports from the
tenth century, and by the ritual interactions between the three corners of Sen’s triangle.
In 1003 Sriwijaya’s envoys to China reported that their king had erected a Buddhist
shrine in honour of the Chinese emperor, and requested bronze bells to decorate it.
In 1005, the Sriwijaya ruler financed the construction of a Buddhist vihara at the prin-
cipal Chola (and Hindu) port of Nagapattinam (where a ‘Chinese pagoda’ had already
been erected in the eighth century, according to Gokul Seshadri, during the first period
of intense interaction). In the following decade, traders/envoys purporting to represent
Srivijayan kings presented precious stones, bronze lamps and ‘Chinese gold’ to
(Hindu?) temples in Nagapattinam, while in 1015 King Rajendra Chola confirmed
his patronage of the Sriwijayan Budddhist vihara at Nagapattinam. To complete the
triangle, Chinese records report the first Cholas ‘tribute’ mission in 1015, and a steady
series of 16 missions from Sriwijaya in the period 960–1017, six of them in the last 15
of these years (Kulke, pp. 6–8; Sen, pp. 66–7).
While the first generation of Indian writers interpreted these ritual interactions as
a sign of harmonious relations preceding the Chola attacks, Tansen Sen looks more
closely and critically at the Chinese sources to show the growing political strains
on the relationship. The traders who kept the interaction flowing were no doubt
anxious to placate and manipulate the three sets of rulers in their own interests,
using whatever Hindu, Buddhist or Confucian rituals and networks that worked to
their advantage (though Sriwijayan envoys were increasingly Muslim in the period).
Sriwijaya had a very long-standing stake in exploiting the Chinese imperial preoccu-
pation with ‘tribute’ to assert an effective monopoly on Southeast Asian trade to
China. The Cholas were new and very ambitious players in this game, conquering
one South Asian port after another in an obvious strategy of monopolising the long-
distance maritime trade through this zone. But Sriwijaya had the inside track in fun-
nelling this trade through the Southeast Asian portals to China, and naturally insisted
to the Chinese court that the Cholas, like Javanese and other rivals in Southeast Asia,
were but subsidiaries of Srivijaya who should be given trade access only through their
agency. This was likely to have economic consequences for the Chola traders seeking
 BOOK REVIEWS 341

direct access to China, and put them on the side of encouraging an extension of Chola
expansionary policy eastwards.
Interestingly, the aggressive tactic appears to have failed in its purpose, since in
1106 the Chinese Council of Rites was still classifying the Cholas as ‘subject to
Sriwijaya’ (Sen, p. 69). However, this is probably an artifact of the extreme conserva-
tism of Chinese policy towards the Southern barbarians, which may have insisted on
regarding joint missions that came from Cholas and Sriwijaya as essentially
Sriwijayan, the better-known category at court.
Among the other interesting new data on the context for the Chola raids
(thought by both Sen and Kulke to have included an earlier 1017 raid as well as
that of 1025) are the chapters by Karashima and Subbaralaya (of the Tamil
University of Thanjavur) on the South Indian merchant guilds that flourished
especially in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries. Karashima’s team assembled all
the 314 inscriptions pertaining to these guilds, including four in Southeast Asia,
from Sumatra and the isthmian ports of the Peninsula. Although most of these
were essentially Hindu and centred around the cult of a particular deity or temple,
both authors report new research on the Anjuvannam, for which inscriptions record
rights and grants to particular merchants with Jewish, Christian and Muslim names.
Was this also a trade guild in the same sense, or rather a category of entitlement and
protection accorded to foreign merchants from West Asia?
One should be warned that the editing of this volume has been light. The papers
do not all have new research or analysis to report, there is considerable repetition of
material between them, and almost no acknowledgement in any papers except the
Introduction of the existence of other papers or of the valuable primary sources in
the appendices. Karashima’s two chapters in the book have overlapping material,
including the same table repeated (pp. 53, 137). The index is very valuable, but it
would have been nice to have also a list of illustrations, many of which seem impor-
tant including the beguiling cover, which is nowhere explained.
Still, this is a valuable advance towards bridging the gap that opened up between
Indian and Southeast Asian scholarship in the 1950s. It is a fine first product of the
Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
ANTHONY REID
Australian National University

Sino-Malay trade and diplomacy from the tenth through to the fourteenth century
By D E R E K H E N G
Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi, 286. Maps, Plates (some coloured),
Notes, Bibliography, Index.
doi:10.1017/S0022463411000105

This book provides a complex panorama of the political and commercial

relations between Song and Yuan China on the one side, and the ‘Malay’ world on

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