The home minister’s proposal to rename Port Blair as Sri Vijayapuram to honour the memory of the 11th century Chola empire is the third major name change involving the Andamans. In 2002, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government had renamed Port Blair’s airport as Veer Savarkar International Airport. In 2018, the BJP government had renamed three islands – Ross, Neil and Havelock – as Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, Shaheed and Swaraj islands. These successive name changes are being done in the name of ‘decolonisation’ – freeing the Indian subcontinent from the cultural influences of British colonialism and restoring its ego.
The latest name change has given rise to three popular misconceptions: that the Srivijaya kingdom was an Indian empire; the term Srivijaya is the Sanskrit name for the Chola or Vijayanagara Empire; and that the Andamans were an integral part of the Chola Empire. However, the Srivijaya kingdom was a maritime Indonesian empire that flourished from the 7th to the 13th centuries and had trade relations with the Indian subcontinent. According to a Tamil prashasti (eulogy) of the Chola ruler Rajendra I in a Thanjavur temple, in the early 11th century, he sent naval expeditions to the Srivijaya kingdom. Nilakanta Sastri, professor of Indian history at the University of Madras, in his seminal History of the Cholas (1955) presented these expeditions as military raids undertaken by King Rajendra to remove obstacles to trade and extend his ‘digvijaya’ or world conquest.
Later historians have questioned Sastri’s view that the Chola expeditions were a result of a desire for conquest, but have upheld the theory of commercial motive. According to Indian Ocean historian Himanshu Prabha Ray, Tamil inscriptions from South India, Myanmar, Malaya and South China provide extensive information about maritime Tamil merchant guilds who built temples and water tanks and had private armies. There is a consensus that these expeditions were intended to protect the commercial interests of the maritime merchant community, especially in the wake of the rise of the Fatimids in Egypt and the Song in China. Chinese sources studied by historian Tansen Sen also confirm the view that the reasons for the Chola expeditions were primarily commercial, i.e. to counter Srivijaya’s attempts to block maritime links between the Chola and Chinese Song dynasty markets.
So, despite the lack of historical evidence to substantiate the Chola Digvijaya claim, it has become part of popular nationalist folklore. We know that it was not the Chola expeditions or ancient and medieval maritime maps that integrated the islands into the Indian subcontinent, but British colonialism in 1858. It was colonial mapping that reoriented the Andamans towards India. The movement of Indian political prisoners to the Cellular Jail (after 1905) marked the beginning of the nationalist appropriation of the Andamans. It culminated when Lord Mountbatten handed over the Andamans to Jawaharlal Nehru in 1947 and it was incorporated as a Union Territory in 1956. After independence, the Andamans continued to play their role in India’s nation-building project through holding ceremonies to commemorate the arrival of the 1857 rebels, converting the Cellular Jail into a national monument in 1967, inviting tribal Andamanese to perform at Republic Day celebrations, and subsequently renaming the Andamans.
How do we understand the renaming of Port Blair to Sri Vijayapuram? It is directly linked to the Digvijaya imagination. What is being imposed in the name of celebrating or honouring the memory of the Cholas is a hegemonic cartographic imagination of a grand and dazzling ancient Hindu empire that goes beyond the idea of Greater or Akhand Bharat, which included the Indian subcontinent including Afghanistan and Myanmar. The ideologue who propagated this imaginary Hindu cartography was Purushottam Nagesh Oak (1917-2007), a member of Bose’s Indian National Army. His books ‘World Vedic Heritage: A History of Histories’ and ‘Some Missing Chapters of World History’ were full of nostalgia for a Hindu empire that extended from India to Mecca, Egypt, Syria, China, Manchuria and Korea, but an empire that never existed. He also wrote several fictional books on the Hindu antecedents of medieval monuments, and we owe him the idea of the Taj Mahal being a Shiva temple.
The Andamans and its inhabitants are a sham and, at best, a victim of hyper-nationalistic discourse. It is a vision of global conquest that brings the islands into focus for public glorification, which otherwise struggle for their basic needs. How strange it is that the way the British viewed and treated the islands was as a pawn in their maritime conquest. Renaming is an act of epistemic colonisation disguised as decolonisation. What is the difference between the name Port Blair and Sri Vijaya Puram? It is the same thing.
Vaidik is a professor of history at Ashoka University. Views are personal
Disclaimer
The views expressed above are the author’s own.
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