How Indians and their boats fared in the deep sea: Clues from a little-known past

A model of the stitched ship that will sail from Odisha. (Express Photo)

What’s the earliest known instance of people from the subcontinent taking part in sea trade? And as they set off on some of the most daring expeditions, with little but the wind in their sails to guide them, what were the boats or ships they employed?

Early evidence of maritime trade

Evidence from Indus Valley, Mesopotamia and other coastal sites on the Arabian Sea show the existence of maritime trade networks circa 3300-1300 BCE. The dock at Lothal (in present-day Gujarat), a remarkable engineering feat for its time, shows the civilisation’s deep understanding of the workings of tides and winds.

Meanwhile, Neolithic-Chalcolithic sites in present-day Odisha (dated to as early as circa 2300 BCE) have yielded evidence of boat building and fishing, and, possibly, contact with South-East Asia.

Experts also point to how the Vedas (composed between circa 1500-500 BCE) feature colourful tales of seafaring and the perils involved. The Buddhist fables Jataka Tales (composed circa 300 BCE- 400 CE) as well as Tamil Sangam literature (composed circa 300 BCE-300 CE) contain even clearer references to seas and seafaring.

Despite these hints and decades of scholarship on thriving maritime networks featuring India and Indians, the country’s maritime heritage has not percolated into popular narratives of the country’s past.

Archaeologist PJ Cherian, who has led the Pattanam (Muziris) excavations in Kerala, suggests that historians “failed to include our maritime heritage in greater narratives of India’s past due to commonly held biases”.

“The development of states, and organised, hierarchical land-based polities has definitely affected our historiography, sidelining a history of waterbodies,” he told The Indian Express, adding, “You cannot create an ‘area of control’ when it comes to the seas — it is thus far easier to write histories of land-based kingdoms … we see this tendency all over the world.”

Early maritime activity was largely restricted to the coasts. “Movement through the deep seas intensified by the 1st century BCE, with the emergence of the Roman Empire and its insatiable appetite for commodities from the East,” Cherian said.

“Mid-ocean crossings were made possible by harnessing the power of monsoon winds to complete journeys quickly…Roman commerce simply spurred the need for such voyages,” he added.

Reviving India’s Ancient Maritime Legacy!

Extremely delighted to be part of the momentous keel laying ceremony of the Stitched Ship, which shall revive the 2000 year old Indian technology of stitching ships together through wooden planks.

This unique initiative under the… pic.twitter.com/p7ODWdCEa7

— Meenakashi Lekhi (@M_Lekhi) September 12, 2023

The boats they built

But such voyages were made possible only due to corresponding developments in shipbuilding and navigation. Not only did vessels need to be sturdy to survive their journeys, they also had to be capable of holding enough cargo. As Prof Steven Sidebotham, veteran archaeologist most famous for his work at the Egyptian port of Berenike, put it, “No one was coming to a miserable place like Berenike for vacation.”

So, what do we know about ancient Indian boats? Not a whole lot. “Marine archaeology in India is still very much at its infancy when compared to other countries,” said scholar-historian William Dalrymple. What is known, is mainly through extant boat-building traditions or representations of seafaring vessels in art and literature.

For instance, the design chosen for the recent project is based on a ship painted on the walls of Ajanta Caves in present-day Maharashtra. “The rough idea (was taken from) an Ajanta painting of a stitched ship. The ship will have square sails, two masts, two trailing oars and a flexible hull. We will not use a rudder,” Sanjeev Sanyal, economic advisor to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the author of The Ocean of Churn (2016), said at the September 12 keel-laying ceremony of the ‘stitched boat’ project.

Historian Lotika Varadarajan had in a 1993 paper titled ‘Indian Boat Building Traditions, The Ethnological Evidence’ written about “three sets of maritime tradition (in India) — the coir sewn tradition of the Arabian Sea … the jong tradition of Southeast Asia impinging on Bengal and perhaps Orissa … and the Austronesian tradition of outrigger boats”, while emphasising that these traditions themselves were not mutually exclusive.

These Indian boat-building traditions can be characterised by a certain reluctance to use nails. All three traditions mentioned above use some form of stitching. While the coir-stitched technique attached planks of wood together with the help of strong coir and some adhesive substance, the other two traditions, which emerged from South-East Asia, used discontinuous stitches.

Technique of plank joinery aside, a variety of local woods was available to cater to the specific needs of shipbuilding. “Mangrove wood made the sturdiest dowels … (whereas) teak lent itself to the fashioning of planks, keels, stem and stern posts,” Varadarajan wrote.

Such usage can be seen in evidence ranging from present-day usage among coastal communities to archaeological evidence across the Indian Ocean, from Berenike in the west to Java in the east.

India at centre of ‘trade lake’

By the beginning of the Common Era, the Indian Ocean transformed into — in the words of PJ Cherian — a “trade lake”, with India at the very centre of it.

“In Roman sources, Muziris appears as the end of the world. But there is evidence to suggest a maritime route, probably hugging the coastline, all the way to China and Malaysia. Tamilakam (the region inhabited by the ancient Tamilpeople) had a central position, geographically and economically, in this network,” he said.

To India’s west was the route connecting the subcontinent to Europe through the Middle East and Africa. “The route connected Barygaza (present-day Bharuch) and Muziris to Red Sea ports in Egypt, primarily Berenike and Myos Hormos,” Prof Sidebotham explained, adding, “Along the way, ships would have stopped at ports on the Arabian coastline, in places such as modern-day Oman to replenish supplies and partake in trade.”

Towards the east, evidence of Indian artefacts have been unearthed as far away as Hepu in China, dating back to the 3rd century BCE. “The Hepu site is now recognised as the starting point of the Maritime Silk Road, which could have transported Chinese silk to Muziris for the Romans” Cherian said. The port of Tamralipti (in present-day Bengal) is believed to be particularly important for this trade.

While it is hard to put exact numbers on the scale of the trade, estimates based on available evidence indicate a near unfathomable scale. Speaking about the western route, Dalrymple said that as per latest calculations, “custom taxes on the Red Sea trade with India, Persia and Ethiopia raised as much as one-third of the income for the Roman exchequer”.

These networks enabled the movement of a vast number of people, from various sections of society, who, along with their goods, brought their culture and ways of life to distant lands. In Berenike, for instance, numerous artefacts of Indian provenance or influence have been found, including the famous Berenike Buddha (actually, three Buddha fragments have been found and pieced together), a relief showing three different Hindu gods, a terracotta statuette fragment made in India and even an inscription in Sanskrit, the only such one in the Western world.

‘Just scratched the surface’

A lot has been revealed in recent years about India’s maritime past. Excavations in sites across the Indian Ocean have provided details that ancient literary sources simply did not contain. However, as Prof Sidebotham put it, “we have just scratched the surface”. Even in Berenike, where excavation work has been happening since 1994, only about 2 per cent of the total area of the site has been excavated.

Dalrymple said that when compared to the kind of work done, for example, off the coast of China or Singapore, Indian marine archaeology lags behind.

“In general, archaeology in India could do with a lot more funding and recognition,” Dalrymple said, adding, “An amazing amount of India’s past has never been excavated. And many of the most interesting and promising archaeological sites in India haven’t been dug since Victorian times.”

But why should all this matter? Beyond the innate value of knowledge itself, there is value in what this knowledge might imply. “Scientific archaeology may prove to be of enormous benefit to humanity. Engaging the deep past is a subversive act,” said Cherian.