Far Western Reaches of Nusantaria

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 67-73: We do not yet know how products from Nusantaria came to arrive at the plush homes of a literate, urbanized Babylon. But that merely says how little we know about unwritten history. Sailing techniques which took Austronesians to Samoa were equally capable of taking them to the west coast of India where people from Harappa, the city of the Indus valley civilization which flourished between about 4500 and 3900 BP, had a settlement in Gujarat. At the least, sailing to the south-east coast of India from Sumatra or the Malay peninsula would have been well within their reach. There is evidence that the single outrigger sailing craft found in southern India was brought from the east around this time. The use in Arabic and Persian of Dravidian- rather than Sanskrit-derived words for Indian items such as ginger and rice indicates very early south Indian connections,…