Nia Deliana
The notion of the Mandala can be traced back to a Tamil inscription that describes a settlement and commercial system of a South Indian communal compound before the Chola’s raid in 1025 CE. The records note a commercial system in Lobu Tua of Southern Aceh dated in 1088 CE (McKinnon 1994). Mercantile exchanges between the two regions continued despite political turbulence resulting from domestic or global affairs. Many scholars believe that the Mandala of the Indian Ocean was the most substantial factor that engineered this international relationship. Mandala is a Sanskrit word that means a circle of space and time that connect through a circulation of being, according to Bose (2006). Through the shared Muslim cultures across the Indian Ocean (Pradines and Topan, 2023), The Mandala’s international norms ruled not only the entanglement on networks, ports, commodities, and agencies that characterized the systemic order of sovereignty, rivalry, and alliances with the great powers but also the fluid political ecosystem of the Ocean. It guided mobility, interactions, and a sense of belonging to the native-becoming South Indians, Arabs, Chinese, Jews, and Europeans.
Fernand Braudel highlighted a similar notion of mandala in French as revealed in his book, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II (1972). He coined the “long duree” concept to explain spatial and temporal connections threaded in the cycle of economic and political circulatory processes that shaped inter-civilizational pluralism and inclusivity. Complimentary to Braudel’s, Acharya’s reflection (2019) on the origin of the global economy and international politics showcases the cycle of circulation pattern between various empires. It contributed to a “civilizational state” where “embedded norms and cultures engineered pluralism and unipolarity” that formed the global order across the Indian Ocean. Such multiplexity had to owe to the ‘open’ character of the surrounding sovereignties, as Manjeed S Pardesi (2022) concluded. He showed that the ‘open’ character contributed to shaping a ‘de-centered hegemony’ of the centric world order system, referring to the case of 15th century Malacca’s international politics with the global powers.
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