Palur to Bali
- Early historic centuries
Palur was where ships stopped following the coast and turned into open sea for Southeast Asia. Indian pots of exactly the same kind lie buried at Sembiran in Bali.
Every year Odisha floats little paper boats to remember the sailors who set off for Bali on the Kartika full moon.
Palur was a special spot on the coast. Here, ships stopped following the shore. They turned out into the open sea, heading for Southeast Asia. Archaeologists found Indian pottery buried at Sembiran, on the north coast of Bali. It was exactly the kind of pottery made near Kalinga. [Patra, n.d., p.109; Ardika, 1991, p.221]
Diggers at Sembiran found more than pottery. They found rouletted ware. They found a broken piece like pottery made at Arikamedu. They even found a scratched letter, in an old script called Kharoshthi. These lay in dirt about two thousand years old. [Ardika, 1991, p.225]
A Greek mapmaker named Ptolemy wrote about this coast. He named a point where ships left the shore. From there, they sailed into open sea, toward a storied land he called “Khryse.” Some historians think this point lay near Palur. [Patra, 2014, p.121]
A festival in Odisha still remembers voyages like these. Every year, at Cuttack, people mark Kartika Purnima, the full-moon day of the month of Kartika. A story says this was the day Sadhaba merchants once sailed for Bali, Java, Sumatra, Borneo and Sri Lanka. People float tiny paper boats on the water. Each boat carries a betel leaf, an areca nut and a small lit lamp. [Nanda, 2019, pp.41-42]
For scholars
Ardika and Bellwood call the Sembiran pottery “Indian.” They do not say it came from Kalinga. Two separate Odisha writers make that link instead, based only on matching pots. [Ardika, 1991, p.232; Nanda, 2019, p.44] Ptolemy’s point of departure aimed toward Khryse. Scholars think that was the Malay Peninsula, not Bali itself. Different scholars even disagree on where, along this coast, that point of departure lay. [Patra, 2014, p.121]
The festival is a living memory, not a written record. It cannot date the old voyages, or prove they happened as the story says. The route’s real evidence is the Sembiran pottery, not the festival. [Nanda, 2019, p.41]
Facts
- Mode
- Maritime (open sea)
- From
- Palur
- To
- Sembiran
Ports on this route
-
Palur
Palur is an old port village near the mouth of the Rushikulya river in south Odisha. People found bits of Chinese and Mediterranean pots there, which shows traders came from far away.
-
Sembiran
Sembiran is a village on the north coast of Bali. Indian pots buried there show that ships from India reached Bali about two thousand years ago.
Scholar notes
Ardika and Bellwood say 'Indian', not Kalinga; the Odisha to Bali link is asserted by OHRJ p. 110 and by Nanda 2019, not by the excavators. Ptolemy's apheterion points to Khryse, the Malay Peninsula, not to Bali, and Ptolemy's own text was not read. Bali Jatra is a living memory, not a record, and dates nothing. Beal and Patra place the departure point differently, at Manikapatna and near Gopalpur. The 5,000 km line is schematic.
- Sushanta Kumar Patra, Benudhar Patra. *Archaeology and the Maritime History of Ancient Orissa*. in Orissa Historical Research Journal XLVII. n.d. , pp. 109-110 (Palur was a departure port on the India-Southeast Asia route; the spread of rouletted ware suggests a trade link from the eastern coast to Southeast Asia.)
- I. Wayan Ardika, Peter Bellwood. *Sembiran: the beginnings of Indian contact with Bali*. in Antiquity 65. 1991 , pp. 221-232 (Excavations at Sembiran in Tejakula District, north-east Bali, in 1987 and 1989 found Indian Rouletted Ware, a sherd of Arikamedu type 10 and a body sherd carrying a graffito identified as Kharoshthi, in deposits dated about AD 1-200.)
- Benudhar Patra. *Ports in Ancient Odisha: Historical Perspective*. in Odisha Review. 2014 , p. 121 (Ptolemy's apheterion, a point of departure 'immediately to the south of Paloura (Palur), where ships bound for Khryse (the Malaya Peninsula) ceased to follow the littoral and entered the high seas'. Gerini placed it at Gopalpur; Patra prefers Mansurkota nearby.)
- Xuanzang. *Record of the Western Regions (Da Tang Xiyu Ji)*. 7th century CE. public domain , Beal 1884, vol. II, p. 205 n. 55 (Beal glosses Charitra as Chinese Fa-hing, 'city of departure', and equates it with 'Ptolemy's to apheterion ton eis ten Chrysen empleonton (lib. vii. c. 1, 15)' - the point where ships left the coast for the Golden Land.)
- R. K. Nanda. *Kalinga Bali Yatra and the Maritime Trade of Odisha*. in Odisha Review. Bhubaneswar: Information and Public Relations Department, Government of Odisha. 2019 , pp. 41-42, 44 (p. 41: Baliyatra or 'Boita Bandana Yatra' at Cuttack marks the day Sadhaba mariners sailed for Bali, Java, Sumatra, Borneo and Ceylon on Kartika Purnima. p. 44, NOT p. 43 as cited before: Sembiran's rouletted ware is grouped with Sisupalgarh, Manikpatna and Tamluk.)