In an Antique Land (36 page)

Ben Yiju's closest affiliations in Mangalore would of course have lain with the community with which he shared his spoken language and his taste in food and clothing: the expatriate Muslim Arabs who were resident in the city—indeed, for most purposes he would have counted himself as one of them. Muslim traders figure frequently in his papers, as do the names of the Arab sailors and ships' captains who carried his letters and brought him news from other parts of the world.

Ben Yiju's business interests also brought him into contact with a large number of agents and retailers, and those relationships seem to have often overlapped with the kinship networks of his household.
In addition, Ben Yiju was also closely connected with a group of metalworkers specializing in certain bronze objects and utensils which were much in demand in Aden.
The names of these craftsmen, who appear to have been Brahmins from Tamilnad, often figure in Ben Yiju's household accounts, and it is possible that their workshop was attached to his warehouse.

The vast network of relationships that Ben Yiju fitted himself into in Mangalore was clearly not a set of random associations: on the contrary, it appears to have had a life of its own, the links being transmitted between generations of merchants, just as they were from Madmun to Ben Yiju.
Membership in the network evidently involved binding understandings of a kind that permitted individuals to commit large sums of money to
joint undertakings, even in circumstances where there was no legal redress—understandings that clearly presuppose free and direct communications between the participants, despite their cultural, religious and linguistic differences.

But here lies a
mystery into which Ben Yiju's papers offer no insight at all: the question of what language the merchants used in their dealings with each other. Madmun's letters, for instance, leave no doubt that he wrote regularly to his friends amongst the ‘Bâniyân' of Mangalore. But what neither Madmun nor Ben Yiju ever reveal is what language they used in communicating with their Indian associates.

As far as their letters are concerned, the most likely solution is that
they conducted their correspondence largely in Arabic, making liberal use of scribes and translators. But that still leaves a host of other questions unanswered: what language did Ben Yiju speak with Ashu, for instance? Or for that matter, how did he communicate with Bomma, or with the merchants from various regions in India and beyond, with whom, given the nature of his occupation, he must have had to do business? On the evidence of his papers there is no reason to suppose that he ever acquired fluency in Tulu or any other south Indian language: such Indian words that found their way into his writings were all of northern derivation. Indeed, learning any one language would not have solved Ben Yiju's problems of communication, for the Indians he dealt with evidently came from several different linguistic regions.

Common sense suggests that in an area as large and as diverse as the Indian Ocean, business could not possibly have been conducted in Tulu, Arabic, Gujarati or indeed any tongue that was native to a single group of traders; to function at all the language of everyday business would have had to be both simpler
and much more widely dispersed than any ordinary language. Given what we know about the practices of Arab traders in other multilingual areas (the Mediterranean for example) it seems likely that the problem was resolved by using a trading argot, or an elaborated pidgin language.
The Arab geographer Mas'ûdî refers, in fact, to a language called ‘Lâriyya', which he describes as being spoken along much of the length of the Malabar Coast. Since no language corresponding to that name is known to exist, it is possible that he was referring to a pidgin, one that was possibly compounded largely of Perso-Arabic and north Indian elements, and was in use amongst merchants and traders all along the coast.

It is easy enough to imagine that Ben Yiju used a specialized trade language to communicate with his fellow merchants in Mangalore: the difficulties lie in imagining how he and Ashu adapted that argot to the demands of a marital bedroom.

I
N ALL THE
eighteen years or more that Ben Yiju spent in India he appears never to have ventured away from the Malabar coast; it would seem that he had no interest at all in the peninsular mainland, on the other side of the mountains. Yet Ben Yiju and his circle did not conceive of Malabar as a region separate from the mainland; as far as they were concerned Mangalore fell squarely within a loosely defined entity that covered most of the subcontinent, a territory which they referred to in their letters, as al-Hind, or bilâd al-Hind, ‘the country of India.' Thus to
speak of Ben Yiju living in ‘
India', or to refer to Bomma as an ‘Indian' is not to anticipate the borders and the political vocabulary of the twentieth century: those words are merely direct translations of the terms used by Ben Yiju and his friends.

Ben Yiju's usage, in this regard, was entirely in keeping with the academic geography of the Arabic-speaking world, in which the Indian subcontinent, beginning at the eastern border of Sind and extending as far as Assam and even beyond, was generally referred to as one unit, al-Hind, just as China was al-
în. There is of course, an intriguing asymmetry in this coupling, for China was recognizably a single state, an empire whose provinces were merely constituent parts of a larger political unity. India, on the other hand, as the Arab geographers well knew, was divided into several kingdoms, large and small, and in their descriptions they were always careful to demarcate the various regions and principalities of the subcontinent. Yet, at the same time, Arab travellers and geographers appear to have believed that al-Hind had a centre, recognized by all its kings and its various different regions.
For several centuries they seem to have been more or less in agreement on this subject: al-Hind, as they knew it, was centred in the domain of a king called the Ballahrâ, whose capital lay in the city of ‘Mankîr'.

The names are puzzling, for they do not correspond to any known political entity, and they occur even in periods when there were frequent shifts in the centres of power in the subcontinent.
An eminent scholar of Arabic, Doctor S. M. H. Nainar, has suggested that ‘Mankîr' corresponded to the town of Malkhed, now in Andhra Pradesh, and that ‘Ballahrâ' was an Arabic representation of ‘Vallabharaja' (Supreme King), a title assumed successively by the rulers of several dynasties in the region of south-west India. But if those were indeed the original
referents of those terms, in time they seem to have drifted away from their roots until they eventually became metaphors which represented, in a fashion easily comprehensible within Arab culture, India's idiosyncratic ways of giving shape to its luxuriant diversity.

In any event, there can be no doubt that in the Middle Ages, for much of the outside world, the geographical centre of India lay somewhere in the southern peninsula; to Ben Yiju in Mangalore, the northern reaches of the subcontinent may have seemed much like a distant and unruly frontier, on the outer edge of the country. For his own part he appears to have been perfectly content to stay within the Malabar coast, an area that was itself divided into a number of
small kingdoms and principalities. It was within the interlinked principalities of the coast that Ben Yiju conducted his business: scattered references in his papers link him with a handful of towns, all in the Malabar—places with names such as ‘Fandarîna', ‘Dahfattan' and ‘Jurbattan', all within easy reach of Mangalore.

Today the names of those towns carry not the faintest resonance, but in the Middle Ages they were well-known all along the trade routes of the Indian Ocean and even beyond, to scholars, geographers and travellers throughout the Arabic-speaking world. They have long since vanished from the map, at least in their earlier incarnations, but unlike many other medieval ports of the Indian Ocean ‘Fandarîna', ‘Jurbattan' and ‘Dahfattan' did not quite disappear: they still exist, not as spectacular ruins, but in the most unexpected avatar of all; as small towns and villages which have prospered, once again, because of their connections with the far side of the Indian Ocean—in this instance the oil-producing countries of the Arab world. They lie hidden in quiet anonymity within the hills and
palm-shaded lagoons of the coast, amongst some of the most beautiful landscapes in the Indian subcontinent.

The place that was known as ‘Jurbattan' in medieval Arabic texts has been identified as Srikandapuram, a small town in the foothills of the Western Ghats, about a hundred miles south of Mangalore. The hills around it fall amongst the richest pepper- and spice-producing areas in Malabar, and in the Middle Ages the town probably served as a major market where traders could buy directly from producers. The hills possess other attractions as well: a cool, fresh climate and streams and valleys of a kind which even then, long before romanticism made nature an object to marvel at, could not have failed to capture the attention of those who saw them for the first time.

‘Jurbattan's' combination of blessings was clearly an attractive one, and Ben Yiju appears to have visited it regularly—partly to buy spices and partly, no doubt, for pleasure. For Ashu the town may have held an added allurement: being a Nair, it is more than likely that she had relatives in the area and it may have been at her insistence that those visits were undertaken.

For Ashu, Ben Yiju, and their children, the journey would have begun with a voyage down the coast from Mangalore, for a distance of a hundred miles or so.
After about two days at sea, their boat would have entered a harbour whose Arabic name, ‘Budfattan', was probably a garbled rendition of Baliapatam.

Today a quiet palm-fringed road leads north towards Baliapatam from the nearby city of Cannanore, past large houses, some new, with sharp geometric lines and bright pastel colours that speak eloquently of their owners' affiliations with the Persian Gulf. Dotted between them are a few older and gentler dwellings, with carved wooden doorposts and tall red-tiled roofs that sweep high above the palm-tops. The road
comes to a halt beside what appears to be a small duck-pond, with two diesel-pumps perched inexplicably on its edge. A wharf lies hidden under weeds on the bank, and on the far side there is a channel that connects it to a wide expanse of water: a great river-mouth that was once the harbour of ‘Budfattan'.

From there Ashu and her family would probably have travelled upstream on river-boats as far as the current permitted, before beginning the overland journey into the hills, along the pathway to ‘Jurbattan'.
For much of the distance they would have used palanquins carried by porters—then the preferred mode of travel amongst those who could afford it.

Today the road that leads to Srikandapuram runs through vast plantations of cashew and rubber, with low-slung motels and lavish residences dotted along its curves and bends. In the valleys, crops seem to grow in two layers, thriving on the exuberant fertility of the land, with coconut and areca palms soaring above long rows of velvety green pepper-vines. Srikandapuram, when it arrives, proves to be a thriving little town: the houses on the outskirts are bright and new, with sleek shops and sparkling clinics dotted between them. The bazaar at the centre, however, seems to belong to another time; the shops are crammed with sacks of spices, and their owners sit cross-legged behind low counters, bargaining at leisure with their customers.

A narrow road leads south from Srikandapuram, at a precipitous angle, and, after a rapid descent to the coast, it passes through several places that would have been well-known to Ben Yiju, long before he came to India. The ‘
Dahfattan' of his correspondence lies at the junction of two rivers, a small cluster of Gulf-gilded houses known to the world today as Dharmadam.
A little further down the coast is Pantalayini Kollam, the ‘Fandarîna' of the Arabs, and the ‘Pandarene' of the Portuguese, a quiet town on the
sea, a little to the north of Calicut.

The journey ends on a
beach between ‘Fandarîna' and Calicut, at a small fishing-village, hidden behind the shelter of a sand-dune. It is a quiet spot: a few catamarans and fishing-boats lie on a great crescent of sand, a vast beach that is usually empty, except when the fishing-boats come in. The village is called Kappkadavu and on one side of it beside the road is a worn white marker which tells the passer-by that this was where Vasco da Gama landed, on his first voyage to India, on 17 May 1498—some three hundred and fifty years after Ben Yiju left Mangalore.

Within a few years of that day the knell had been struck for the world that had brought Bomma, Ben Yiju and Ashu together, and another age had begun in which the crossing of their paths would seem so unlikely that its very possibility would all but disappear from human memory.

A bare two years after Vasco da Gama's voyage a Portuguese fleet led by Pedro Alvarez Cabral arrived on the Malabar coast. Cabral delivered a letter from the king of Portugal to the Samudri (Samudra-raja or Sea-king), the Hindu ruler of the city-state of Calicut, demanding that he expel all Muslims from his kingdom as they were enemies of the ‘Holy Faith'. He met with a blank refusal; then as afterwards the Samudri steadfastly maintained that Calicut had always been open to everyone who wished to trade there—the Portuguese were welcome to as much pepper as they liked, so long as they bought it at cost price.
The Portuguese fleet sailed away, but not before Calicut had been subjected to a two-day bombardment.
A year or so later Vasco da Gama returned with another, much more powerful Portuguese fleet and demanded once again that all Muslim traders be expelled from Calicut.