It’s not often that current news echoes one’s reading of events of more than 800 years ago. Yet, that’s exactly how it appeared when my driver reported in anguish that Cyclone Amphan had blown away his mother’s house in Kakdwip at the mouth of the Ganga. I had just read in George Coedès’s The Indianized States of Southeast Asia of another Bay of Bengal storm in 1180 that blew one of the boats escorting a Ceylonese princess to Cambodia off course so that it “landed at Kakadipa, ‘island of the crows’”.
Coedès weaves the mishap into a rich tapestry
Coedès weaves the mishap into a rich tapestry
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