Concept Mandala The history of the mandala in South India can be traced back to Tamil inscriptions that describe the settlements and commercial systems of South Indian communities prior to the Chola raids in 1025. Records document the commercial system of Lobutua in South Aceh in 1088 (McKinnon 1994). Commercial trade between the two regions continued despite political turmoil resulting from national or global events. Many scholars consider the Indian Ocean mandala to be the most important factor that built this international relationship. According to Bose (2006), mandala is a Sanskrit word meaning a circle of space and time that connects through the cycle of being. Through Islamic culture shared across the Indian Ocean (Pradines and Topan, 2023), the international norm of mandala governed the fluid political ecosystem of the ocean as well as the entanglement of networks, ports, goods, and institutions that characterize a systemic order of sovereignty, competition, and alliances with great powers. It guided the movement, interaction and sense of belonging of indigenous South Indians, Arabs, Chinese, Jews and Europeans.
Fernand Braudel emphasized a similar idea. Mandala As he writes in his book, in French The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World under Philip II (1972). He coined the concept of the “long period” to explain the spatial and temporal connections woven into cycles of economic and political circulation processes that shaped pluralism and inclusiveness among civilizations. Complementing Braudel’s ideas, Acharya’s Reflections on the Origins of the World Economy and International Politics (2019) shows cycles of circulation patterns among various empires. It contributed to the “civilizational states” whose “embedded norms and cultures gave rise to pluralism and unipolarity” that shaped the world order across the Indian Ocean. As Manjeed S. Pardeshi (2022) concludes, such multiplicity must have owed to the “open” character of the surrounding sovereignties. Referring to the case of Malacca and the international politics of the world in the 15th century, he showed that the “open” character contributed to the formation of a “de-centred hegemony” of a centric world order system.
South Indian merchants appeared in circular commercial networks from Coromandel ports such as Porto Novo, Nagore, Kayalpattinam, Nagapattinam, Kailackaral, Chennai and Pulicat to areas such as Aceh, Malacca, Kedah, Perak, Penang, Singapore, Thailand, Myanmar and Sri Lanka before returning from Coromandel ports (Nordin, 2005). These merchants were important players with knowledge of economic and political ocean flows through their ports and networks. Not only were they capable of managing their agents and maintaining their goods through long distance voyages, but they were also known to be multilingual, learned and wealthy merchants, involved in the non-hierarchical government political structure and managed their ports and networks with almost autonomous leadership. This is evident from the interactions of South Indians such as Nainal, Chulia, Lapai, Marican and Kering. They were the leaders of the major port ministers (Shahbandar), Captain (Nakoda(Nordin, 2005), from local rajas to economic and political advisors to the sultan.
Besides increasing the number of appointments ShahbandarSouth Indian merchants were trusted not only to advise the sultans and local kings and handle trade matters, but also to be effective lobbyists, expanding their scope of work to include diplomats, interpreters, letter drafters and couriers, at least from the perspective of a polycentric sovereignty in which autonomous rulers formed alliances.
Around 1767-1768, an incident occurred involving a ship that was supposedly carrying a large amount of cargo belonging to the British trading firm Gowan Harrop and Bayly alongside the commercial goods of the Sultan of Aceh. A dispute arose between the shipowner and the shipowner, and the case was referred to the court of Pondicherry in the French colony of India for arbitration. To settle the dispute, the Sultan commissioned Abu Bakar Lebi (Bayley, 1989) to seek consultation with Nawab Waran Gill, or Nawab Muhammad Ali Khan Walajah (1717-1795), of Karnataka, who had enough influence to “make amends” with the French authorities (Lee, 2006).
Abu Bakar Levy was chosen because of his linguistic skills and political knowledge of Aceh-Karnataka and Coromandel-French. In the Sultan’s and Levy’s geopolitical understanding, the Nawab was the patron of the wealthiest Malican merchant network with long-standing commercial ties in Aceh-Indonesia, Malaysia and the Straits Settlements. The Nawab employed Malacca-yare in Porto-Novo as supplies and crew for his ships, which he used for charity work and to carry pilgrims to Mecca and Medina. Others worth mentioning are Shahbandar and the Sultan’s advisors Muhammad Qasim and Por Saleh, who are recorded in Thomas Forrest’s 1772 chronicle. Two other merchants, Sahib Nadar Alam and Panton Abdullah, were entrusted by Sultan Jauhar al-Alam Shah (1786-1823) with the administration of two villages in northern Sumatra. The Sultan’s Nakoda were Meera Rubai, Muhammad Musa, Mohammad Sultan and Kassim. Rubai Muhammad and Gula Maidin are the names of the scribes and drafters of the treaties between Aceh and the great powers such as France and the United States (Reid, 2008).
Oberto Voll (1994) argued that historically Islam is a world system capable of engineering order within the complexities of social and political hierarchies. Islam regulates the open nature of power actions that encompass “political entities between civilizations” and guides its sovereignty to the establishment of “imperial unity”. This is because he found that “no single cultural, economic, or imperial system is hegemonic”, which provides a hypothesis on peace and universal values of maritime exchanges between Indonesians and South Indians. Mabar Coromandel Harbour.
This argument supports the idea that Islamic culture was a norm that contributed to the establishment of a maritime world order. The norm witnessed the existence of inferiority in a hierarchical international system established on the basis of skin color superiority and religious exclusivity, as evidenced in the international affairs between South Indians and Acehnese Indonesians in the 18th century, especially in the evidence of non-Muslim settlements and diverse political occupants. For example, a Hindu Purvan partnered with a British merchant to trade with Aceh. Nathaniel Sabat, an Orthodox Catholic from Syria, was an interpreter and advisor to the Sultan. It was not uncommon for non-Muslim British and French merchants to serve as advisors (Lee, 2006). All these Europeans fled colonial India to reach the Indonesian archipelago. At many periods, non-Muslim enclaves existed, including Chinese, Indians, and Europeans in Aceh and Java, demonstrating the legitimacy of their self-determined order. In the case of South Indian Hindus, there were Chetty enclaves in Melaka, Pasai and Sulawesi (Subrahmanian, 1995).
The Indian Ocean Mandala, multi-skilled institutions and norms were key factors in the long-standing international relations between Indonesia and South Indian states. The Indian Ocean linked maritime sovereignty and institutions belonging mainly to Islamic groups. Common culture and identity shaped international norms that rejected the racial and religious-based international system.
References
Acharya, A. (2019). The Making of Global International Relations: The Origins and Evolution of International Relations Theory in its 100th AnniversaryUK: Cambridge University Press.
Bose, S. (2006), One Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global EmpireLondon: Harvard University Press.
Bayley, S. (2003). Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700-1900. Cambridge University Press.
Hing, LK (2006). Aceh at the time of the Treaty of 1824. In Reid Anthony (ed.). Balcony of Violence: Background to the Aceh Troubles (pp. 72-95) Singapore: University of Singapore Press.
Pardeshi MS (2022) “De-centering Hegemony and Open Order: Fifteenth-Century Malacca in a World of Order.” Global Studies QuarterlyVolume 2, Issue 4. Doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksac072
H. Nordin (December 2005). Malay merchant networks and the rise of Penang as a regional trading centre. Southeast Asian Studies43(3), 216-237.
Obert, V. (1994) “Islam is a special world system.” World History JournalVol. 5, No. 2, pp. 213-226.
Pradines, S., & Topan, F. (2023).Islamic Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Diversity and Pluralism, Past and Presentt, UK: Edinburgh University Press.
Reid, A. (2008). The Merchant Prince and the Magical Mediator. Indonesia and the Malay World, 36(105), pp. 253-267.
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