Indian Shipping/Book 1/Part 2/Chapter 4

Throughout the centuries when India carried on her maritime and political intercourse with Rome she also maintained an equally active commerce with the farther East. The trade with the West alone was unable to give a full scope to her throbbing international life. We have already indicated some of the evidences supplied by Buddhist texts belonging to a period of a thousand years from 600 B.C., which all point to a complete navigation of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean and the flow of a steady and ceaseless traffic between Bengal and Ceylon, Madras and Burma. Those evidences have been set forth in great detail, and need not be reproduced here. As Elphinstone^[1] has pointed out, "the inhabitants of the coast of Coromandel seem early to have been distinguished by ​their maritime enterprise from their countrymen on the west of India." Mr. Vincent Smith^[2] also says: "Ancient Tamil literature and the Greek and Roman authors prove that in the first two centuries of the Christian era the ports on the Coromandal or Chola coast enjoyed the benefits of active commerce with both West and East. The Chola fleets did not confine themselves to coasting voyages, but boldly crossed the Bay of Bengal to the mouths of the Ganges and the Irrawaddy, and the Indian Ocean to the islands of the Malay Archipelago." Of the precise part played by the Tamils and their trade with Eastern nations, no detailed accounts are available, but according to our authority on this subject, Mr. Pillay, there are many allusions in ancient Tamil poems to voyages undertaken by merchants and others to Nagapuram in Chavakam (Sumatra or Java), Kalakam in Burma, and seaports in Ceylon and Bengal. Thus a ship sailing from the coast of Madura to Chavakam (Java) is said to have touched at Manipallavam, an island between Ceylon and India on which was one of the sacred seats of Buddha. Again, in another Tamil poem of the 1st century A.D. it is said that ships from Kalakan (the ancient name of Kaddaram in Burma) brought articles of merchandise to Kavirippaddinam, the great emporium at the mouth of the ​Kaveri.^[3] Lower Burma or Pegu was conquered by emigrants from the Telugu kingdoms bordering on the Bay of Bengal, and consequently the people of Pegu have long been known to the Burmese and to all foreigners by the name of Talaing.^[4]

Next to the Tamils in the eastward maritime activity of India the pioneering work seems to have been done and the lead taken by the ancient kingdom of Kalinga on the eastern sea-board, which is said to have been founded "at least eight centuries before Christ,"^[5] and which extended from the mouth of the Ganges to the mouth of the Krishna. "It formed one of the five^[6] outlying kingdoms of ancient India, with its capital about halfway down the coast and still surviving in the present city of Kalingapatam."^[7] This kingdom was ruled for many centuries by princes of the Buddhist persuasion, a religion which did not tolerate any antipathy against foreign nations. The materials for the early history of this kingdom are mainly monumental in their character. Some of the inscriptions "speak of navigation and ship-commerce as forming part of the education of the princes of ​Kalinga."^[8] The Chilka Lake in those days made an excellent harbour for anchorage, "crowded with ships from distant countries."^[9] The conjecture may be hazarded that the great sea-king Bali of the Rāmāyaṇa might have been no other than a monarch of the sea-coast kingdom of Kalinga. At first confining their maritime efforts to Ceylon, the Klings from mere coasting soon began to make bolder voyages across the Bay of Bengal. From the evidences furnished by the Buddhagat, or the sacred scripture of the Burmese in particular, it is clear that a steady commercial intercourse was cultivated with Burma by the Buddhist merchants of Kalinga, which soon led to missionary undertakings for the propagation of their religion, and afterwards to the assumption of political supremacy in the land.^[10] One of Asoka's religious missions was to Suvarna-bhumi or Burma, and one of the most famous of Hindu settlements, the remains of which still exist, was Thara-khetra ​near Prome.^[11] According to R. F. St. Andrew St. John,^[12] "somewhere about 300 A.D. people from the west coast of the Bay of Bengal founded colonies on the coasts of the Gulf of Martaban, of which the principal appears to have been Thaton or Saddhammanagara." The intercourse between Kalinga and Burma also appears from Sir A. P. Phayre's statement of coins and medals with Hindu symbols being found in Pegu.^[13] "That there was intercourse also with Malacca is evident from many words in the Malayan language which Marsden has traced to an Indian or Sanskrit origin. To this day there are Klings or descendants of settlers from ancient Kalinga at Singapore." The Klings are the lowest class of Indians, and their name is derived from Kalinga in India, from whence they are said to have come. Indians, moreover, of a higher grade, Madrasees, Tamils, etc., are also called Klings at Singapore.^[14] With reference to this ancient trade Sir Walter Elliot observes: "There is no doubt that the intercourse between the east coast of India and the whole of the opposite coast of the Bay of Bengal and the Straits of Malacca was far greater in ancient times. … It had attained its height at the time the Buddhists were in the ascendant, i.e. during ​the first five or six centuries of our era. The first great Buddhist persecution both checked it and also drove great numbers of the victims to the opposite coast. The Tamil and Telugu local histories and tradition are full of such narratives. When the Chalukya prince, brother of the King of Kalyan, was founding a new kingdom at Rajamundry, which involved the rooting out and dispersion of the pre-existing rulers, nothing is more probable than that some of the fugitives should have found their way to Pegu. One Tamil MS. refers to a party of Buddhist exiles, headed by a king of Manda, flying in their ship from the coast."^[15]