The study of maps of the ancient world, as I never tire of saying, can prove very instructive to any student of the heritage and cultural history of the lands that now are Bangladesh.
And beyond those maps is the steadily accumulating archaeological, documentary and circumstantial evidence of the way in which the peoples of the Ganges, especially of the Ganges deltaic lands, have, over the millennia, interacted with the rest of the world.
In Australia, for example, recently published research calls into question the traditional view that there was no human contact between the original arrival of the Aboriginal peoples, over 45,000 years ago, and the arrival of the Europeans in the eighteenth century.
Tests have shown that some Aboriginals can trace as much as 11% of their genomes to migrants from India about 4,000 years ago. Migrants who probably also brought the Indian dog in Australia, now identified as the dingo, and possibly tool-making skills as well.
In some ways such an arrival should not really surprise us. The 3,000 year old Hindu script, the Mahabharata, in the story of the rescue of Shita from Sri Lanka, describes the rescue forces as, in their hundreds, boarding ship.
There is plenty of reason to suppose that such a voyage may well have originated from the Ganges Delta, not only because the Sanskrit of the writing developed, most probably, in the lands of the Ganges basin, but also because of the accumulating evidence of early trade along the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers from such an early period.
That the Ganges Delta was also a trading centre in rice, spices and gems, amongst other commodities, with links to such developing areas of civilisation as those in Thailand and Indonesia, from at least the late first millennium BCE, there is also plenty of evidence.
Trade into the vast hinterland beyond the Ganges and Brahmaputra, with the great Tibetan lands, China, and lands of central Asia, certainly during the last millennium BCE, is now beyond doubt, both from Han dynasty documentation, and archaeological evidence in China itself.
There is some evidence of an unusual linkage of Shamanism, Animism and Buddhism, a linkage that lies at the foundation of the great Japanese Shinto tradition, from artefacts recovered from excavations at Wari Bateshwar. This certainly predates the development of Shinto culture in Japan. And such evidence suggests that not only did merchants propagate the Buddhist traditions out of the Ganges basis of its genesis, into many lands of South East Asia, but also, through them and China itself, into ancient Japan.
There is also little doubt that it was through the lands of Bangladesh, up the great Brahmaputra River, that, not only Buddhism, but, a thousand years later, Islam reached central Asia.
It was not, therefore, simply a simple matter of trade between the Ganges delta and such nations and empires, nor just ideas and philosophies. The fact that the unique structure of the Pahapur Vihara in North Bengal, the largest such structure in south India, was replicated in Indonesia and Cambodia is clear evidence of the strength and richness of the influence of the societies of the Ganges was substantial, across a large area of the ancient world.
It can, it seems, be asserted with reasonable confidence that the ancient peoples of these lands of the Ganges delta both influenced, and probably were influenced by, a wide diversity of what we now know as the Asia Pacific region.
That traders from great swathes of Arabia, Asia Minor, North Africa and Europe, found their way to the Ganges delta from at least the middle of the last millennium before the Common Era, there is also no doubt. We have both Greek and Roman writers to support that view, and plenty of emerging archaeology.
But if what the people of the Ganges basin and Ganges delta gave, in terms of genepool, religious and philosophical beliefs, means of communication, amongst its other influences, to the world of Asia Pacific, what it gave to the west was both trade and the luxuries that adorned the lives of their changing civilisations.
It can be no coincidence that when rewriting, in the third century BCE, the famous Homeric legend of Jason, the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece, the Greek writer, Apollonius of Rhodes, introduced “Datis, a Chieftain of the Gangaridai” to his exotic cast of characters. Already, it seems, the people of the Ganges delta had achieved, in the Mediterranean world, legendary status as warriors. Even today, the Bangladesh Army, despite its worldwide role in United Nations peacekeeping activities seems not to have reaquired such status in the literary world!
The great Roman poet Virgil also appears to have been well aware of that legendary reputation of the people of the delta, who, at his time, were known as the Gangaridai. “On the doors I will represent in gold and ivory the battle of the Gangaridai and the arms of our victorious Quirinius,” he celebrated at the end of the first century BCE, writing of a battle in Galatia in Asia Minor.
That the British novelist, Daniel Defoe, in his enduring novel, Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, nearly fifty years before the Battle of Plassey confirmed a rising interest by the English in the lands of the Ganges, especially, positioned his eponymous hero’s last adventure around the delta, “trading in opium and diamonds, and very satisfied with the trade,” tells us something of the almost mythical reputation that these lands had acquired amongst the people of Europe.
And even the immortal bard, the great Shakespeare, just over 100 years earlier, found a reference to the late 16th century voyage of the merchant, Ralph Fitch, that took him through the lands of the “great Mughal,” to those of the delta, a crowd-pleaser in his great dramatic work, Macbeth.
The expensive fabrics, such as the silks both woven in the deltaic lands, and traded from China, and, of course, Muslin, the gem stones, the precious metals, the herbs and spices, similarly traded, and, rapidly, such valuable chemicals as salt petre for gunpowder, were the tangible benefits of such trade between Bangladesh and the western world, but, in many ways, for centuries, these lands of Bangladesh were, surely, at the very centre of the romance of this mystic orient.
Only the slowly opening routes beyond, following da Gama’s opening of the Cape route, took traders, themselves, beyond the trading centre of the delta to the very origins of luxury in China, Japan and the Spice Islands.
For millennia, Bangladesh had been the epicentre of so much maritime trade, and drew to its shores an ever more powerful collection of wannabe conquerors and exploiters. From nations of Arabia, like Yemen, and from Africa, Ethiopia, and Somalia came soldiers of fortune; from Morocco, as we know, the great traveller of the 15th century, Ibn Battuta, eventually also found his way to these shores.
The study of the rich, emerging, history of Bangladesh is, itself, fascinating, but its place in the world, as a cross roads, not merely for traded luxuries, but also ideas and philosophies, even architecture, and the influence in the world that extends from the lands of the delta, even down to the present day, with influence in both international and domestic affairs if countries across the world, must surely lead, even the most jaded and pessimistic viewer, to a reappraisal of the people, the nation, and the lands of Bangladesh.
This is a nation, and a people, for sure, who are not simply the denizens of some forgotten, disaster-ridden and poverty-stricken neighbour of modern India. It has been, for millennia, not merely a large part of the foundation of civilisation in South Asia, but also a significant contributor to the social, cultural and economic development of much of the entire, wider world.
