Opinion: Savarkar Airport, Bose Island and now Sri Vijayapuram… why these changes in Port Blair are not just a change of name!

Author: Aparna Vaidik
The Home Minister’s proposal to rename Port Blair as Sri Vijaya Puram has sparked a new debate. This proposal has been made in memory of the 11th century Chola Empire. This is the third major incident of renaming the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Earlier in 2002, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government had renamed Port Blair Airport as Veer Savarkar International Airport. In 2018, the BJP government renamed three islands – Ross, Neil and Havelock as Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, Shaheed and Swaraj Islands. The argument behind changing the name is ‘freedom from colonization’. That is, to free the Indian subcontinent from the cultural effects of British colonialism and restore its glory.

Misconceptions spread by this proposal

However, this new proposal has spread three misconceptions. First, the Srivijaya Empire was an Indian empire. Second, the term Srivijaya is the Sanskrit name for the Chola or Vijayanagara Empire. Third, the Andamans were an integral part of the Chola Empire.

What is the story of Srivijaya Empire?

Contrary to these claims, the Srivijaya Empire was a maritime Indonesian empire. It flourished from the 7th to the 13th centuries. It had trade relations with the Indian subcontinent. According to a Tamil prashasti (eulogy) of the Chola ruler Rajendra I in a Thanjavur temple, he/she sent naval expeditions to the Srivijaya Empire in the early 11th century.

Nilakanta Sastri, professor of Indian history at the University of Madras, in his/her History of the Cholas (1955) presented these expeditions as military raids. he/she argued that King Rajendra undertook these expeditions to remove obstacles to trade and extend his/her ‘digvijaya’ or world conquests.

Business purpose

Later historians have questioned the view of Chola expeditions as a result of a desire for conquest, but have upheld the theory of a mercantile motive. According to Himanshu Prabha Ray, a historian of the Indian Ocean, Tamil inscriptions from South India, Myanmar, Malaya and South China provide extensive information about maritime Tamil merchant guilds. These guilds built temples and water tanks and maintained private armies.

There is a consensus that these expeditions were intended to protect the commercial interests of the maritime trading community, especially in the wake of the rise of the Fatimids in Egypt and the Song in China. Chinese sources studied by historian Tenzin Sen also corroborate the idea that the reasons for the Chola expeditions were primarily commercial, i.e., to counter Srivijaya’s attempts to cut off maritime links between the Chola and Chinese Song dynasty markets.

Colonial Mapping

Thus, despite the lack of historical evidence to substantiate the Chola Digvijaya claim, it has become part of popular nationalist lore. It was not the Chola expeditions or ancient and medieval maritime maps that integrated the islands into the Indian subcontinent. It was British colonialism in 1858. It was colonial mapping that reoriented the Andamans to face India.

Nationalization started after 1905

After 1905, the sending of Indian political prisoners to the Cellular Jail began the nationalisation of the Andamans. This culminated in the handing over of the Andamans to Jawaharlal Nehru by Lord Mountbatten in 1947 and their merger as a Union Territory in 1956. Since Independence, the Andamans have continued to contribute to India’s nation-building through commemorative ceremonies marking the arrival of the 1857 rebels. Examples are the conversion of the Cellular Jail into a national monument in 1967, inviting the tribal Andamanese to perform at the Republic Day celebrations, and the subsequent renaming.

How to understand the change of name?

How should we understand the renaming of Port Blair to Sri Vijaya Puram? 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 that comprises the Indian subcontinent, including Afghanistan and Myanmar.

The ideologue who propagated this imaginary Hindu cartography was Purushottam Nagesh Oak, a member of Bose’s Indian National Army. his/her books ‘Vishwa Vedic Heritage: History of History’ 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 none existed. he/she also wrote several imaginary books on the Hindu antecedents of medieval monuments, and we owe his/her imagination of the Taj Mahal as a Shiva temple.

Victim of ultra-nationalist discourse

The Andamans and its inhabitants are simply victims of an ultra-nationalistic discourse. It is this 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.

Changing the name is just a change of mask in the form of colonialism, but the work is the same. What is the difference between the name Port Blair and Sri Vijaya Puram? It is just the same thing.

(The author is Professor of History at Ashoka University.)