Crossing the Bay of Bengal

Sunil S. Amrith

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674728479
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia asiática

The Indian Ocean was global long before the Atlantic, and today the countries bordering the Bay of Bengal—India, Bangladesh, Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Malaysia—are home to one in four people on Earth. Crossing the Bay of Bengal places this region at the heart of world history for the first time. Integrating human and environmental history, and mining a wealth of sources, Sunil Amrith gives a revelatory and stirring new account of the Bay and those who have inhabited it.For centuries the Bay of Bengal served as a maritime highway between India and China, and then as a battleground for European empires, all while being shaped by the monsoons and by human migration. Imperial powers in the nineteenth century, abetted by the force of capital and the power of steam, reconfigured the Bay in their quest for coffee, rice, and rubber. Millions of Indian migrants crossed the sea, bound by debt or spurred by drought, and filled with ambition. Booming port cities like Singapore and Penang became the most culturally diverse societies of their time. By the 1930s, however, economic, political, and environmental pressures began to erode the Bay's centuries-old patterns of interconnection.Today, rising waters leave the Bay of Bengal's shores especially vulnerable to climate change, at the same time that its location makes it central to struggles over Asia's future. Amrith's evocative and compelling narrative of the region's pasts offers insights critical to understanding and confronting the many challenges facing Asia in the decades ahead.

1

The Life of the Bay of Bengal

Ahmad Rijaluddin traveled across the Bay of Bengal, from Penang to Calcutta, in late 1810. He accompanied Robert Scott—son of James Scott, one of Penang’s first residents and wealthiest merchants. Rijaluddin was himself the son of a rich local family: his father was a Tamil trader, his mother was Malay. He worked as an interpreter for the European merchants of Penang, which had been established in 1786 as a settlement of the British East India Company. Rijaluddin’s memoir, written in the Malay language, is probably the first modern account published by an Asian traveler of crossing the Bay of Bengal.

Passing quickly over the sea voyage, Rijaluddin’s account begins with his arrival at the Bay of Bengal’s northern basin. By the time of his voyage, Bengal’s fame had “spread to the east and to the west, as far as Constantinople, Egypt, China, Mecca and Medinah.” Rijaluddin delved into the life of Calcutta. “Ships visit the capital without a break,” he wrote, “there is no let-up day or night, thousands of ships arrive and depart and from the west to the east, from the north-west to the south-east.” Sailors from around the world took their pleasure in port. “In every street, you will find different sorts of street entertainers,” he told his readers. Most enticing was the “winding lane near the shipyards” where “the whores live, thousands of them … Pathans, Indians, Mughals, and Bengalis.” Their clientele was equally diverse: “people of different races—English, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Chinese, Bengali, Burmese, Tamil and Malay—visit the place morning, noon and night.” The street was always “as noisy as if they were celebrating the end of a war.” Rijaluddin described an open field nearby, with “hundreds of people cooking rice, chappatis and roast meat, and others selling sweets and rice crisps.” The scene “sounds like the roaring of thunder,” he wrote, “you can’t imagine the noise produced by such a great crowd.”¹

Rijaluddin could have been writing about any port in the world in the age of sail. They had in common their mixed crowds, the landed conviviality that followed weeks at sea, the many trades that fulfilled sailors’ desires. But his account also describes something more specific: a maritime world surrounding the Bay of Bengal. The peoples he describes—“English, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Chinese, Bengali, Burmese, Tamil and Malay”—were the peoples of the Bay’s rim: the imperial rulers and adventurers, the traders and merchants and sailors and laborers that made the Bay of Bengal “a far more tightly knit unit of interaction … than the Indian Ocean as a whole.”²

More than a century later, in 1937, Palanisamy Kumaran crossed the Bay of Bengal the other way, from the South Indian port of Nagapatnam to Penang. Palanisamy has not written an account of his travels; he narrated it to me over several hours in a series of interviews at his house in Sungai Petani, in Kedah. Sungai Petani was once a frontier outpost in Malaya’s “wild west” and is now a midsized and bustling town. Traveling with few possessions, Palanisamy paid twenty-seven rupees for his place on the steamer. The worst of the Depression was over, and Malaya’s rubber plantations needed new hands. A freak accident, a house fire, sent the young man to seek his fortune abroad at a time of family trouble. His destination was obvious: “Lots of guys came and went from Malaya, so I thought I would go, too, see what it was all about,” he told me. His first sight of shore was the quarantine station on Jerejak Island, where he was detained for five days. His first job was to carry buckets of “rubber milk” on a long pole balanced on his shoulders, at a wage of fifty cents a day. Mr. Palanisamy was part of the vast movement of South Indian laborers across the Bay at the height of the British Empire, to Malaya, Burma, and Sri Lanka. But he insisted that “not one single person came here with the idea that they’d get married, settle down; they just wanted to earn money for a couple of years and go back,” he said. When I met him, in 2007, he had been in Malaysia for more than seventy years.³ During his lifetime he had seen the political transitions of modern Asian history: he had lived in British India, the Federated Malay States, Japanese Malaya, British Malaya, and independent Malaysia.

In the century between Rijaluddin’s journey and Palanisamy’s, millions of people crossed the Bay of Bengal as sail gave way to steam. If Rijaluddin, a wealthy merchant’s son, epitomized the voyager in the early nineteenth century, Palanisamy, a laborer destined for the rubber plantations of Malaya, typified the migrant of the early twentieth. Their journeys, under such different circumstances, frame the narrative of this book and provide a sense of its span. They also hint at a longer history. Rijaluddin’s family was formed over centuries of commerce, movement, and marriage across the Bay; Palanisamy’s story reminds us that this is a history that endures in the Indian diaspora remaining in Southeast Asia.

This began as a history of the migration of Tamil labor to the Malay Peninsula—a history of journeys like Palanisamy’s. Over time it metamorphosed into a history of the sea. The history of Tamil migration is our recurring motif, but we will hear many other voices—Chinese, Malay, Burmese, Bengali, English, Dutch—along the way. Tamil migration was among the largest and most enduring movements across the eastern Indian Ocean, and it is a good starting point from which to approach the history of the region as a whole. Sometimes a simple, even naive question can reframe our vision—how far can we see South India as part of the Southeast Asian world, as closely linked to the coasts across the Bay of Bengal as it was to the centers of power in India? We have become so accustomed to national histories and nationalist maps that it is difficult to put the Bay of Bengal, with its traffic of people, ideas, and things, at the heart of our story. But to do so opens new perspectives on the past and the present.

Picture the Bay of Bengal as an expanse of tropical water: still and blue in the calm of the January winter, or raging and turbid with silt at the peak of the summer rains. Picture it in two dimensions on a map, overlaid with a web of shipping channels and telegraph cables and inscribed with lines of distance. Now imagine the sea as a mental map: as a family tree of cousins, uncles, sisters, sons, connected by letters and journeys and stories. Think of it as a sea of debt, bound by advances and loans and obligations. Picture the Bay of Bengal even where it is absent—deep in the Malaysian jungle, where Hindu shrines sprout from the landscape as if washed up by the sea, left behind. There are many ways of envisaging the Bay of Bengal as a place with a history—one as rich and complex as the history of any national territory.

Today one in four of the world’s people lives in a country that borders the Bay of Bengal. More than half a billion people live directly on the coastal rim that surrounds it. This is a region that has long been central to the history of globalization: shaped by migration, as culturally mixed as anywhere on earth, and at the forefront of the commodification of nature. It is also now being transformed by global warming. The coastal frontiers of the Bay are among the most vulnerable in the world to climate change; they are densely populated, ecologically fragile, and at the fault lines of new dreams of empire.

The Bay of Bengal is a large triangular basin in the Indian Ocean, and the largest bay in the world. It is an enclosed sea, surrounded by thousands of miles of coastline—an arc stretching from the southeastern edge of India, up and along the coasts of present-day Bangladesh and Burma, and down to the western coast of Thailand and Malaysia. It has a narrow continental shelf, and “islands are scarce and small except for Ceylon” in the west and the smaller Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the east. At its southeastern edge, the Bay of Bengal meets the waters of Southeast Asia—the Straits of Melaka, the Java Sea, and the South China Sea—which are, by contrast, shallower, fresher, warmer, and “thickly strewn with small islands.” Ceylon and the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent, at Kanyakumari, mark its western boundary with the Arabian Sea.⁴

Many of Asia’s great rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal: the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Meghna, the Godavari, the Kaveri, the Krishna, and the Salween spill 200 cubic kilometers of water into the sea each monsoon season. The Bay “receiveth into its bosome many navigable rivers, which lose their note and names in the eminent neighborhood of the famous Ganges,” wrote the English trader William Methwold in the 1620s.⁵ Many of these rivers begin high in the Himalayas, and by the time they reach the sea, having passed through many countries, they carry enormous accumulations of silt. Each year the Ganges alone discharges more than two and a half billion tons of sediment into the Bay. “In a sense,” historian Willem van Schendel writes, “Bangladesh is the Himalayas, flattened out.”⁶ If you could look down upon the sea floor, it would appear “virtually featureless.” Sediment coats the sea floor more than twenty kilometers thick in the north, thinning out to several hundred meters toward the south. Silt creates many sandbars in the active Bengal delta, making the northern part of the Bay especially shallow. But the “generally smooth” sea floor has significant “valley-like features” in the north and “isolated highs” in the south.⁷

The India tectonic plate runs far beneath the Bay of Bengal; it meets the Burma microplate near the Andaman Islands. The India plate moves gradually northeast toward the Eurasian landmass at a rate of around sixty millimeters a year. The friction between the India and Burma plates, where both meet the Sunda plate, has created a submarine volcanic arc subject to periodic eruptions. In December 2004 a rupture more than a hundred kilometers wide occurred on the floor of the Andaman Sea, causing a massive undersea earthquake—magnitude 9.0 on the Richter Scale—and a devastating tsunami that swept across the Indian Ocean. As many as a quarter of a million people died.⁸ The 2004 tsunami, Sugata Bose writes, “brought to light the deep and unique bonds that tie together the peoples of this interregional arena of human interaction.” It also laid bare the deep forces that have given life, and continue to bring death, to the Indian Ocean as a whole and to the Bay of Bengal in particular, where the 2004 tsunami took its greatest toll.⁹

The Asian monsoon animates the Bay of Bengal; it is “one of the most dramatic climatic phenomena on Earth.”¹⁰ This region is the beating heart of “monsoon Asia,” which in the old colonial vision stretched from the Arabian Sea up to southern China and down to the northern tropics of Australia. In this region climate was thought to determine every aspect of human society and culture, an idea that scientists have been slower than historians to abandon.¹¹ The monsoon—from the Arabic mawsim, or “season”—is a weather system of seasonally reversing winds. Colloquially, it refers specifically to the heavy rains, or “monsoon rains,” that these winds bring in the summer months. Between April and September the southwest monsoon moves roughly from southwest to northeast; between November and March the northeast monsoon moves in the opposite direction. In the Bay of Bengal these regular patterns are broken by depressions, cyclonic storms, and strong countercurrents, particularly at its northern head during the southwest monsoon, when the accumulation of water from the south has no other outlet but to turn back on itself.

The differential heating of sea and land drives the monsoon. “The Air which is less rarified or expanded by heat and consequently more ponderous,” Edmund Halley wrote in his 1686 essay on the monsoons, “must have a Motion towards those parts thereof, which are more rarified, and less ponderous, to bring it to an Equilibrium.”¹² The monsoon’s intensity comes from the sheer mass of the Tibetan mountains, the “largest mountain chain seen on Earth for more than five hundred million years.” The summertime heating of the Tibetan plateau creates low-pressure cells, drawing in moist winds from the cooler sea; in winter, cold dry winds blow out from the mountains to the warmer ocean, which has a greater capacity than the land to store heat.¹³

The southwest monsoon begins its path across the Bay of Bengal in April. By May the summer rains reach the island of Sri Lanka, a “meeting or dividing point for the currents of the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, and the Bay of Bengal.”¹⁴ Witnessing the May rains drifting in from the Bay of Bengal during his stint as Chilean consul in Ceylon, the poet Pablo Neruda wrote of “the seasonal wind, the green wind, laden with space and water.”¹⁵ By early June the rains reach the Bengal delta; the winds accumulate such moisture from the sea that Cherrapunji, in the mountains north of the Bay, is the wettest place on Earth. Moving up the coast the other way, the monsoon reaches the eastern littoral of the Bay: the coasts of Arakan, lower Burma, and southern Thailand. Everywhere it intensifies in July and August, “steadiest in the central and western parts of the Bay,” bringing heavy rains to most of its coastal arc. As the southwest monsoon begins to retreat in September, it settles upon the Malaysian Peninsula. There the heaviest rains come in the period of the summer monsoon’s retreat, in the transitional months of October and November. But this region “below the winds” is less affected by the monsoons: the pattern of wet and dry seasons gives way to more constant rainfall at these latitudes. The Bay of Bengal is at its most unsettled as the southwest monsoon retreats in October and November. In October the Bay’s notorious cyclones are most common. The term cyclone came into use in the 1840s, first presented at the Asiatic Society of Calcutta by ship’s captain and president of the Marine Courts Henry Piddington (1797–1858), based on his detailed study of a devastating storm that had hit the Orissa coast in 1789. He derived the word from the Greek kukloma, “wheel, coil of a snake.”¹⁶

Reporting on a cyclone that had swept in from the Bay to inundate the districts of Midnapore and Burdwan, in Bengal, on the fifteenth and sixteenth of October 1874, W. G. Willson observed that the “storms of October and November are usually generated in the eastern part of the Bay of Bengal near or a little north of the Andaman islands,” and warned that “there are usually no weather indications along the Bengal coast-line of the coming storm until a day or two before its arrival.”¹⁷ In November the northern basin of the Bay of Bengal frequently experiences storms known in English as nor’westers: their arrival is marked by “a low bank of dark clouds in the north-west, the upper outline of which has the appearance of an arch.”¹⁸ By the second half of October, the winds have reversed and the northeast monsoon arrives on the Coromandel Coast, bringing the heaviest rains of the year there. Dry, fine weather spreads across most of the region from November until February or early March, when again the clouds begin to thicken and the waters stir.

The monsoon sustains life in the Bay. The upper layer of its waters are warm, low in salinity, and rich in nutr...