Reclaiming India’s Maritime Inheritance

As the INSV Kaundinya retraces an ancient sea route, Shoumojit Banerjee explores India’s rich maritime past and its disruption by European colonialism

Two days before the New Year, as the winter sun settled over Porbandar’s harbour, a ship put to sea in a manner that would have been eminently recognisable along India’s western coast more than a millennium ago. There was no engine to mark its departure, no steel hull vibrating against the pier as the vessel slipped into the Arabian Sea with its canvas filled and ropes tightened. It was guided by wind and tide rather than mechanical command.

The vessel - the INSV Kaundinya - was bound for Muscat, roughly 1,400 kilometres to the west. The passage which is expected to take about two weeks, follows a route that once formed a vital commercial corridor linking western India with Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and East Africa and beyond them the wider Indian Ocean world in ancient times.

Long before the arrival of European navies, this sea lane had carried pepper and cotton, teak and textiles, along with sailors, pilgrims, financiers and ideas. The Kaundinya’s voyage is an attempt to demonstrate that India’s relationship with the = sea did not begin with colonial intrusion, nor did it end with it.

Officially, the expedition has been framed as an ‘experimental’ naval project. The vessel was built using techniques described in early Indian sources and iconography, with the aim of testing their seaworthiness under modern conditions.

In actuality, the Kaundinya’s voyage advances a broader historical claim that the Indian Ocean formed a complex, integrated economic system long before European powers attempted to dominate it and that Indian actors were integral to its workings, not incidental to them - a point that resonates as India assumes a more consequential role in global affairs today.

The Kaundinya is an exercise in historical engineering. Measuring 19.6 metres in length, with a beam of 6.5 metres and a draft of 3.33 metres, it is constructed entirely of wood. Its planks are stitched together using coir rope made from coconut fibre, sealed with natural resins, rather than nailed or riveted. The ship has no engine. Instead, it relies on a square sail and auxiliary triangular sails, drawing on the monsoon wind systems that Indian sailors have understood and exploited for more than two millennia.

In days or yore, sewn-plank vessels like the Kaundinya were widespread across the Indian Ocean littoral, from western India to Arabia and East Africa. Archaeological finds along the Omani coast, particularly at Ras al-Jinz, confirm their use at least 2,000 years ago. Their flexibility allowed them to absorb wave shock more effectively than the rigid hulls favoured by early European shipbuilders.

The project grew out of a tripartite agreement signed in July 2023 between the Indian Navy, the Ministry of Culture and Hodi Innovations, a Goa-based shipbuilding firm. Construction began the same year under the supervision of traditional shipwrights from Kerala, whose craft has survived largely through oral transmission despite centuries of technological displacement.

Because no complete archaeological specimen of such a vessel exists, the design had to be reconstructed from multiple sources, including textual references and visual evidence, notably the fifth-century Ajanta cave murals, which depict stitched ships navigating open seas. Naval architects at IIT Madras subjected the design to hydrodynamic testing to ensure that historical plausibility did not come at the cost of safety. The ship was launched in February last year and formally inducted into the Indian Navy in May.

The vessel’s name gestures eastward as well as westward. In Southeast Asian tradition, Kaundinya is remembered as an Indian mariner or ritual specialist associated with the early polity of Funan, in present-day Cambodia and Vietnam, around the first century CE.

Whether legend or historical composite, the story reflects a broader pattern of Indian commercial and cultural presence across Southeast Asia that was transmitted by ships, merchants and monks rather than armies.

To understand the significance of the Kaundinya’s voyage, it helps to abandon the deeply embedded habit in popular history of seeing the Indian Ocean as a passive stage awaiting European arrival. Indian engagement with the sea is old enough to resist neat periodisation. Archaeologists trace it to the third millennium BCE, when the cities of the Indus Valley traded with Mesopotamia. Archaeological evidence from Lothal, dating to around 2500 BCE, points to dock infrastructure engineered to manage tidal variation, suggesting sustained maritime exchange between the Indus Valley, Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf. Seals from Harappa have turned up in Sumer; lapis lazuli from Afghanistan travelled by boat before it ever travelled by horse.

By the early centuries of the Common Era, Indian merchants were fixtures in ports along the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Mesopotamian records refer to Meluhha, widely identified with the Indus region as a source of timber, copper, carnelian beads and luxury goods.

Older Oceans

Long before Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, these waters were already thick with traffic. Indian merchants, Arab navigators and East African traders understood the rhythm of the monsoon with an intimacy that made seasonal wind patterns a form of infrastructure. Ports like Bharuch, Sopara, Muziris and later Cambay were less endpoints than switching stations in a vast, salt-water web connecting West Asia, Africa, and Southeast Asia. The Indian Ocean, unlike the Atlantic of later centuries, was not an arena of conquest so much as a zone of commercial, cultural and intellectual exchange.

By the late first millennium BCE, these exchanges had expanded dramatically. Indian merchants were embedded in long-distance trade networks linking the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, and Southeast Asia. The ‘Periplus of the Erythraean Sea,’ said to have been written by a Greek-speaking merchant sometime in the first century CE, lists Indian ports such as Barygaza (modern Bharuch), Sopara and Muziris on the Malabar Coast.

It explains how sailors exploited the Hippalus winds to cross directly from the Red Sea to India and catalogues goods like pepper, ivory, silk, pearls and fine cottons traded with remarkable regularity.

If the early Indian Ocean economy was mercantile, the Chola period gave it unmistakable state power. Between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, the Chola empire in southern India presided over one of the most ambitious maritime systems Asia had yet seen. Tamil merchant guilds such as the Ayyavole and Manigramam operated across the Bay of Bengal, establishing permanent commercial settlements from Sri Lanka to Sumatra. Chola fleets protected these routes, enforced contracts, and, when required, projected force.

Rajendra Chola’s naval expedition against Srivijaya in 1025 was an assertion of commercial primacy over the choke points of maritime Asia. Inscriptions record the movement of spices, textiles, precious metals and horses, underscoring that the Indian Ocean was not merely traversed by Indian traders but actively shaped by Indian political and economic power centuries before European entry.

Roman writers were acutely aware of this commerce. Pliny the Elder, writing around 77 CE, complained that Rome lost 50 million sesterces annually to trade with India, Arabia and China. Indian pepper, textiles and gemstones were embedded in Roman material life, turning up in Pompeii, Alexandria and imperial villas across Italy.

Malabar World

The Malabar Coast emerged as one of the most important nodes in this system. Ports such as Muziris, Tyndis, and later Calicut (Kozhikode) functioned as entrepôts where Arab, Jewish, Christian, Persian and Indian merchants operated under legal regimes that prioritised commerce over confessional identity. When Calicut rose to prominence between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries under the patronage of the Zamorin, it became one of the most cosmopolitan ports in the world. Chinese fleets under Admiral Zheng He called there between 1405 and 1433 while Arab geographers such as Ibn Battuta, who visited in 1342, described it admiringly. Early European travellers were struck by its openness and commercial sophistication.

This changed with European intervention, which altered this balance not by introducing global trade, but by militarising it. The Portuguese cartaz system, imposed after 1498, forced Indian Ocean shipping to purchase Portuguese-issued passes, turning free navigation into a licensed activity enforced by cannon. Dutch and English convoy regimes followed, increasingly tying trade to territorial control. It was K.M. Panikkar who placed this rupture at the centre of Indian historical consciousness. In his classic essay India and the Indian Ocean (1945), written as Independence approached, Panikkar argued that India “never lost her independence till she lost the command of the sea in the first decade of the sixteenth century.” There had been an unfortunate tendency to overlook the sea in the discussion of India’s defence problems, he said.

Panikkar observed that until the arrival of the Portuguese at Calicut, no naval power had appeared in Indian waters capable of enforcing exclusive sovereignty. The Arabs who dominated trade after the decline of Chola naval power were commercial navigators, not instruments of state policy. What Vasco da Gama’s successors introduced was a new conception: exclusive control of the seas, enforced by organised violence, justified by papal decree and imperial ambition. Indian polities, long accustomed to open seas, were compelled to respond and among the first to do so systematically were the Marathas.

The Mughals, Panikkar observed, never overcame their Central Asian suspicion of the sea. Akbar endured the humiliation of Portuguese interference with imperial trade and pilgrim traffic to Mecca. Aurangzeb’s half-hearted naval efforts relied on the Sidis of Janjira in a bid to counter the growing Maratha power. The result was that during the 200 years of Moghul domination, not only was the Indian sea entirely under alien control but simultaneously with the development of Moghul power, the foundation was being laid by others for a more complete subjection of India, than any land power at any time could have conceived. The importance of the sea came to be recognised by the Indian Rulers only when it was too late, said Pannikar.

Maratha Waters

Chhatrapati Shivaji was near enough to the Portuguese base of Goa to realise its importance and did initiate a policy of naval expansion which in the heyday of Maratha power ruled the Konkan waters.

Under him, the Maratha state constructed a chain of sea forts including Sindhudurg, Vijaydurg, Suvarnadurg and Kolaba which were integrated into a coastal defence system that combined naval patrols, revenue collection and coastal intelligence. Shivaji Maharaj established a formal naval administration by 1659, appointing admirals, regulating shipyards and recruiting coastal communities.

This maritime experiment reached its apex under Kanhoji Angre, appointed Sarkhel (Admiral of the Maratha Navy) around 1698. Contrary to European perceptions, Angre was no corsair operating at the margins of authority but a key functionary of a pre-British power at its zenith, commanding a fleet that at its height numbered several dozen armed vessels, supported by coastal forts and a revenue system that treated maritime tolls as a legitimate extension of sovereignty.

From his base at Kolaba (modern Alibaug), Angre asserted control over much of the Konkan coastline. European ships that refused to recognise Maratha authority or pay customary duties were intercepted, their cargoes seized, crews detained and ransoms negotiated. The records of the English East India Company are filled with anxious references to Angre as a persistent and humiliating adversary. Between 1702 and 1721, repeated British and Portuguese expeditions failed to break his control of the coast.

Angre understood the coast, the tides and the limits of European naval power in littoral waters. After his death in 1729, internal Maratha divisions weakened naval capacity, allowing European powers to consolidate their position. But for a generation, he ensured the Arabian Sea remained contested.

Likewise, the Mysore ruler Hyder Ali also realised the vital importance of control over the oceans as his agreement with the French admiral Bailee de Suffren conclusively proves. However, by the time of Chhatrapati Shivaji, the control of the seas had already passed to the Dutch and the British; and by the time of Hyder Ali, the British were the undoubted masters of the Indian Ocean, though the transcendent genius of Suffren eclipsed the fact for a short time.

It is through these layered histories that the Kaundinya sails today. Its voyage does not romanticise the past but instead asks a pointed question: what changes our understanding of global history when the Indian Ocean is treated not as a European discovery, but as an older, Indian-influenced system?

As India reorients itself toward the Indo-Pacific, this question has contemporary relevance. The Kaundinya’s wake is long because the waters it now charts re-opens an older map in which India was not merely acted upon from the sea, but once acted decisively upon it.