Living up to our oceanic glory

In a comprehensive monograph titled “A Vision of Maritime India 2020”, Admiral Arun Prakash in 2012 reinvoked the need “to create a consciousness of our ancient maritime heritage” to shore up our efforts in creating a Maritime India. Retracing our maritime glory has great historical validity, simply because it necessarily does not have to thrive on myth-making. At a time when India is locked in a battle of attrition over expanding its circle of influence around the Indian Ocean – much in the fashion the Ottomans were with their Portuguese rivals – so far “India had indeed overlooked its maritime interests,” Shashi Tharoor wrote wryly, “often acting as if the ocean was an accident of geography rather than a vital strategic setting.” 

Therefore, it is just par for the course that a historically-minded India is on a revivalist mode to retrace its position of strength around the Indian Ocean. When historically important artefacts are revived, consciously or serendipitously, just to discover their abiding contemporary relevance, it appears no less fresh as an invention. Historians all the while have been aware that that there have been major economic and cultural exchanges across the waters of the Indian Ocean and around its coasts that date back at least seven thousand years and that these were greatly accelerated following the rise and expansion of Islam from the seventh century CE. The Indian Ocean – one of the oldest and most striking spaces of cross-cultural interaction – has been remarkable for its role in facilitating contact between the Arab world, East Africa, coastal India, the Malay world and Australia for millennia. 

Apart from the aspect of security, the Indian Ocean has remained central to international maritime trade and coincident cultural networking in Asia that developed in stages. Historians locate initial prosperity to be centred in the maritime Middle East–India route with overland connections to the Silk Road that connected the West with China. The Indian Ocean maritime route (the ‘‘Maritime Silk Road’’) developed after Rome established its Pax Romana in the first century of the Christian era, corresponding to a diffusion of knowledge among sailors of Greece, Persia, and the Roman Orient on the use of the monsoon winds for navigation, which navigators based in South and Southeast Asia had used in earlier centuries to reach the western Indian Ocean coasts. Recently we are getting to see that New Delhi is trying to neutralise the ‘force’ of China's proposal by choosing to highlight its own maritime history, including India's central role in what it calls spice and mausam routes.

Be that as it may but for centuries, the Indian Ocean has been the port of call for “mobile underclasses” – poor Europeans, Australians and East Africans within South Asia, as well as Indian pauper pilgrims travelling abroad to the Hijaz and Indian seamen employed in the British merchant marine for whom moving between port cities was a regular activity, and who thus travelled between India, Australia, Ceylon, Kenya, and the Arabic peninsula. Many were constant wanderers, as in the case of seamen or brothel workers in Bombay and Calcutta, while others went on pilgrimage to fulfil their religious duty or were transported during wars, such as military personnel recruited in East Africa and stationed in Ceylon.

For the great mariners, adventurers and geographers of ancient times, who traversed the oceans from the centres of trade and civilization in Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo and Constantinople to China in the Far East, the island of Ceylon was a beacon and haven. From Megasthenes to Pliny, Ptolemy to Fa Hsien, Cosmas to Al-Biruni, and Marco Polo to Ibn Batuta – no island in the world has been so frequently mentioned as Ceylon. Vessels bound for the east from the Red Sea ports of Jeddah, or Suez or from the Persian entrepot at Ormuz voyaged across the Arabian Sea to the coast of Malabar to India and thence to Ceylon before proceeding outwards to their destinations in Bengal or China. Equally the Chinese traders following the same ocean routes arrived at ports on their way to destinations along the Arabian coastline. 

Through the first centuries CE, Western and Chinese records portrayed Southeast Asia as a region of ‘exotic’ lands that lay between India and China on a mystified Indian Oceanic passageway. When Westerners reached India in the first century they found that there was already regular maritime networking between India and Southeast Asia’s Straits of Malacca region. Southeast Asia–based seamen and Indian and Middle Eastern traders routinely made the voyage from India’s eastern coast or Sri Lanka to Southeast Asian ports, which provided access to China’s rich markets.

In the early eleventh century, Bay of Bengal regional trade encompassed the Burmese, Cambodian, and Thai mainland polities and the variety of domains on the upper Malay Peninsula and the northern and western coasts of Sumatra; India’s eastern and southern coasts and Sri Lanka were the regional points of contact with the western Indian Ocean. There was also an overland trade network between Burma and southern China. Southern Sumatra and the lower Malay Peninsula remained principal Southeast Asian landfalls where Western and Eastern Indian Ocean international traders intersected. 

Therefore, foreign minister Sushma Swaraj, averring the focus on the region that extends from the African coast to West Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia and touches Australia or Narendra Modi showcasing India’s foreign policy priorities in her immediate and extended neighbourhood upon his recent visit to the three Indian Ocean island countries resonates seamlessly with Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s plea in 2003 that as our security environment ranges from the Persian Gulf to the Straits of Malacca across the Indian Ocean, our strategic thinking has also to extend to these horizons.

With such historical background, India must take fuller advantage of the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA) – a pan-Indian Ocean regional grouping consisting of twenty countries across Asia, Africa and Australia, six dialogue partners, and two observers – as a platform to garner important influence in the Indian Ocean region. But as any reference to India’s maritime past cannot be delinked from that that of Southeast Asia, India – with Australia, Japan, and the US by its side – must learn to match China’s traditional security and economic initiatives by exercising naval diplomacy involving maritime multilateralism with Indian Ocean littorals with greater stridency and material inputs. And in that, the Indian Navy is saddled with a truly historical remit, governed once by a smooth flow of international trade and old world multilateralism, so that a groggy vision of our past does not clutter our vision of contemporary realities. 

The author is a teacher and social commentator