Kalinga

The Melaka Sultanate · Chronicle · 11 min read

What Did Keling Originally Mean?

Malacca had a large number of South Asian merchants — but their "country" at the time was not called India

A word traveled two thousand kilometers, walked for a thousand years, and then stopped at the docks of Malacca. In the 15th century, that word was the residual shadow of a place name, a code name for a group of merchants, and the same group of people written into the records by Portuguese sailors with different spellings. As for where they came from — the Malaccan court itself provided the answer: they came from Vijayanagara, the Gujarat Sultanate, Kalinga, from the Coromandel Coast, from Bengal. The name "India" did not exist back then.