In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale

MANGALORE

1

SEEN FROM THE sea, on a clear day, Mangalore can take a newcomer’s breath away It sits upon the tip of a long finger of steeply rising land; a ridge of hills which extends out of a towering knuckle of peaks in the far distance. Two rivers meet around the elliptical curve of the fingertip to form a great palm-fringed lagoon, lying tranquil under a quicksilver sky. Between the lagoon and the sea, holding back the waves, are two thin elbows of sand. They strain towards each other, but stop just short of touching, and through the gap between them flows a narrow channel, joining the lagoon to the open sea.

The boats that pass through that channel today are mainly small fishing craft; the lagoon’s ancient functions as a harbour have now been delegated to a modern, artificially-dredged port a little to the north of the city. But it was the lagoon that first granted Mangalore its charter as a port, and it is from there that Ben Yiju would have had his first glimpse of the city he was to live in for close on two decades.

The geographical location is all that remains of the Mangalore that Ben Yiju saw: the city was sacked several times in the sixteenth century and afterwards, and today almost no trace of its medieval incarnation remains. The area that is now known as ‘the old port’ lies forgotten below the city’s bustling business centres and market-places, at the bottom of a steep slope. It still bears the Persian name Bandar, ‘port’, but today its few moments of life are provided by a ferry that connects it to the fishing-villages on the sand-spit across the lagoon. Otherwise its docks are largely untenanted and its wharfs empty, except for a handful of barges and river-boats.

When Ben Yiju arrived in Mangalore there was probably a stretch of sand where the docks stand now: the ships that plied the Indian Ocean appear to have been designed to be beached rather than docked — the better to profit from the fine sands that lined those waters. The merchants of the city, including the large community of expatriate Middle Easterners, would have had their offices and godowns close to the Bandar, probably on the hillside above, from where they could keep an eye on incoming ships.

The expatriate merchant community of Mangalore was a large one, by all accounts. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, who visited the city some two hundred years after Ben Yiju, reports that it was the practice of most merchants from the Yemen and Persia to disembark there; the Sumatrans, on the other hand, along with others from the eastern reaches of the Indian Ocean, seem to have preferred other cities, such as Calicut and ‘Fandarîna’, a little further to the south. At the time of Ibn Battuta’s visit the Muslims of Mangalore (and by implication) the foreign merchants, together formed a community of about 4,000 people, ‘living in a suburb alongside the town.’

The settlement of foreigners at Mangalore was by no means the largest or the most cosmopolitan on the coast: Calicut, a couple of hundred miles to the south, appears to have housed an even larger and more diverse merchant community. There were thirteen ‘Chinese’ vessels in the harbour when Ibn Battuta’s ship docked there, and he reports that the city regularly had visitors from ‘China, Sumatra, Ceylon, the Maldives, Yemen, and Fars [Iran] …’ A Portuguese sailor, Duarte Barbosa, who visited the city early in the sixteenth century, noted that the city’s merchants included ‘Arabs, Persians, Guzarates, Khorasanys, and Decanys’, who were known collectively as pardesis, or foreigners. The pardesi merchants were not all itinerant traders; many of them were expatriates who had settled in Malabar for considerable lengths of time. ‘[They] possess in this place wives and children,’ noted Barbosa, ‘and ships for sailing to all parts with all kinds of goods.’

The lifestyle of these merchants was so sumptuous that even sophisticated travellers and courtiers, accustomed to the refinements of great royal courts, were taken by surprise upon being admitted into their circle. The Persian ambassador ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Samarqandi, for instance, was greatly impressed by their style of living when he passed through Malabar in 1442AD. ‘They dress themselves in magnificent apparel,’ he wrote, ‘after the manner of the Arabs, and manifest luxury in every particular …’ Duarte Barbosa was to echo those observations a few decades later: ‘They have large houses and many servants: they are very luxurious in eating, drinking and sleeping …’

There is nothing now anywhere within sight of the Bandar to lend credence to the great mansions and residences that Ibn Battuta and Duarte Barbosa spoke of. Now the roads and lanes around the wharfs fall quiet after sunset; shipping offices shut their doors, coffee-shops pull down their shutters, and only a few passengers waiting to cross to the sand-spit remain. The imagination baulks at the thought that the Bandar once drew merchants and mariners from distant corners of the world.

For many hundreds of years, however, large numbers of foreign visitors congregated in the cities of this region, and it was Middle Eastern travellers who gave this part of the coast the Arabic name ‘Malabâr’. In their usage, the name was applied loosely to the southern third of the west coast, an area that shares many aspects of a common culture. But Malabar is also divided into several smaller sub-regions, among which the district around Mangalore is perhaps the most distinctive. Being the northernmost frontier of the Malabar region, it forms a kind of double-headed causeway, between the south and the north on the one hand, and between the seaboard and the interior on the other. With its southerly neighbours it shares certain distinctive cultural institutions, as well as legacies bequeathed by a parallel history — forms of personal law based on principles of matrilineal descent, for instance, are common to many groups throughout the area. But in other respects its affiliations lie with the adjoining districts of the north and the east, and with the state of Karnataka, of which it is a part. Its speech, for example, while forming a distinct language in its own right, is also closely akin to Kannada, the majority language of the state.

The language of Mangalore is called Tuu, and it is one of the five siblings of the Dravidian family of languages: it is rich in folk traditions and oral literature, but it does not possess a script of its own and is usually transcribed in Kannada. It is this language that has given the area around Mangalore its name, Tuunâ: like so many other parts of the the subcontinent, it forms a cultural area which is distinctive and singular, while being at the same time closely enmeshed with its neighbours in an intricate network of differences.

Tulunad is not large — it is contained today within a single district — yet it has had a distinct identity since antiquity. Writing in Alexandria in the second century AD, the Greek geographer Ptolemy referred to it as ‘Olokhoira’—a term which is thought to have been derived from ‘Aupa’, the name of Tulunad’s long-lived ruling dynasty. For several hundreds of years, until the beginning of the fifteenth century, Tulunad’s Alupa rulers succeeded in preserving a measure of autonomy for their small kingdom by picking allies judiciously among the various dynasties that followed each other to power in the hinterlands. It was during their rule that Mangalore became one of the principal ports of the Indian Ocean, and it was in the reign of the king Kavi Aupendra that Ben Yiju came to the city.

Ben Yiju, like so many other Middle Eastern merchants, was drawn to Mangalore because of the economic opportunities it offered as one of the premier ports of an extremely wealthy hinterland: a region that was well endowed with industrial crafts, apart from being one of the richest spice-producing territories of the medieval world. Later the area‘s wealth was to attract the much less welcome attention of the European maritime and colonial powers and it was in the course of the struggles that ensued that Mangalore came to lose virtually every trace of its extraordinary past.

But appropriately, Mangalore does not treat its lost history as a matter of crippling melancholy: it has always been a busy, bustling kind of place, and today it is again a thriving, relatively prosperous city. Its ancient connections with the Arab world have bequeathed it a more useful legacy than a mere collection of artefacts: thousands of its residents are now employed in the Persian Gulf, and its suburbs are awash with evidence of the extravagant spending of its expatriates.

In this, as in many other intangible ways, Mangalore remains perfectly true to its medieval heritage.

2

THE MORNING AFTER I arrived in Mangalore, one day in the summer of 1990, I found myself sitting in a coffee-shop, waiting eagerly to make the acquaintance of a scholar whose name I had heard mentioned several times on the way to the coast. I had been told on excellent authority, that this, if anyone, was the person who might be able to help me with the riddle of the Slave of MS H.6: his name was Professor B. A. Viveka Rai and he was one of the worlds foremost experts on Tulu folklore and philology. For me a great deal depended on this meeting, for my unravelling of the Slaves history had been blocked by an intractable etymological puzzle: the mystery of his name.

My introduction to the puzzle had come from Goitein’s translation of the letter that Khalaf ibn Ishaq wrote to Ben Yiju in 1139: at the end of the letter Khalaf happened to mention the Slaves name while sending him ‘plentiful greetings’. In the translated version of the letter, the name was spelt ‘Bama’ and it was accompanied by a footnote which explained that Goitein had been informed by a specialist on Indian history that ‘Bama’ was ‘Vernacular for Brahma.’

At the time, captivated as I was by the letter’s contents, I had not given the name any further thought. Years later, when I began working directly with the Geniza material, I discovered that the name occurred in some half-dozen documents, written by various different people — Madmun, Khalaf, and of course Ben Yiju himself. The name was always spelt in exactly the same way, with three characters: B-M-H. But of these, the last, ‘H’, was actually not a consonant at all, but rather an open vowel that is known in Arabic as the ‘teh marbûta’. The three characters of the Slave’s name were therefore, properly speaking, B-M-A. Clearly there was another vowel between the first and second characters, but it was never specified in the documents, for in Judæo-Arabic, as in written Arabic and Hebrew, short vowels are not usually indicated in handwritten texts. The vowel could have been ‘u’, ‘o’ or any other — one guess was about as good as another. In spelling the name as ‘Bama’, Goitein had taken it to be ‘a’, on the plausible assumption, as his footnote explained, that the word was derived from ‘Brahma’.

My first doubts about the exact nature of the relationship between the letters ‘B-M-A’ and the word ‘Brahma’ arose while reading some medieval accounts of India written by Arab travellers and geographers. The word ‘Brahma’ and its cognates occurred often in those texts and it soon became clear to me that it had been well-known amongst educated people in the Middle East and North Africa since long before Ben Yiju’s time. Indeed, it seemed possible that there had been an accepted way of spelling the word in Arabic through much of the Middle Ages.

Against that background it began to seem increasingly improbable that Ben Yiju and his friends would spell the Slave’s name as B-M-A if it were actually ‘Brahma’. If other Arabic-speakers, many of whom had never even visited India, could spell the term accurately, then surely Ben Yiju, who lived so many years in Mangalore, would have been able to do just as well, or better.

Clearly then, the Slave’s name was not ‘Brahma’. But it might of course have been a diminutive or a shortened form of that word. Yet if that were so, I began to suspect, the word would probably have had a slightly different shape: as a diminutive ‘Bama’ did not have a very convincing sound to my ear. I could think offhand of several other forms, from various Indian languages, which sounded a great deal more persuasive.

At this point I realized that finding an acceptable solution to the puzzle of the Slave’s name was a crucial step in determining his identity — indeed, it was the one clue that could provide some indication of where he was born and what his background and social circumstances were. But the moment that door swung open, a fresh host of problems appeared. The first among them was that there was no indication anywhere about what language the Slave was named in: after all the B-M-A of the documents could have had its origins in any one of several different languages.

Such information as I was able to find about slavery in the region of the Indian Ocean during the Middle Ages only served to complicate the matter further. The slave trade in Ben Yiju’s time was a wide-ranging transcontinental phenomenon, with substantial numbers of slaves being brought into the region from distant parts of the world: from as far away as Central Asia, the Russian steppes, the Transcaucasus and Europe. Mangalore, as a major port, would certainly have been a way station for many of the slave-traders, and it was entirely conceivable that the Slave of MS H.6 had been brought there from the Middle East. Indeed, an obscure reference in one of Ben Yiju’s letters suggested that he himself may have had occasional dealings with certain slave-traders from the Yemeni town of Zabid.

At the same time, there were good reasons to believe that the Slave of MS H.6 was in fact from the region of Mangalore rather than the Middle East: the spelling of his name for one. The slaves who were traded in the markets of Egypt were usually given Arabic names of a distinctive kind — Lu’lu (‘Pearl’), for instance, and Jawhar (‘Jewel’) — names that served to locate them on the margins of human society. But the Slave’s name, whatever it was, did not bear any resemblance to the usual run of Middle-Eastern slave-names, and indeed it did not appear to be of Arabic, or even Semitic origin. While the evidence was not conclusive by any means, it was certainly strong enough to suggest that Goitein was right in assuming that the Slave’s origins lay in India.

But that only served to bring me back to that mysterious acrostic: B-M-A. After puzzling over those three characters for a long time, one last possibility suggested itself to me. In Judæo-Arabic (as in Arabic) a doubled letter is often represented by a single character. It was possible then that the single ‘M’ in the name was actually doing duty for two of its kind. If that were so, it would mean that there were actually four letters in the name: ‘B-M-M-A’. If I then filled in a short vowel after the first letter, the result was ‘Bomma’ or ‘Bamma’, names which I knew to be common in certain parts of India.

Proceeding on that premise I began to look through the names in medieval inscriptions from Tulunad and its surrounding regions. The results were immediately gratifying. I discovered, for instance, that a man called Mâsaleya Bamma, who had worked as a servant for a group of warriors, had been killed, not far from Tulunad, just a few years before Ben Yiju arrived in India. His masters had caused an inscription to be carved in his memory: it was dated 15 June 1126, and it was discovered in a village about two hundred miles north-east of Mangalore. Another inscription from the same region records the name of one Sei Bamma, a man from a merchant family, who married a pious wife. From those, as well as other sources, it was soon clear to me that ‘Bamma’ had been a common name in that region in the Middle Ages.

Slowly the indications mounted, and just before leaving for Mangalore I came to be convinced that the Slaves name was actually ‘Bamma’ or something of the sort. Exciting as the discovery was, it also brought me to a standstill: I did not know whether the name was derived from the Sanskrit word ‘Brahma’ or from some other source, and I had no idea at all whether it might reveal anything about the Slave’s origins by linking him to any particular caste, religion or social group.

And so it was not without reason that I found myself balancing on the edge of my seat, as I waited for Professor Viveka Rai that morning in Mangalore: it was as though the identity of an elusive and mysterious acquaintance were soon to be revealed.

3

PROFESSOR RAI PROVED to be a soft-spoken, youngish man, tall and bespectacled, with an air of gentle abstraction that hid a precise and immensely erudite mind. He quickly became absorbed in my account of my unravelling of the Slave’s name, and it was not till I reached the end of the story that he broke in to correct me.

I had come very close, he said, in fact I was only fractionally off the mark: the Slave’s name was probably ‘Bomma’ rather than ‘Bamma’.

The name Bomma had once had wide currency within Tulu culture, he explained, and even until a generation or so ago it was commonly encountered in and around Mangalore. Over the last few decades it had passed out of general use as a personal name, but it was still preserved in the titles of various groups and clans in Tulunad. As for the derivation of the word, he said, it was a matter of critical importance to the story of the Slave, but the trail that led to its source was a circuitous one, traversing a wide swathe of Tulu culture and history.

The people of Tulunad were divided, by tradition, into several castes, ranging over a broad expanse of the social hierarchy — from immensely rich and powerful landlords, to poor peasants and Untouchables. But divided as they were by rank and occupation, the Tuluva still shared certain aspects of a common culture: they all spoke Tulu, for one, and they also followed matrilineal rules of inheritance for certain kinds of property. Equally, they shared in the worship of certain spirit-deities known as Bhûtas.

By tradition, each of the Tuluva castes and communities played a designated role in the Bhuta-cult, one providing financial support, for instance, one tending the shrines, others performing the ritual dances and so on. The cult was closely tied to the land, and those who did not own or work on the land — Brahmins, for example — were generally excluded from its rituals and celebrations. These rites were not just occasional events; they followed closely upon each other, even weekly in some seasons, and so the people who participated in them were thrust together at frequent and regular intervals. As a result they stood apart, in some ways, from the other people in the region: their rites, their language, and their matrilineal institutions gave them a distinct identity within the diverse population that had drifted into Tulunad over the centuries.

The Brahmins, on the other hand, played an important role in an altogether different aspect of the religious life of the region; they were the standard-bearers of the Pan-Indian Hindu tradition which formed the complementary other half of the folk-religion of Tulunad. As in much of India, the religious fabric of Tulunad was woven from an equal mixture of local forms of worship (the Bhuta-cult, in this case) and the high Sanskritic tradition. Along with its innumerable Bhuta shrines, Tulunad had its fair share and more of temples dedicated to the gods of the Sanskritic pantheon, and most of the Tuluva people participated enthusiastically in the worship of both sets of deities. There was no contradiction in this, of course, for to them Bhutas and Sanskritic deities represented aspects of divine and supernatural power that shaded gently and imperceptibly into each other. Indeed, under the benign cover of that shade, there was a good deal of trafficking between the two pantheons: some Bhuta deities would occasionally appear within the mists of high Sanskritism, while others fell from favour and vanished into the netherworld.

It is somewhere in those dark and shaded regions that the pedigree of the name Bomma takes a sudden and unexpected turn and leads away from the Brahma of classical Hindu mythology towards a deity of an altogether different character.

And, by an extraordinary coincidence, said Professor Rai, I could, if I wanted, have a glimpse of that deity, a darshan, that very night.

‘How?’ I asked, imagining a night-time vigil at a lonely shrine in a deserted and wind-tossed palm-grove. ‘Is there going to be a secret exorcism?’

Professor Rai cast me a quizzical glance. ‘On television,’ came the laconic answer. ‘In a film that’s going to be broadcast this evening.’

The film was in black and white; it had been made some ten or fifteen years earlier by some friends of Professor Rai’s, and besides serving as an advisor for it, he had also written some of the songs. It was one of a small number of films made in the Tulu language, and it was based upon the most celebrated folk-epic of Tulunad, a legend that recounted the deeds of two heroic brothers, Koti and Chennaya.

When the heroes appeared on the screen, I noticed they were carrying small sickles around their waists. The sickles were symbols of their caste, Professor Rai explained, for the brothers were Billavas, whose traditional occupation was that of brewing and extracting palm-wine or toddy.

Through no fault of their own, Koti and Chennaya eventually ran afoul of the ruler of their area — a man of the Bant caste, which was traditionally the landowning community of Tulunad. Soon their enmity became very bitter, and the brothers were sentenced to exile and sent away from their native region. Before setting out on their travels, however, they managed to go to the shrine of their personal deity to seek his succour and protection.

‘Now watch this scene,’ said Professor Viveka Rai with a smile, as the two heroes went up to the shrine and began to sing a devotional song, their hands joined in prayer.

Listening carefully, I soon recognized a name that was repeated over and over again; it was the only word I could understand, for the song was, of course, in Tulu. This particular word, however, was instantly familiar: it was none other than ‘Brahma’.

Having recognized the name of the deity, I thought I knew exactly what I would see when the camera turned towards the shrine’s interior: a four-headed, four-armed image, accompanied by a goose — the traditional representation of the god Brahma according to the rules of classical iconography. But instead, to my great surprise, the camera revealed an elongated wooden figure, with curling moustaches, holding a sword in one hand. It was an image of a warrior-deity, wholly unrelated to the Brahma of the Sanskritic pantheon.

I knew now why Professor Rai had smiled so enigmatically: the deity of the Tulu myth was evidently not the same as the Brahma of classical Sanskritic mythology.

Later, he explained that the god depicted in the film had originally had a wholly different name: he was Berme or Bermeru, the principal figure in the pantheon of Tuluva Bhutadeities. Over time, with the growth of Brahminical influence, the Tulu deity Berme had slowly become assimilated to the Sanskritic deity ‘Brahma’.

So the pedigree of the name Bomma in the Tulu language probably stretched back to a time before the deities of Tulunad had begun to assume Sanskritic incarnations: in all likelihood it was a diminutive of ‘Berme’, the figure who stood at the pinnacle of the Tuluva pantheon of Bhuta-spirits.

It took me a long time afterwards to check the steps in the argument and to work out the consequences that this derivation would have for the history of the Slave. Speculative though it was, the argument seemed to lead to the conclusion that the Slave of MS H.6 had been born into one of the several matrilineal communities which played a part in the Bhuta-cult of Tulunad.

It was thus that Bomma finally came of age and was ready at last to become a protagonist in his own story.

4

THERE IS ONLY one incident in Bomma’s life of which we have direct knowledge. By yet another odd coincidence this story also happens to be the one with which Bomma entered the annals of the Geniza: the letter which recounts it is the earliest known document in which his name is mentioned.

The principal reason why the story has been preserved is that it was set in Aden, and thus earned a mention in a letter written by Madmun. The letter in question is one of the most important that Madmun ever wrote, for he included in it a description of an unusual and dramatic event: a piratical raid on Aden by the ruler of a small kingdom in the Persian Gulf. Yet in the letter, Bomma’s doings actually took precedence over the raid and from the pattern of Madmun’s narrative it seems possible that Bomma was actually present, on his very first appearance in the Geniza, at the enactment of a full-blooded historical event, more than a thousand miles from his home in Mangalore.

The events which Madmun described in his letter are known to have occurred in 1135, so the letter must have been written soon afterwards. Bomma happened to be in Aden at the time because Ben Yiju had sent him there on an expedition that appears to have been partly a business trip and partly a shopping jaunt. When he returned to Mangalore, he brought back a large consignment of goods, including a whole array of clothes, household utensils and presents for Ben Yiju and his family. Altogether, the purchases that Bomma made in Aden added up to about ninety-three dinars. It is worth adding — since it is only human to be curious about other people’s shopping expenses — that this sum of money could have paid the wages of a mason or builder for more than two and a half years, or it could have bought somewhere in the region of 2,000 kilograms of meat or 3,000 kilograms of olive oil. Alternatively, with the addition of a mere seven dinars it would even have served to ransom the lives of three adult Spaniards at the going rates.

Ben Yiju gave Bomma a fairly generous monthly allowance while he was in Aden — two dinars a month, or about the wage of any artisan — but the figure was a paltry one compared to the sums of money that Bomma was handling in Aden. Madmun’s accounts show that the consignment of goods that Bomma took with him to Aden fetched about 685 dinars on the market: a sum that would have been large enough to buy Ben Yiju a splendid mansion in Fustat. But of course, Bomma for his part must have been accustomed to dealing with sums of that kind, for it is worth remembering that this small fortune represents the value of just a single consignment of goods sent from Mangalore to Aden — probably no more than a seasons earnings, and that, too, for a newly established merchant with a business of relatively modest size.

The volume of goods and money that flowed through Aden was evidently huge and it was the prospect of those rich pickings that made the city the object of a raid in the year of Bomma’s visit.

The expedition was not perhaps an event that properly deserves to be called ‘historic’, yet it did make a deep enough impression to earn a mention in a chronicle written by the historian Ibn Mujawwir a century and a half later. As for Ben Yiju’s friends in Aden, at least two of them were moved to describe it at length in their correspondence: Madmun, when he wrote to Ben Yiju, and Khalaf ibn Ishaq, in a letter to their common friend, the traveller Abu Sa‘id Halfon.

The villains of the piece, by common agreement, were the rulers of Kish (or, properly speaking, Qai), an island at the mouth of the Straits of Hormuz, which by virtue of its location commanded the sea routes to the Persian Gulf. The Amirs of that tiny kingdom were amongst the most ambitious representatives of a breed that proliferated in the Indian Ocean: pirates, who made their living by preying on the rich merchant vessels that plied the trade-routes.

Pirate attacks were fairly frequent occurrences throughout the Indian Ocean, and there are several references to them in the Geniza documents. The Amirs of Kish, for example, had sent raiding expeditions up and down the coasts of Africa and India, and even so distant a port as Cambay in Gujarat had to take special precautions to guard against their depredations. But an attack such as the raid on Aden was unusual, for generally the pirates tried not to invite the attention of the stronger rulers of the region. Even at their worst, they were a nuisance rather than a serious threat to commerce, and neither they nor any of the powers of the Indian Ocean, no matter how large or well-armed, ever tried to gain control of the seas or to take over the trade routes by force.

But clearly, on this occasion the pirates of Kish decided that they would try to expand their horizons. First, at the beginning of the seafaring season, the Amir’s son sent an expedition to Aden demanding a part of the city in payment for protection against a raid. When the demand was refused he sent a fleet of fifteen ships which forced their way into the city’s harbour and took up positions there. The raiding party did not attempt a landing; their intention was to capture a merchant vessel on its way back from India.

As it turned out, their plan failed. Aden’s soldiers gave the pirates no respite in the time they spent waiting in the harbour; they were constantly attacked and harried, many were killed in skirmishes, while others died of hunger and thirst. At length, when a prize of the kind they had been waiting for finally did appear on the horizon, it happened to be a convoy of two ships that belonged to one of the most powerful merchants in the Indian Ocean — a trader called Abû’l Qâsim Râmisht, who was based in the Persian Gulf port of Sirâf.

Ramisht of Siraf was rich beyond computation: a contemporary writer relates that one of his clerks alone was worth half a million dinars, while the silver plate his family ate out of weighed approximately one ton. Ramisht’s trading empire stretched as far as China, and the traders of Aden and Mangalore, including Ben Yiju and his friends, frequently used his ships for transporting their merchandise.

The pirates from Kish attacked Ramisht’s ships as soon as they appeared in the harbour. But the city sent troops to their rescue and eventually the pirates were driven back to the open sea where they quickly dispersed. ‘Thus God did not give them victory,’ wrote Madmun in his letter, ‘and they made off in the most ignominious way, after having suffered great losses and humiliation …’

But despite his obvious delight in the pirates’ defeat, it was not the raid that was uppermost in Madmun’s mind when he wrote the letter: that honour was kept for Bomma. It appears that Bomma, determined to enjoy his trip to the full, had spent his wages on an extended drinking bout during which he had presented himself several times in Madmun’s office, demanding money.

This is how Madmun put it:

And after that he [Bomma] started on other things. He said: Give me more money, [what I have] is not enough. He took 4 months money from me, eight dînârs. Often he would come here, very drunk, and would not listen to a word I said.’

We cannot be sure of course, but it is not impossible that the Adenese soldiers were cheered into battle by a drunken Bomma, standing on the shore and waving a flask.

5

THE GENIZA DOCUMENTS provide no indication at all about how Bomma’s path came to cross Ben Yiju’s. From certain references in Ben Yiju’s papers it seems likely that he took Bomma into his service as a business agent and helper soon after he had established himself as a trader in Mangalore.

Whatever the circumstances of their meeting, the terms under which Bomma entered Ben Yiju’s service were probably entirely different from those suggested by the word ‘slavery’ today: their arrangement was probably more that of patron and client than master and slave, as that relationship is now understood. If this seems curious, it is largely because the medieval idea of slavery tends to confound contemporary conceptions, both of servitude and of its mirrored counter-image, individual freedom.

In the Middle Ages institutions of servitude took many forms, and they all differed from ‘slavery’ as it came to be practised after the European colonial expansion of the sixteenth century. In the lifetimes of Bomma and Ben Yiju, servitude was a part of a very flexible set of hierarchies and it often followed a logic completely contrary to that which modern expectations suggest. In the Middle East and northern India, for instance, slavery was the principal means of recruitment into some of the most privileged sectors of the army and the bureaucracy. For those who made their way up through that route, ‘slavery’ was thus often a kind of career opening, a way of gaining entry into the highest levels of government.

At a more modest level, merchants and traders often used slavery as a means of finding apprentices and agents; the ‘slaves’ who entered employment in this way often took a share of their firm’s profits and could generally be sure of obtaining manumission, and even of attaining the rank of partner or shareholder.

In the medieval world, slavery was also often used as a means of creating fictive ties of kinship between people who were otherwise unrelated. Amongst the Jewish merchants of medieval Cairo, for instance, as with many tribes in Africa, slaves were sometimes gradually incorporated into their masters’ households and came to be counted as members of their families. Equally, in some vocations, the lines of demarcation between apprentice, disciple and bondsman were so thin as to be invisible: to be initiated into certain crafts, aspirants had to voluntarily surrender a part of their freedom to their teachers.

Perhaps the most elusive aspect of medieval slavery is its role as spiritual metaphor, as an instrument of the religious imagination. In south India, amongst the pietist and fiercely egalitarian Vachanakara saint-poets of Bomma’s own lifetime, for example, slavery was often used as an image to represent the devotee’s quest for God: through the transforming power of metaphor the poets became their Lord’s servants and lovers, androgynous in their longing; slaves, searching for their master with a passion that dissolved selfhood, wealth, caste and gender, indeed, difference itself. In their poetry it was slavery that was the paradoxical embodiment of perfect freedom; the image that represented the very notion of relationship, of human bonds, as well the possibility of their transcendence.

This imagery would not have been unfamiliar to Ben Yiju. He and his friends were all orthodox, observant Jews, strongly aware of their distinctive religious identity. But they were also part of the Arabic-speaking world, and the everyday language of their religious life was one they shared with the Muslims of that region: when they invoked the name of God in their writings it was usually as Allah, and more often than not their invocations were in Arabic forms, such as inshâ’allâh and al-amdul-illâh. Distinct though their faith was, it was still a part of the religious world of the Middle East — and that world was being turned upside down by the Sûfis, the mystics of Islam.

Judaism too soon felt the impact of Sufism. Shortly before Ben Yiju’s lifetime the Jewish mystic Baya Ibn Paqûda composed The Duties of the Heart, a treatise culled largely from Sufi sources, which was to have a powerful impact on the world of Mediterranean Judaism, infusing generations of readers with Sufi ideas. Egypt, in particular, was a fertile ground for mystical beliefs and over the centuries, many members of the congregation of the Synagogue of Ben Ezra in Fustat were to be greatly influenced by Sufism. Abraham Maimonides (1186–1237), a son of the great Talmudist Moses Maimonides, even composed a Sufi text of his own, and he is known to have remarked once that the Sufis were ‘worthier disciples of the Prophets of Israel than were the Jews of his time.’

Most Sufis would have regarded the Vachanakara saint-poets as pantheistic and blasphemous in their desire to merge themselves in their Lord. Their own conceptions of extinction (fanâ) and subsistence (baqâ) always assumed an utterly transcendent God. Yet they would probably have acknowledged a commonality in the nature of their quest, and they would certainly have perceived a similarity in their use of poetic imagery.

For the Sufis as for the Vachanakaras, the notion of being held by bonds was one of the central metaphors of religious life. They too drew some of their most powerful images from the institution of slavery: metaphors of perfect devotion and love strung together in an intensely charged, often erotic, spiritual imagery. Thus, in Sufi tradition, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, the eleventh-century soldier who built an immense empire in Central Asia, was not the fearsome and bloodthirsty conqueror that he is often depicted to be, but rather a symbol of mystical longing, because of the ties that bound him to his soldier-slave, Ayaz. A Sufi parable relates that once when the mythical bird, Huma, the touch of whose shadow was said to confer kingdoms, appeared in the skies above Mahmud’s army, the emperor found himself suddenly alone, abandoned by his most faithful courtiers — all except one, Ayaz. While the others went chasing after Homa’s shadow, Ayaz stepped instead into the shadow of Mahmud, so that his master might know that for him the world contained no better kingdom. In the telling of the Sufis, that perfect act of love works a miraculous spiritual transformation and the world-conquering Mahmud becomes ‘the slave of his slave’.

The imagery of the Vachanakaras and the Sufis would seem to be far distant from Bomma and Ben Yiju, and the workaday relations of a trader and his business agent. But even the most mundane institutions have their life-giving myths and against the setting of that distant backdrop of legend and metaphor, the elements of slavery in the ties that bound an apprentice to a master craftsman, an accountant to a merchant, would have appeared, perhaps, not as demeaning bonds, but rather as links that were in some small way ennobling — human connections, pledges of commitment, in relationships that could just as well have been a matter of a mere exchange of coinage.

Bomma may never have known of the saint-poets of his time and their teachings, but he would certainly have been intimately acquainted with some of that great range of popular traditions and folk beliefs which upturn and invert the categories of Sanskritic Hinduism. Ben Yiju, for his part, as a man of wide education, would probably have read something of the Sufis, and he may well have shared in some of the beliefs and practices that have always formed the hidden and subversive counter-image of the orthodox religions of the Middle East: the exorcism cults, the magical rites, the customs of visiting saints’ graves and suchlike. Amongst the members of his community in Cairo, those ideas and practices formed almost as important a part of daily observance as the orthodox aspects of their religion: a very large number of the documents in the Geniza, for example, consist of magical formulae, and treatises related to esoteric rites.

It was probably those inarticulate counter-beliefs, rather than the formal conversion that Bomma probably had to undergo while in Ben Yiju’s service, that eventually became a small patch of level ground between them: the matrilineally-descended Tulu and the patriarchal Jew who would otherwise seem to stand on different sides of an unbridgeable chasm.

6

WHILE MAKING MY way around Mangalore, I often had Bhutashrines pointed out to me: there seemed to be dozens of them dotted around the city and its outskirts, small, modest structures, perched on columns, gazing serenely over gardens and palm-groves. They were always brightly-painted and well-tended, and often there were flowers and offerings lying upon their thresholds.

As the days passed I became increasingly curious about the religious practices that were enshrined in those structures. But when I began to look for material I discovered that as far as most of the standard authorities were concerned the Bhuta-cult did not count as ‘religion’ at all: it fell far beneath the Himalayan gaze of canonical Hindu practice. Such detailed studies as there were, I found, were mainly carried out by anthropologists and folklorists; it was otherwise often dismissed as mere ‘devil worship’ and superstition.

Then, one day, quite unexpectedly, I was presented with an opportunity to visit a shrine when a taxi I was travelling in stopped beside one, on the outskirts of the city. The driver apologized for the delay and said it would only be a matter of minutes: it was just that he always made it a point to stop there, when he was passing by, to say a quick prayer and make an offering. The shrine was a very famous one, he explained, and visitors were always welcome.

The shrine stood on top of a mound, a small tiled enclosure surrounded by ricefields, with the sand-dunes of the coastline visible in the near distance. The image inside was a very simple one, a white, circular mask with an emblematic face depicted on it in bold black lines: a pair of curling moustaches were its most striking features. On either side of the mask was a sword, propped upright against the wall.

The spot was tended by a Pujari, a large, friendly man with gold rings in his ears, who touched our foreheads with sandalwood and gave us handfuls of prasad. He explained, through the taxi-driver, who translated into Hindi for my benefit, that once every year the Bhuta who dwelt in the shrine emerged to take possession of him. A great festival was held then, and after a long cycle of dances and rituals the spirit was ceremonially restored to its proper place within the shrine.

It was an extraordinary experience, the Pujari said, to feel the Bhuta within him, for the spirit of that shrine was greatly renowned for his powers. Many stories surrounded the shrine, he said, and one of them had become famous throughout the region. Years ago, when Mangalore’s new port was completed, the government’s engineers had started building a road to connect it with the city, some fifteen miles to the south. But soon, to general consternation, it was discovered that if the work were to go ahead as planned, the road would cut straight through the shrine. The people of the area had protested mightily, but the government had ignored them and sent out notices of eviction to all the farmers who owned land in the area. Sure enough, one day, the engineers arrived with their machines to begin the work of demolition. But then there was a miracle: their bulldozers were immobilized soon after they had begun to move; they were frozen to the ground before they could touch the shrine’s walls. Completely confounded, the engineers called in high-ranking government officers, and technicians with yard-long degrees. But there was nothing anyone could do and eventually, admitting defeat, they agreed to divert the road so that it skirted around the shrine.

This was a story everyone knew, said the Pujari, and every year at the time of the festival, people would tell it over and over again.

Later, when we got back into the car, the driver asked me to look through the rear window. I watched the road carefully as we drove away, and from the angle of its curve it did indeed look as though it had made a loop to spare the shrine.

Smiling, the driver said: ‘Have you ever heard of anything like that?’

A recollection suddenly stirred in my mind.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I heard a very similar story once. In Egypt.’

He nodded politely, but disbelief was written all over his face.

7

BOMMA WAS NOT to remain long in Aden: he came back carrying the very letter in which Madmun described his drunken revelries to Ben Yiju. Madmun’s complaints, however, do not appear to have excited an excess of wrath in Ben Yiju, and nor did Madmun himself bear a grudge for long — in his later letters he was always careful to include a word of friendly greeting for Bomma. Over the years, as Bomma’s role as business agent grew in importance, Ben Yiju’s friends in Aden came to regard him with increasing respect, and in time Khalaf ibn Ishaq even began to prefix his name with the title of ‘Shaikh’.

Ben Yiju, for his part, seems to have reposed a great deal of Crust in Bomma from the very beginning of their association. When Bomma went to Aden in 1135, for example, he was responsible not only for delivering a quantity of merchandise, but also for bringing back a large shipment of goods for Ben Yiju and his household. Among the items he brought back were four aîra-s or mats from Berbera (in modern Somaliland), a leather table cloth of a special kind on which chess and other games could be played, an iron frying-pan, a sieve, a large quantity of soap, two Egyptian gowns, and several presents from Madmun, such as sugar, raisins, ‘a quire of white paper’, as well as a piece of coral for Ben Yiju’s son, Surur.

The two ‘gowns’ that Bomma brought back with him were almost certainly intended for Ben Yiju himself, because it is clear from other references in his correspondence that he, like his fellow expatriates, continued to wear the customary garments of the Middle East — robes, turbans and the like — all the while that he was in India. The people of Malabar, on the other hand, generally left the upper parts of their bodies bare, men and women alike — their preferred markers of class distinction being ornaments and jewellery rather than articles of clothing. ‘They wear only bandages around the middle,’ wrote ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Samarqandi, ‘[garments] called lankoutah, which descend from the navel to above the knee.’

To Middle Eastern merchants like Ben Yiju, on the other hand, being properly dressed meant wearing a double layer of clothing, first a loose undergarment and over that a robe, a garment that covered the covering, so to speak, of the body’s nakedness and rendered it fit to be seen in public: anything less they would have considered immodest.

Ben Yiju, for one, was clearly fastidious about his clothing. Several of his letters and accounts mention imported Egyptian robes and fine Alexandrian cloaks, while others refer to lengths of cloth and kerchiefs that may have served as turbans. He clearly had a reputation as a careful dresser amongst his friends; Madmun, for instance, when sending him a shawl once, thought it prudent to extol its qualities: ‘I have also for my own part, sent for you … a fine new Dîbîqî shawl, with nicely worked borders — an appropriate garment for men of eminence.’

The most important of his imports, as far as Ben Yiju was concerned, was paper. In the Malabar, as in most parts of India, the material most commonly used for writing at that time was the palm-leaf — paper appears to have been rare and difficult to obtain. In the Middle East, on the other hand, paper was being produced on a large scale by the eleventh century, and like most of his contemporaries Ben Yiju must have grown accustomed to it in his youth. Once he moved to India his friends went to great pains to keep him well-supplied and packages of paper were included in virtually every shipment sent to him from Aden.

Ben Yiju’s friends evidently knew of the great importance that writing played in his life, and they often showed a touching concern for the quality of the paper they bought on his behalf. Madmun, for example, once assured him that the Egyptian alî paper he had acquired for him was ‘the best available’, and on another occasion he proudly assured him that his two large quires of Sulânî paper were so fine that ‘no one has its like’. Madmun was not exaggerating: the paper he and his friends sent to Ben Yiju was of so matchless a quality that even today, eight hundred years later, a surprising number of those sheets are still marvellously well-preserved, despite the heat and humidity they have endured in the course of their travels between Egypt and India.

That Ben Yiju was a man with a taste for good living is also evident in many of his household purchases. Much of his kitchenware for instance, was imported from Aden — even such things as frying-pans and sieves — and he also regularly had crockery, soap, goblets and glasses sent out from the Middle East. For his mats he looked to the Horn of Africa, and he is known to have purchased at least one velvet-like carpet, made in Gujarat.

Ben Yiju also seems to have had something of a sweet tooth. His friends often sent him raisins and other delicacies such as nougat and dates. The various kinds of palm-sugar that were in use in Malabar were clearly not to his taste, and his friends seem to have had standing instructions to dispatch Middle Eastern cane-sugar with every consignment of goods.

If it seems curious today that somebody should import sugar into sweet-besotted India, it would not have appeared so in Ben Yiju’s time. In the Middle Ages, it was Egypt that pioneered the large-scale production of cane-sugar and its exports of that commodity were such that in many parts of Asia to this day some sugar products bear names that link them to an Egyptian source. No matter that the Arabic word sukkar (hence the English ‘sugar’) is itself ultimately derived from a Sanskrit source: today, throughout north India, crystallized sugar is still known as misri in commemoration of traders like Ben Yiju and the tastes they imported from Masr.

8

I HAD NOT been in Mangalore long when Bomma provided me with an insight into the uses of History.

Among the many castes and religious communities of the Malabar coast few have a past as interesting as that of a small group of fisher-folk, known variously by the name of ‘Magavîra’ or ‘Mogêra’. The sixteenth-century Portuguese traveller, Duarte Barbosa, left a brief description of them in his account of his travels on the Malabar coast. He referred to them as ‘another sect of people still lower [than the others] … which they call moguer … These people for the most part get their living at sea, they are mariners and fishermen.’ But although the Magavira were traditionally linked with fishing, Barbosa notes that many amongst the group had also prospered in trade: ‘They are some of them very rich men who have got ships with which they navigate, for they gain much money with the Moors.’

According to tradition, the Magaviras have always been closely linked with the foreign merchants and mariners who came to trade in Malabar. As fishermen they would perhaps have been the natural associates of Middle Eastern sailors and seafarers, partly because of their expertise in sailing, and partly because of their position on the margins of the caste-structure of Hindu society which would have rendered them free of the restrictions that might have hampered other groups in trade and travel. Some amongst them were clearly successful traders and ship-owners in their own right, but there must also have been a great many others who entered the maritime trade in different ways — by becoming seamen on trading vessels, for example, or by apprenticing themselves or their children to foreign merchants and traders.

Soon after I reached Mangalore, I discovered that the Magavira’s links with the foreign merchants were commemorated in the traditional symbol of their distinctive identity — a deity known as the Bobbariya-bhuta, deemed by legend to be the spirit of a Muslim mariner and trader who died at sea. No Magavira settlement, I learnt, was without its Bobbariya-shrine: usually a simple pillar and platform of stone, with a wooden mace propped up beside it.

On hearing of this I was immediately seized with curiosity, and I soon succeeded in prevailing upon a friend, Father D’Souza — a Jesuit priest and a specialist in the religious traditions of Tulunad — to take me to visit a Bobbariya-shrine. Being from the region himself, it was a relatively easy matter for my friend to arrange a visit, particularly because, as a teacher in one of Mangalore’s best-known colleges, he had many Magavira students. The nearest Bobbariya-shrine, he told me, was in the fishing-village on the sand-spit that lay directly across the lagoon from Mangalore’s old port. A few days later, after he had told his students to expect us, we boarded the ferry together and crossed the lagoon.

Two of my friend’s students were waiting for us when the ferry docked at the jetty. They received us with a shy, schoolboy deference, clearly overcome with both delight and apprehension at the prospect of a visit from a teacher. The village lay behind them, tranquil in the shade of a thick awning of coconut palms, its pathways cool and sandy, the open sea visible on the far side of the sand-spit.

I soon discovered that this village was quite unlike the fishing-villages I had seen in other parts of the country: there were no shanties, no palm-leaf huts — everything around us, the well-tended gardens and the pastel-coloured bungalows with their thickets of TV aerials, spoke of quietly prosperous, suburban lives. The walls of the houses around us were painted prominently with the letter ‘Om’ and other symbols of Hindu piety, and it was hard to tell that this had once been a fishing-village whose inhabitants had been relegated to the bottom edge of orthodox caste society. It was clear that this was a community whose fortunes had soared in recent years.

After walking through the village, we were led to one of the students’ houses: a large new bungalow, with an ‘Om’ painted prominently on its walls. Chairs had been set out in the garden in expectation of our arrival, and we were greeted at the gate by a group of our host’s female relatives. The family was a large one, our host explained — his mother was the senior member of her matrilineal clan, so several of her sisters and aunts shared their house. His mother was a small, capable-looking woman, with an air of quiet command: within a few minutes of our arrival she had orchestrated the presentation of several trayloads of snacks and coconut water.

Towards the end of our visit, I prompted my Jesuit friend to ask her a question, in Tulu: had she ever encountered the name Bomma amongst people of the Magavira caste?

She was taken by surprise at the question. No, she said, shaking her head vigorously, you would never hear a name like that in the village nowadays; all the boys here had names like Ramesh and Vivek now, proper names, like you heard on the radio and TV.

But then, casting her mind back, she smiled and said, well, yes, in the old days, sometimes, you would hear names like that. But not now, never: everybody had good Sanskritic names nowadays — names like ‘Bomma’ belonged to a time when very few people in the community had been educated and fishermen had ranked at the bottom of the social ladder.

She broke off to say a few words to her son, and he ran into the house and fetched an illustrated pamphlet. She opened it reverently, to the first page, her face lit by a smile of intense pride: it was a short history of the village, financed and published by community subscription.

Towards sunset we bid the family goodbye and set out to visit the Bobbariya-shrine. It was almost dark now and silver television-shadows flickered across the lanes as we walked past. With glares of disapproval, our guides led us quickly past a small but boisterous crowd that had gathered at a corner toddy-shop: there had been a lot of drinking in the community once, they explained, but now the younger people were trying to put an end to the sale of alcohol in their village.

When we were still a fair distance away, one of the students pointed towards the lights of the shrine. It looked nothing like any of the simple Bhuta-temples that dotted the countryside around Mangalore: it was a large, modern building, modelled after a classical Hindu temple. When we approached it, I noticed that its walls bore the posters of a fundamentalist Hindu political organization, an upper-caste group notorious for its anti-Muslim rhetoric: it was a clear indication that this community, so long relegated to the peripheries of the Hindu order, had now resolved to use a political short-cut to break into the Sanskritic fold. Having transformed its social and economic position it was now laying claim to the future, in the best tradition of liberalism, by discovering a History to replace the past.

Leading us into the shrine, the students told us how the old structure had been torn down and the new one built, at great expense, by community subscription. It was not really a Bhuta-shrine any more, they explained proudly: it had become a real Hindu temple, and the main place in it was now reserved for Vishnu, the most Brahminical of gods.

Once we went inside, however, it turned out that one small aspect of the past had ingeniously escaped re-invention: the spirit of the Bobbariya-bhuta still remained in the temple although in a wholly altered guise. The students pointed him out to us; he stood beside the image of Vishnu, but at a slightly lower level. The old symbols, the mace and the pillar, had been dispensed with: he was now represented by an image, like a Hindu god.

I had to struggle with myself to keep from applauding the ironies enshrined in that temple. The past had revenged itself on the present: it had slipped the spirit of an Arab Muslim trader past the watchful eyes of Hindu zealots and installed it within the Sanskritic pantheon.

As we walked away, I was glad to think that in Bomma’s lifetime the inhabitants of that sand-spit would have had no need of a temple to lay claim to the future: they would in fact have been witnesses to a great revival in an entirely different aspect of Hinduism — the tradition of personal devotion which, time and time again, has confronted the hierarchical ideology of caste with a critique of millenarian power.

In Bomma’s own lifetime, no more than a few hundred miles from his home town, one of the most remarkable of those egalitarian devotional movements was being sung into existence by the Vachanakara saint-poets, who had set about creating fraternal communities of artisans and working people, defying the rules of caste and kinship.

Had Bomma passed his childhood on that sand-spit, as he may well have done, he might have heard one of the Vachanakara’s songs being sung where today that brand-new temple projects its shadow into the future and the past:

With a whole temple

in this body

where’s the need

for another?

No one asked

for two.

9

BEN YIJU’S LIFE in Mangalore was extraordinarily rich in relationships: his connection with Ashu, for one, brought an entire constellation of relatives with it. Dealing with this newly-acquired family was not always easy for Ben Yiju: indeed, on the one occasion on which he is known to have called down Gods curses it was on someone who was probably connected to him through Ashu’s family.

The person in question was a kârdâr, an agent or middleman who helped traders in the buying of spices and other commodities. But the story of this particular kardar, as it develops in Ben Yiju’s papers, is a good deal more complex than an account of the dealings between an exporter and his agent.

The plot begins with a set of accounts (reckoned in coins called mithqâls and units of weight called bahârs). ‘The kâ(r)dâr, may God curse him,’ Ben Yiju scribbled, ’owed … 14 mithqâls, for two bahârs of cardamom. He did not deliver the cardamom, so I bought … two bahârs from Fandarîna as a substitute, for 17 mithqâls.’

What had happened, evidently, is that the kardar had offered to procure a consignment of cardamom at unusually low rates, and Ben Yiju, in the hope of making a quick killing, had given him an advance to make the purchase. But when the time came to send the consignment on to Aden, the kardar defaulted, and Ben Yiju was caught in the classic bind of a futures speculator: he had gambled on a commodity that hadn’t turned up in time.

In fact, Ben Yiju had committed not just his own but some of his partners’ money too, and they took a dim view of the matter when they found out. Yusuf ibn Abraham wrote to say: ‘You, my master, mentioned that you approached the kârdâl gently in order to get something for us back for him. Perhaps you should threaten him that here in Aden we [disgrace] anyone that owes us something and does not fulfil his commitments … If he does not pay, we shall issue an official letter of [censure] and send it to him, so that he will become aware of his crime.’

Even Khalaf ibn Ishaq, the closest of Ben Yiju’s friends, reacted sharply on this occasion. ‘As for the delay [in the delivery of the kârdâr’s cardamom],’ he wrote to Ben Yiju, ‘may God curse him. I have spoken to some people about the matter, and they said to me that the cardamom was yours, and we had no share in it. It is a matter between you and the kârdâr: deal with this thing individually with him, separately from us.’ Clearly Khalaf had a suspicion that there was something in Ben Yiju’s relationship with the kardar that did not quite meet the eye, and he was evidently resentful of the way Ben Yiju had involved him in a set of private arrangements. He and Yusuf continued to press Ben Yiju for several years, but to no avail: there is no indication that they ever recouped their losses in this affair.

The clue that gives away the nature of Ben Yiju’s connection with the kardar lies in a throwaway line on a tiny scrap of paper: it suggests that the kardar was a close relative of Ashu’s brother, the man whom Ben Yiju referred to as ‘Nair’.

Nair is mentioned only twice in all of Ben Yiju’s papers, and in both cases the references consist of little more than the name and a couple of brief words. Yet, if there was anyone who was located at the precise juncture where Ben Yiju’s instilled responses could be expected to run into conflict with Ashu’s, it was none other than her brother, Nair. By the matrilineal reckoning of the Nairs the bond between brother and sister was far more important than the tie between husband and wife; in their practice it was a woman’s brother and not her husband who was entitled to the guardianship of her children. Thus, by the customs of Ashu’s community it would have been Nair who held the reins of authority over her progeny; it would have been he — not Ben Yiju — who played Laius to their Oedipus.

It was not without reason therefore that Khalaf suspected that the relationship between Ben Yiju and the kardar extended beyond their business dealings: it could well be that Ben Yiju had given him the advance principally because Ashu or Nair had asked him to make a loan to their relative. It is even possible that the reason why the money was never returned was that her family saw it as their compensation for forgoing their rights over her children. But of course the simplest of solutions is also the most likely: that the kardar had effected a clever swindle by exploiting a family connection.

Fortunately for Ben Yiju, his social and professional life in Mangalore extended far beyond his family. The names that are sprinkled through his papers speak of a startlingly diverse network of associations: entered into a file, the list would yield nothing to the Rolodex of an international businessman today.

Some of Ben Yiju’s closest business connections, for instance, lay with a group of merchants whom he and his friends in Aden referred to as the ‘Bâniyân of Mangalore’—Hindu Gujaratis of the ‘Vania’ or trading caste. Long active in the Indian Ocean trade, Gujarati merchants had plied the trade routes for centuries, all the way from Aden to Malacca, and they exerted a powerful influence on the flow of certain goods and commodities. They evidently played a significant role in the economy of Malabar in Ben Yiju’s time, and were probably instrumental in the management of its international trade. Madmun, for one, was on cordial terms with several members of the Gujarati trading community of Mangalore, whom he kept informed of trends in the markets of the Middle East. He, in turn, appears to have handed on those connections to Ben Yiju when he set up his business in Mangalore. Over the years, Ben Yiju often served as a courier for Madmun, delivering letters as well as messages and greetings to the ‘Bâniyân of Manjalûr’, and on occasion he even brokered joint entrepreneurial ventures between them and Madmun.

In matters of business, Ben Yiju’s networks appear to have been wholly indifferent to many of those boundaries that are today thought to mark social, religious and geographical divisions. Madmun, for instance, is known once to have proposed a joint venture between himself and three traders in Mangalore, each of different social or geographical origins — one a Muslim, one a Gujarati Vania, and the third a member of the landowning caste of Tulunad. Equally, the ships that Ben Yiju and his friends used for transporting their goods were owned by a wide variety of people. Among the many nâkhudas or ship-owners who are mentioned in Ben Yiju’s papers, there is one Pattani-Swami, probably the head of a merchant guild or caste, a man called Nambiar, evidently from Kerala, and many others, including of course ‘Abd al-Qasim Ramisht of Siraf. The ties forged by trade were so close that Madmun’s kinsman, the nakhuda Mahruz (in a letter written for him by Ben Yiju), once remarked of a ship-owner called ‘Tinbu’, probably of Tamil extraction, that, ‘between him and me there are bonds of inseparable friendship and brotherhood.’

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.

10

IN 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.

During those early years the peoples who had traditionally participated in the Indian Ocean trade were taken completely by surprise. In all the centuries in which it had flourished and grown, no state or king or ruling power had ever before tried to gain control of the Indian Ocean trade by force of arms. The territorial and dynastic ambitions that were pursued with such determination on land were generally not allowed to spill over into the sea.

Within the Western historiographical record the unarmed character of the Indian Ocean trade is often represented as a lack, or failure, one that invited the intervention of Europe, with its increasing proficiency in war. When a defeat is as complete as was that of the trading cultures of the Indian Ocean, it is hard to allow the vanquished the dignity of nuances of choice and preference. Yet it is worth allowing for the possibility that the peaceful traditions of the oceanic trade may have been, in a quiet and inarticulate way, the product of a rare cultural choice — one that may have owed a great deal to the pacifist customs and beliefs of the Gujarati Jains and Vanias who played such an important part in it. At the time, at least one European was moved to bewilderment by the unfamiliar mores of the region; a response more honest perhaps than the trust in historical inevitability that has supplanted it since. ‘The heathen [of Gujarat]’, wrote Tomé Pires, early in the sixteenth century, ‘held that they must never kill anyone, nor must they have armed men in their company. If they were captured and [their captors] wanted to kill them all, they did not resist. This is the Gujarat law among the heathen.’

It was because of those singular traditions, perhaps, that the rulers of the Indian Ocean ports were utterly confounded by the demands and actions of the Portuguese. Having long been accustomed to the tradesman’s rules of bargaining and compromise they tried time and time again to reach an understanding with the Europeans — only to discover, as one historian has put it, that the choice was ‘between resistance and submission; co-operation was not offered.’ Unable to compete in the Indian Ocean trade by purely commercial means, the Europeans were bent on taking control of it by aggression, pure and distilled, by unleashing violence on a scale unprecedented on those shores. As far as the Portuguese were concerned, they had declared a proprietorial right over the Indian Ocean: since none of the peoples who lived around it had thought to claim ownership of it before their arrival, they could not expect the right of free passage in it now.

By the time the trading nations of the Indian Ocean began to realize that their old understandings had been rendered defunct by the Europeans it was already too late. In 1509AD the fate of that ancient trading culture was sealed in a naval engagement that was sadly, perhaps pathetically, evocative of its ethos: a transcontinental fleet, hastily put together by the Muslim potentate of Gujarat, the Hindu ruler of Calicut, and the Sultan of Egypt was attacked and defeated by a Portuguese force off the shores of Diu, in Gujarat. As always, the determination of a small, united band of soldiers triumphed easily over the rich confusions that accompany a culture of accommodation and compromise.

The battle proved decisive; the Indian and Egyptian ships were put to flight and the Portuguese never again had to face a serious naval challenge in the Indian Ocean until the arrival of the Dutch. Soon, the remains of the civilization that had brought Ben Yiju to Mangalore were devoured by that unquenchable, demonic thirst that has raged ever since, for almost five hundred years, over the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf.