The Dynasties of the Kanarese Districts of the Bombay Presidency from the Earliest Historical Times to the Musalman Conquest c7.s4: Section I. Early Travellers
The Dynasties of the Kanarese Districts of the Bombay Presidency from the Earliest Historical Times to the Musalman Conquest c7.s4
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Section I. Early Travellers
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THE earliest certain mention of the country now called the Konkan is in the geography of Ptolemy about A.D. 150, and in the Greek work called "The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea," the authorship of which is uncertain, and the date variously calculated from A.D. 66 to A.D. 240. Ptolemy makes of this part of the coast two provinces, Larika (Sk. Lâtaka or Lâtadesh¹) which is identified with Gujarát and part of the North Konkan, and Ariaka which includes the rest of the Konkan.² The author of the Periplus does not mention Larika, but applies the name of Barugaza or Broach to this province as well as to the port of Broach, and states that Ariaka included "the land of the pirates."³ This is the first mention of the pirates, who down to the present century were the terror of the coast between Bombay and Goa. With reference to them Rennell about 1780 wrote: "Few countries with so straight a general outline are so much broken into bays and harbours. The multitude of shallow ports, an uninterrupted view along the shore, and an elevated coast favourable to distant vision, have always fitted this tract of country for piracy. The land and sea breezes blow alternately and divide the day, so that vessels sailing along the coast are obliged to keep within sight of land."⁴ The pirates of Suvarnadurg are also mentioned by Strabo.⁵ Vincent in collating the various descriptions of the coast assigns to Ariaka the limits from Goa to the Tápti, and of course includes in this the land of the pirates, and he considers that as the province can thus be identified with tolerable certainty, it is of little use to try to ascertain the exact position of the different ports named, most of which were places of only local trade.⁶ The two identifications, however, which he makes without any doubt are Kalyán (Kalliéna) and the Vengurla rocks, the first a port which was already decayed in the time of the Periplus, as Sandanes the king admitted no Egyptian vessels, and if any entered the harbour by accident or stress of weather he compelled them to go to Broach. The Vengurla rocks are mentioned as islands off the southern extremity of Ariaka and called Sesekrienai.⁷ The ports given both by Ptolemy and in the Periplus between Broach and these islands are Oopára or Sopára near Bassein where interesting Buddhist remains of about A.D. 50 were discovered in 1882,⁸ Semulla, Mandagora, Palaipotamai (Balapatna in Ptolemy), Melizigara, and Toparon
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¹ Compare Bombay Gazetteer, XII. 57 note; XIII, Part II., 112, 431, 435 & note 4.
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² Heeren, II. 239; Tod, 187.
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³ Vincent, II, 418.
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⁴ Memoir, xxx.-xxxviii.
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⁵ Vincent, I. 178.
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⁶ Vincent, II. 428.
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⁷ Vincent, II, 422, 432.
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⁸ Bom. Gaz. XIV. Sopára.
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Early
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of the Byzantians (Byzantium) in Ptolemy.¹ Besides these Ptolemy alone mentions the river Binda between Sopára and Semulla, Hippocura south of that, and the islands called Heptanesia.² These last are identified by Lassen with the islands of Bombay and Sálsette.³ Semulla he puts at Bassein, Balipatna about Cheul or Dánda Rájápur, and Manadagora a little further south. Melizigaris, called by Pliny Zizerus, he puts at Suvarndurg, Vincent at Jaygad. Ptolemy calls this place an island, Pliny a river and a port, and the author of the Periplus a place on the continent. A tolerable agreement can be found between these three apparently contradictory descriptions if it is remembered that the Arabic word Janjira, which may be evidently traced in the two names given, is still used not only for the rocky island off Dánda-Rájápur, but also for the similar rocks at Suvarndurg and Málvan, either of which places, with the towns on the mainland which they protect, might then be identified with Melizigara or Zizerus.⁴ Byzantium Lassen puts at Vijaydurg. And Nitrias, mentioned by Pliny as a chief station of the pirates, Rennell identifies with Nivti, between Málvan and Vengurla.⁵
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¹ Vincent, II. 427, 431.
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² Liber, VII. Cap. I. Bom. Gaz. XIII. Part II. 414.
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³ Map to Indische Altherthumskunde.
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⁴ Vincent, II. 430.
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⁵ Memoir, 31; Vincent, II, 449; Bom. Gaz. XV. Part II, 336. The similarity of the name and position suggest that Mandagora is Mandangad, a lofty and prominent hill close to Mahápral, a village on the Bánkot creek, to which large native craft still pass.
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The identification of all these places is an interesting study for those who are well acquainted with the district, and there are certain resemblances of names which will probably strike every reader; but the speculations made by different geographers are almost endless, and the means of ascertaining the real situation of the places mentioned are so small, owing to Ptolemy's mistake of making the coast from Broach to the Ganges run almost due east, and to no manuscript of the Periplus being known to exist, that it seems useless to go deep into the subject. Except Kalyán the places mentioned in the Periplus are all given as country ports frequented only by the natives.⁶ From Barugaza (Broach) and Ariaka to the coast of Africa were exported corn, rice, butter, oil of sesame, coarse and fine cotton goods, and cane-honey (sugar). And ships with these cargoes sometimes went on from the African to the Arabian ports.⁷ Whether this African trade was in the hands of Arabs or of the natives of India is doubtful, but all writers are agreed that the traffic from the west coast of India to the Red Sea was mainly in the hands of the Arabs.⁸ The trade of the ancient Egyptians with India is to be looked on as previous to history and a matter only of speculation.⁹ The Greeks from Egypt may occasionally have gone across the Indian Ocean, but in general they contented themselves with getting Indian goods from the
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⁶ Vincent, II. 428. Compare Bom. Gaz. X. 192; XI. 136, 137, note 6; XIII, Part II, 414-418; XV. Part II. 78 and note 1.
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⁷ Vincent, II. 282, 423.
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⁸ Heeren, II. 301; Elphinstone 166; Vincent, I. 43; II, 35, 119; Robertson, 38.
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⁹ Vincent, I. 284.
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Arabs in the ports of the Red Sea.¹ Authorities differ as to whether the Romans ever traded with this coast at all.² As regards the ports of the Konkan in the earliest times it may be taken as proved that the larger ones were frequented by the Arabs and the smaller ones by the natives who carried on the coasting trade.³ The author of the Periplus also mentions that Muziris, which is generally identified with Mangalore, was a great place of resort for vessels from the Konkan.⁴
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¹ Vincent, II. 119, 35; Priaulx, 84.
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² Priaulx, 234.
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³ Elphinstone, 166.
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⁴ Vincent, II. 448.
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The conclusion is that, notwithstanding the pirates, this coast was not devoid of trade or shunned by foreigners in the earliest times of which we have any record, though it had no place of such importance as Cambay, Broach, or the ports of Malabár; and that the exports were not very different from what they now are, cotton cloth, muslin, indigo, chintz, spices, and sugar.⁵ It must also be mentioned that the metropolis to which Ariaka was subject was Tagara, a place formerly identified with Divgiri or Daulatabad, about which there is now a difference of opinion.⁶
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⁵ Elphinstone, 169.
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⁶ Wilford in Asiatic Res. I. 373; Vincent, II. 403, 414. Compare Bom. Gaz. XIII. Part II. 423 note 4; XVI. 181 note 2; XVIII. Part II. 211 note 2; Fleet's Dynasties of the Kánarese Districts, 99 - 103.
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After the author of the Periplus no authority can be mentioned until Cosmas, a Greek merchant of the sixth century, who described India, though it is very doubtful if he had visited it himself.⁷ He speaks of Calliana as a place of great trade, and states that the return cargoes from there to Ceylon consisted of native brass, sesamum, wood, and articles of clothing.⁸ He also speaks of a king of Calliana, and of there being a bishop's see and a Christian community at Kalyán subject to the Persian metropolitan. In these respects Kalyán was not different from the other considerable ports of India, most of which were frequented by Persian traders.⁹ The conjecture has been made, though the evidence is certainly weak, that the Buddhist priest Fa Hian at the end of the fourth century and Hiuen Tsiang in the seventh century both visited the Buddhist caves of Kanheri, and that the latter on his return embarked at Kalyán or Bánkot.¹⁰
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⁷ Priaulx, 226.
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⁸ Heeren, II. 442. Heeren's sesame and wood should probably be sisu or blackwood.
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⁹ It must be acknowledged that the description here given by Cosmas seems to point rather to Quilon than Callian, and some writers have also considered the Kalyán of the Periplus to be Quilon. See Paulini a S. Bartolomeo in India Orientalis, Christiana. Vincent's account of the whole coast, however, renders this supposition untenable.
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¹⁰ R. A. S. Journal, VI. 329; Cunningham, I. 554.
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After Cosmas there is a long break before any other European writer mentions this part of India, but the gap is supplied by several Arabian geographers, by whom the name is variously given as Kemkem, Konkam, Kankan, Konkan, and Konkan-Tana, which last compound is given by Ibn Batuta (1340), and is conjectured by Colonel Yule to have been the proper name of the province. The compound is reproduced by an Italian writer of the fourteenth century
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as Cocintana. It appears in what is called the Catalan map of 1375 as Cocintaga.¹
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¹ R. A. S. Journal (New Series); IV. 340; Yule's Cathay, I. ccxxx.
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Reinaud² gives an extract from an Arab writer named Beladori to the effect that in A.D. 636 the Khalif Omar sent an army to Tanna and he thinks that this was probably our Thána. But he acknowledges that the diacritical marks of the initial letter are wanting and he gives no other particulars. In the travels of the merchant Suleiman written in A.D. 851 the country of Komkam is given as part of the kingdom of the Balhára.³ But Alberuni, of whom Colonel Yule says that "in Indian matters he knew what he was talking about a great deal better than other old Arabic writers," says nothing of Balhára. He mentions a kingdom of Konkan with its capital at Tálah and gives the itinerary along the coast as Broach, Sindan 50 parasangs, Soubarah 6 parasangs, Tana 5 parasangs. Then the country of Láran and in that Djymowr, Malyah, Kandjy; then the Dravira which Reinaud says is the Coromandel Coast. Alberuni also mentions the plains of the Konkan as containing the animal called Scharan, a quadruped with four extra legs standing up above its back.⁴
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² Fragments, 1826.
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³ Elliot, I. 4.
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⁴ Yule's Cathay, I. clxxxiv; Reinaud, 109, 121.
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Rashid-ud-Din about A.D. 1300 mentions Konkan, of which the capital is Tana on the sea-shore. But further on he mentions Gujarát as a large country within which are Cambay, Somnát Kankan, 'Tana and several other cities and towns;' and again 'Beyond Gujarát are Kankan and Tana, beyond them the country of Malabar.'⁵ The question as to the dependence of the Konkan on Gujarát will be considered in the next section. It is sufficient here to say that the above extracts prove that the Konkan was a separate province with a capital called Thána, which is mentioned as a town on the coast by the traveller Al Masudi who died in A.D. 956.⁶ By Al Idrisi in the twelfth century the following itinerary of the coast is given: "From Baruk (Broach) to Sindhábur⁷ along the coast four days. From hence to Bana (Thána) upon the coast four days. This is a pretty town upon a great gulf where vessels anchor and from whence they set sail."⁸ Gildemeister has no doubt that the ancient and modern places are the same, and thinks that Thána is the only port known to the Arabs between Broach and Goa of which the situation can be exactly ascertained.⁹ When it is considered that, at no very distant time, the sea must have filled the whole space between the hills on the east of the Thána creek and those on the west of it, and must have flowed also over a very wide expanse of country between Thána and Bassein, it seems that these descriptions may have been tolerably correct for the Thána of eight hundred years ago. The last of these early Arabian
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⁵ Elliot, I. 60, 67.
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⁶ Elliot, I. 24.
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⁷ There is some confusion among travellers as to Sindábur. Colonel Yule thinks it was Goa, but that Al Idrisi and others confounded it with Sanján. Indian Antiquary, III. 116.
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⁸ Elliot, I. 89.
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⁹ De Rebus Indicis, 46.
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travellers is Ibn Batuta in the fourteenth century, who did not visit the Konkan, but mentions Thána as one of the ports from which great ships used to go to Aden.¹ But this last traveller was later in date than the famous Venetian Marco Polo (1290). His description of this part is unfortunately rather vague, nor does he mention the name Konkan. But he divides all this coast into the kingdom of Tanna and the kingdom of Lar. Of the latter his account is very indefinite, but Tanna he calls "a great kingdom with a language of its own and a king of its own, tributary to nobody; many ships and merchants frequent the place." He mentions leather, buckram, and cotton as the exports, and then he comes to the pirates, and their custom of giving up all the horses they take to the king, and keeping the rest of the plunder to themselves. With so much specified it is not difficult to assume Lar to be the Larika of Ptolemy, and to have included the northern part of the Konkan and part, at all events, of Gujarát. Colonel Yule adds that all the sea, west of this coast, was in early times called the sea of Lar.² The account of the martyrdom of the four friars at Thána, which is believed to have taken place on the Thursday before Palm Sunday 1322, is so curious that it cannot be omitted. It is given by the Friar Odoricus who himself visited Thána, and, though full of wonders anachronisms and absurdities, seems from some of the local details to be founded on fact. It is not clear whether the friars ever received the official beatification of Rome, but they appear as Beati in the Acta Sanctorum and are commemorated in one of the churches at Goa.
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¹ Travels, II. 177.
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² Yule's Marco Polo, II. 230, 302.
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The account given by Odoricus is as follows: "I passed over (from Ormuz) in 28 days to Thána, where for the faith of Christ four of our minor friars had suffered a glorious martyrdom. The city is excellent in position, and hath great store of bread and wine, and aboundeth in trees. This was a great place in days of old, for it was the city of king Porus who waged so great a battle with Alexander. The people thereof are idolators, for they worship fire and serpents and trees also. The land is under the dominion of the Saracens, who have taken it by the force of arms, and they are now subject to the Emperor of Delhi. Here be found sundry kinds of beasts, and especially black lions in very great numbers, besides monkeys and baboons and bats as big as pigeons are here. There be also rats as big as our dogs called scherpi. In this country there are trees which give wine which they call loahe, and which is very intoxicating. And here they do not bury the dead but carry them in great pomp to the fields, and cast them to the beasts and birds to be devoured. And they have here very fine oxen which have horns a good half pace in length, and have a hump on the back like a camel. And it was in this place called Tanna that the four minor friars suffered a glorious martyrdom for the sake of Christ."
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They hired a ship at Ormuz to take them to Polumbum, but it took them to Thána instead. "Here there be fifteen houses of
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Christians, that is to say, of Nestorians, who are schismatics and heretics.” The friars were apparently hidden in one of these Nestorian houses, and the Kadi accidently heard of it, and sent for them, and Friar Thomas of Tolentino, Friar James of Padua, and Friar Demetrius a Georgian lay brother “good at the tongues” went, but Friar Peter of Sienna was left at home to take care of their things. There they began to dispute, and Friar Thomas confounded the Saracens as to Christ. Then the Kadi and the Saracens urged them to say what they thought of Mahomet. So, after trying to evade the question, Friar Thomas at last said, “Mahomet is the son of perdition, and hath his place in hell with the devil his father.” Then the Saracens tied the friars up in the sun, that they might die a dreadful death by the intense heat. But after six hours they were cheerful and unscathed. So then they selected to burn them, and kindled a great fire “on the maidan, that is the Piazza of the city,” and threw in Friar James first, and it blazed so high and wide that they could not see him, but they heard him invoking the Virgin. And when the fire was spent there he was unhurt. Then they made a much larger fire, and stripped him naked, and covered him and the wood with oil and threw him in again, while Thomas and Demetrius prayed fervently. But he again came out unhurt. Then the Malik (or podesta) tried to rescue them, and conveyed them “across a certain arm of the sea, that was a little distance from the city where there was a certain suburb,” and there they were received into the house of an idolator. But the Kadi overpersuaded the Malik, and sent four men to kill the friars, and caused all the Christians to be imprisoned; and after talking in a friendly way to the friars, the four men cut off the heads of Thomas, James, and Demetrius. And the air was illuminated, and there was wonderful thunder and lightning, and the ship the friars had come in went to the bottom. And next day they found Friar Peter and tried to convert him, and on his refusing tortured him and then hung him up to a tree, and as he came down unhurt they clove him asunder and in the morning no trace of him could be found. Then a vision appeared to the Malik which disturbed him so much that he released the Christians, and “caused four mosques to be built in honour of the Friars, and put Saracen priests in each of them to abide continually.” But the Emperor of Delhi sent for the Malik and put him to death, and the Kadi fled.
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“Now in that country it is the custom never to bury the dead, but bodies are cast into the fields, and thus are speedily destroyed and consumed by the excessive heat; so the bodies of these friars lay for fourteen days in the sun and yet were found quite fresh and undecayed as if on the very day of their glorious martyrdom.” So the Christians buried them. Afterwards Odoric came, and took their bones which worked various miracles.¹
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¹ The above description is from Yule’s Cathay, I. 57. There is another account not much differing from this, but taken from a Latin manuscript in the preface to Yule’s Mirabilia Descripta, page ix., and another differing as to dates and other particulars in Hakluyt’s Voyages, II. 160.
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It cannot escape notice that among all these later travellers no mention is made either of Kalyán, which had been so frequently mentioned in earlier times, or of Dábhol and Cheul, which are spoken of as great places very shortly afterwards. Ample time had certainly elapsed for Kalyán to have decayed, nor is it likely that two cities of any great pretensions should at the same time have flourished in such proximity as Kalyán and the modern Thána. The absence of any mention of Dábhol and Cheul is more difficult to explain; but until any account of their rise can be found it may perhaps be assumed that they emerged from obscurity only when the Musalmáns took possession of the Dakhan and required sea ports. It is also an allowable conjecture that Cheul did not rise to importance until the gradual drying up of the shallow waters around it Thána rendered less advantageous as a seaport.
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The Arabs are said not only to have monopolised the early carrying trade between Arabia and Malabár, but also to have made many settlements on the Malabár and Konkan coasts.¹ Although some of these colonies in Kánara and Malabár are well known,² nothing certain can be adduced as to any in the Konkan. Still, in treating of the different races and castes of the district, reasons will be given for believing the very distinct class of Mahomedans known in Bombay as "Konkani Musalmáns" to be descended from the old Arab settlers. It is also stated, but the authority is not given, that the Abyssinians had planted colonies along the whole western coast of India from Cape Comorin upwards at a very early period of the Christian era, of which Rájpuri is one of the last remaining.³
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¹ Heeren, II. 438.
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² Vincent, II. 452, 283; Faria in Briggs, IV, 508.
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³ Jervis' Report on Konkan Weights and Measures (1829), 145.
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The Muhammadan conquest is so distinct an era in all Indian history that it has seemed better to bring together all the descriptions of the country up to that period. In the same way the next section will contain all that can be made out as to its government and territorial divisions up to the Musalmán conquest; but this seems the best place in which to mention the immigration of two parties of foreigners from across the sea. The first of these were the ancestors of the interesting people called the Bene-Israel who are found scattered over the northern parts of the Kolába Collectorate and are believed to have arrived in India from Yemen during the sixth century of the Christian era.⁴ Unfortunately no record ancient or recent of their history remains. Still the Jews of Cochin say that they found the Bene-Israel at Rájpuri when they first came to India, and their distinct position among the various native races taken with their partial adoption of Hindu usages points to a very ancient occupation. A further account of their present condition will be found in the last section.
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⁴ Dr. Wilson's Bene-Israel, 10-16. Details are given in Bom. Gaz. XI. 85-86; XVIII. 506-536.
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The other immigrants who in India first found a home in the Konkan were the Pársis. They are believed to have arrived about
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the end of the eighth century. It is certain that after living for some years at Diu they first settled on the continent of India at Sanján, now an utterly insignificant village, but which is believed then to have extended nearly to the sea coast.¹ Here they were permitted to settle by the Rána, who is called Jáde, and whom Dr. Wilson believes to have been Jayadeva, a chief subordinate to the Rajput kings of Chámpáner or Pátan. In the next three hundred years they were dispersed through Hindustán; but the places mentioned as receiving them are all north of Sanján, which agrees with the present facts of their settlements, for it is about Dáhánu, twenty miles south of Sanján, that Pársis begin to be found in considerable numbers, and not merely as settlers for purposes of trade. Tárápur, ten miles south of Dáhánu, has also a large settlement of Parsis; but Kalyán is the only place south of that where their settlement is believed to be of earlier date than the British occupation of Bombay. Nargol, at the mouth of the Sanján creek, is still one of their largest villages, but Sanján itself does not now contain a single Pársi resident.
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¹ Wilson's Sermon to Pársis, 6; Bom. R. A. S. Journal, I. 170. Compare Bom. Gaz. XIV. 506-536.