TIED to the TIDE

Indian history is often seen through a landlocked lens, and comparatively little has been written about the country’s glorious maritime past. But with land rivalries, especially with China, being pushed into the sea, India is trying to retell its naval history and renew lost connections

- MANDIRA NAYAR

Donald Trump was not the first man to send out ships to assert his country’s freedom of navigation. (This summer, the US sent two aircraft carriers to the South China Sea to intimidate China). In 1025, Rajendra Chola I—the most powerful king in southern India—sent out ships to Srivijaya (now in Indonesia) to make a similar demonstration of power.

According to an inscription at the biggest temple in Thanjavur, the heart of the Chola dynasty, his ships raided Srivijaya and 14 other ports. The Chola raid has been woven into the larger nationalist narrative of India as a muscular superpower. However, the Cholas never actually took over Srivijaya. Newer research suggests that the reason to invade was not expansionist, but rather a commercial one. “The Cholas were interested in maintaining free maritime lanes,” says Dennard D’Souza, a young researcher at the Maritime History Society in Mumbai.

The Chola invasion illustrates that, whatever the century, trade rivalries can be fierce. And India, exposed to water on three sides, has a rich maritime past. The Chola raid was just one chapter of a vast book of stories.

“The history that we have taught and written has implicitly accepted that there was a caste restriction to sailing across the ocean,” says scholar Himanshu Prabha Ray, the grande dame of maritime history. “This is, however, something that came up only in the 19th century—the notion of kala pani (a taboo of the sea). But it also ties into the post-economic (elitist) structure in which history has been written, which is why the only space it provides [to maritime affairs] is [related to] trade. It does not provide for maritime history, the notion of mobile communities travelling for not just trade, but also for religious purposes or just for the resources of the seas. There is a lacuna.”