Introduction

Summary

Next to the study of the continental Silk Road, the Indian Ocean and its “Maritime Silk Road” have been the main focus of global, and in particular, Asian history in recent decades. But strangely enough, Indian Ocean studies still remain oddly bipartite. They emphasize predominantly the “classical” period, with its strong Mediterranean connections on the one hand, and the “early modern” period, with its rise of European dominance in the Indian Ocean on the other. The long millennium from the fifth to the sixteenth centuries, when the Indian Ocean finally emerged as an Asian Mediterranean Sea, still remains underrepresented in international studies. The present volume about the naval expeditions of the South Indian Chola dynasty to Southeast Asia in the eleventh century is meant as a modest contribution to fill this historiographical gap.

The great naval expedition of the Chola king, Rajendra I, who claimed in his inscriptions to have “despatched many ships in the midst of the rolling sea” and conquered more than a dozen harbour cities altogether of the famous Southeast Asian kingdom of Srivijaya in Sumatra, and on the Malay Peninsula in about AD 1025, was a unique event in the otherwise peaceful and culturally exceedingly fruitful relation of India with its neighbours in Southeast Asia. Already the last centuries of the first millennium BC witnessed increasingly extending trade activities between India and Southeast Asia, and the peacefulness of the spread of India's culture across the Bay of Bengal throughout the first millennium AD is unparalleled in world history. Buddhism and Hinduism alike left their deep and lasting imprint on the emerging cultures of mainland and maritime Southeast Asia. The first distinct South Indian influences are usually linked with the famous Buddhist art of Amaravati, and the Pallava Grantha of present-day Indonesia's earliest inscriptions in the fifth century AD, followed by the strong impact of Pallava and Chola art and architecture in Southeast Asia.

In view of these lasting peaceful relations of India, and of South India in particular, with Southeast Asia, the great Chola invasions of Srivijaya in 1025, followed by another smaller naval expedition in c. 1070, are an issue that still remains a conundrum for historians.