Ancient Ports of India and Maritime Trade: Exam Notes

India has a coastline of more than seven thousand kilometres and used it early. A dockyard was built at Lothal while the Harappan cities were still standing, Greek and Roman sailors were buying pepper on the Malabar coast in the first century of the Christian era, and a Chola fleet crossed the Bay of Bengal in the eleventh century. Questions on this topic are almost always pairing questions: the old name against the modern place, the port against its coast, the port against the river or the dynasty. The pairs below are the ones that come back year after year.

How we know: the written sources

Four sources carry most of the evidence. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek sailing manual of the first century of the Christian era written by an unknown merchant, lists the ports from the Red Sea to the Ganga with their goods. Ptolemy's Geography, of the second century, maps them. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, complained that India was draining Rome of its gold. On the Indian side the Sangam poems, especially the Pattinappalai and the Silappadikaram, describe the port of Puhar, and Kautilya's Arthashastra gives the duties and the rules of the superintendent of shipping.

The earliest harbours

Lothal in Bhal region of Gujarat, excavated by S. R. Rao, has a baked brick basin connected to the Bhogavo river that is generally identified as a dockyard, together with a warehouse and a bead factory; it is the oldest structure of its kind in the subcontinent. Other Harappan coastal sites are Sutkagan Dor and Sotka Koh on the Makran coast, Balakot, Kuntasi and Dholavira on the island of Khadir. Mesopotamian tablets call the land Meluhha and the stations on the way Dilmun, modern Bahrain, and Magan, modern Oman. Harappan exports were cotton cloth, carnelian beads, ivory, shell and timber.

Ports of the western coast

The western ports faced the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Barygaza, modern Bharuch on the Narmada in Gujarat, was the greatest of them and handled the trade of the Satavahana and Kshatrapa hinterland. Sopara, the Surparaka of the texts, lay near modern Vasai, and Kalyan and Chaul served the Konkan. On the Malabar coast lay Muziris, placed near Kodungallur and the excavated site of Pattanam in Kerala, the chief pepper market of the Roman trade, with Tyndis and Nelcynda close by. Cambay, Quilon and Calicut rose later in the medieval centuries.

Ports of the eastern coast

The Roman trade and the monsoon

Around the middle of the first century of the Christian era a Greek pilot named Hippalus is said to have worked out the rhythm of the south west monsoon, and ships began to sail straight across the Arabian Sea instead of creeping along the coast. The voyage from Egypt to Muziris came down to about forty days and the Indo-Roman trade boomed. India sold pepper, which the Tamil poems call yavanapriya, the dear thing of the Yavanas, along with spices, pearls from Korkai, fine muslin, ivory, teak, indigo, precious stones and the crucible steel the Romans knew as ferrum indicum. It bought gold and silver coins, wine in two handled amphorae, glass, tin, lead, coral and singing boys. Hoards of Roman coins of Augustus, Tiberius and Nero have been found at Arikamedu, in the Coimbatore and Madurai belt and at Kolhapur, which is why Pliny grumbled about the drain of Roman gold.

Guilds, kings and the eastern voyages

Sea trade was organised by merchant guilds rather than by the state. The Ayyavole guild of five hundred, named after Aihole, the Manigramam and the Nanadesi, meaning the merchants of many countries, had their own ships, armed guards and inscriptions from Karnataka to Sumatra. Royal navies followed the merchants. Rajaraja I of the Cholas took the northern Sri Lankan coast and the Maldives, and his son Rajendra I sent the famous naval expedition against the Srivijaya empire of Sumatra and Malaya in 1025 of the Christian era, the only Indian sea campaign of its scale. Nagapattinam became the Chola gateway to Southeast Asia, where Indian scripts, temples and the Ramayana travelled with the traders. The memory of these voyages survives in the Bali Jatra fair of Cuttack in Odisha, held on Kartik Purnima on the bank of the Mahanadi, when paper boats are floated to recall the sailings to Bali, Java and Sumatra.

Decline and continuity

The Indo-Roman trade thinned after the third century as the Roman economy weakened, and the Arab and later the Chinese merchants took over the carrying trade. The ports did not die: Bharuch, Quilon, Calicut and Masulipatnam were busy when the Portuguese arrived, and the old pattern of pepper, textiles and precious stones going out and bullion coming in lasted until the European companies changed the terms of the trade.