Why Did the Indian Navy Recreate an Ancient Ship?

What use is a navy ship that will not engage in fighting, or patrolling, or reconnaissance? What use is a ship that is a recreation of an ancient trading vessel, not even a military ship?

Its use is that it tells a story – both of a country’s past and its declared future.

In May this year, the Indian Navy christened the INSV Kaundinya, a freshly completed reconstruction of a 5th century ship. The name itself is a reference to a legendary Indian sailor. Later in 2025, the Kaundinya is to sail from the western Indian state of Gujarat to Oman, following the sea route between India and the Arabian Peninsula.

The makers of the vessel had to partially base their work on a cave painting (from Ajanta in west India), as apparently no physical Indian ship from the 5th century was preserved. However, written and oral sources from the time make it abundantly clear that trade between the Middle East, East Africa, and India flourished in that period – as did the exchange in the other direction, between Southeast Asia and South Asia.

Trade rose especially in the 1st century, when a Greek sailor first grasped the cyclical pattern of monsoon winds. His knowledge was preserved and allowed future generations of merchants to sail across the Indian Ocean, instead of taking the slower route that clung to the coast. Even the exchange between the Roman Empire and India flourished: evidence for this are the golden Roman coins found along the southern Indian coast as well as Pliny the Elder’s 1st century lament that a fortune was being spent every year to import Indian cotton clothes into Rome.

Here is what K.A. Nilakanta Sastri, the author of the authoritative “History of South India,” wrote about the trade with southern India at that time

Trade, both inland and foreign, was well organized and briskly carried on throughout the period; Tamil poems, classical authors and archeological finds in South India all speak with one voice on this subject. The great port-cities were the emporia of foreign trade. Big ships, we are told, entered the port of Puhār [Poompuhar, on the southeastern Indian coast in Tamil Nadu] without slacking sail, and poured out on the beach precious merchandise brought from overseas.

With goods, there flowed religion. It is no surprise that the image on which the reconstructed ship was based on was taken from the Ajanta caves. In the ancient times, the caves served as residences for Buddhist monks. Buddhism was at that time an “urban” religion, in the sense that its authors clearly took interest in city life and in trade, including its international aspect (and probably also in the sense that large Buddhist monasteries depended on alms, which were easier to gather if there were cities in the vicinity). Buddhist monks accompanied Indian merchants both along the land routes that formed the Silk Road, and also the maritime trade lines into Southeast Asia.

The story of Hinduism is more complex but similar in part. At least in the later period of Indian history, some orthodox priests believed that crossing the sea resulted in ritual pollution and thus forbade it (though it is hard to establish how far in time this belief persisted, and how widespread it was). Yet, it is abundantly clear that Brahmans accompanied traders in the same sea voyages. Kaundinya, after which the new ship has been named, was said to be a Brahman who traveled to what is now Cambodia.

It was thus not only Buddhist traditions that once flourished in Southeast Asia – so did the Brahmanical ones. The faith of the people of Lombok and Bali, while a minority in today’s Muslim-dominated Indonesia, is a testament to this. It is striking that despite the later references to Brahmanical orthodoxy objecting to sea travel, earlier in the millennium the Brahmanical traditions seemed to have spread mainly across the seas into Southeast Asia, and not inland, into Central Asia and China, even though Buddhists took both routes.

It is also striking that the Indian Navy chose to reconstruct a trading ship, not a military one. This may not be representative of India’s approach today – after all, the new vessel will serve in a branch of the Indian military – but what appears as a discrepancy today is much in tune with the Indian history of the past centuries. Most Indian kingdoms were not sea-faring, in the sense that their navies were more capable of defending the coastal waters rather than crossing the blue seas. Most Indian ships that plied the Indian Ocean in the early centuries were trading ships – more than that, they were quite often the possession of private Indian merchants or guilds, but not the monarchs as such. Merchants, priests, and monks seemed to travel much more often than royal soldiers.

This continued well into the early modern period. Even though the Mughal empire was one of the largest in Indian history, and possibly one of the richest realms in the history of the world, it did not avail itself of a blue water navy worth the name. When in 1695, a fleet led by English pirate Henry Every captured a Mughal ship on the Arabian Sea, the atrocious act let to a global manhunt, perhaps the first such chase in history. Yet, it was not undertaken by the Mughal fleet, as it was incapable of doing so. The Mughals forced the East India Company to search for Every and his comrades – and even the British fleet failed. Still, this supremacy on the seas was one of the reasons that allowed the Europeans, mostly the British, to eventually conquer India.

However, there was an Indian kingdom that did undertake naval expeditions: the Chola kingdom, which attacked the realm of Srivijaya in Southeast Asia twice in the 11th century. The Indian Navy could have chosen to reconstruct a medieval military ship from the Chola kingdom instead. Perhaps it will do so one day. This would be much more in tune with the image of the force, though much less with the general truth of Indian history.

For the past two millennia, India was connected to large swaths of Africa and Asia by sea trade – but, apart from rare exceptions, Indian kingdoms failed to protect those maritime routes. Now, with the growth of its navy, India is attempting to fill in this historical gap. INSV Kaundinya is thus the symbol of India’s past, while the rest of the Indian Navy is an expression of the country’s desired future.