Akar Nusa
A shop front by the Melaka river in the 1480s. Bales of printed cotton from Gujarat are stacked to the ceiling. The merchant checks them against a list written in a script few locals can read.
The story
Gujarat is on the western coast of India. Its ports, such as Cambay, were hubs of the Indian Ocean trade for centuries. Gujarati merchants carried cloth, beads and other goods across the sea, and took home spices, camphor and tin.
Melaka was one of their most important stops. The Portuguese writer Tome Pires, who lived in Melaka in the 1510s, reported that about a thousand Gujaratis lived there before the Portuguese arrived in 1511. Cotton cloth from Gujarat and nearby coasts was sold in Melaka, and Melaka's own and the islands' goods were sent back west.
The sultanate gave Gujaratis their own official. Of the four shahbandars (harbourmasters) in Melaka, one dealt only with Gujarati traders. That shows how large and important the community was.
Many Gujarati merchants were Muslim. They shared a faith with Melaka's rulers and with many other traders in the port. Some historians say Gujarati merchants helped Islam spread across Southeast Asia, though scholars debate how large their role was.
When the Portuguese arrived, the merchants were on the other side of events. Records say Gujarati and Tamil Muslim merchants, who already knew the Portuguese from India, were hostile to them. After the Portuguese took Melaka in 1511, the old trading world was disrupted, and many traders moved on to other ports.
Why Gujarat? Gujarati ports such as Cambay and Surat were busy for centuries, and their merchants worked across the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia. Today there are an estimated 31,500 Gujaratis in Malaysia, most of them traders in towns such as Melaka, George Town, Kuala Lumpur and Ipoh. Their long presence shows that Malaysia's Indian story is not only one of plantation labour in the colonial era, but also one of old sea trade.
Where you can still see it today
- Gujarati communities in Malaysia today, in towns such as Melaka, George Town, Kuala Lumpur and Ipoh. The Gujarati language is still spoken in Malaysia and Singapore.
- Melaka's old town, where the old port's trade in cloth and spices took place.
What DNA can tell, and what it cannot
Some Malaysians have ancestors who came from western India, in long-ago or recent times. A region estimate with a South Asian part may reflect this. But South Asian ancestry in Malaysia has many sources: Tamil, Telugu, Malayali, Punjabi and others, as well as Gujarati. DNA alone cannot say which.
DNA does not decide race, religion or bumiputera status.
