Empires of the Sea: A Human History of the Indian Ocean World

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The Indian Ocean world's significance in human history is impossible to dismiss. The 1,000-0dd kilometres of the subcontinent's coastline - which underpinned some of the world's greatest empires and shaped countless human lives - therefore make for the perfect dock from which to embark on a journey through the centuries for a vital reappraisal of India's history.

In this eye-opening book, noted historian Radhika Seshan sets out to map our age-old connections with the seas, tracing maritime linkages from the Harappan period all the way to the long colonial era. Her re-examination of India's past through the prism of water reveals the extent to which this conduit enabled trade and the movement of people, often leading to the establishment of crucial ports, communities, kingdoms and empires. The Chola, Chalukya and Vijayanagar empires, historic ports such as Muziris and Bharuch and accounts of travellers, explorers, merchants and monarchs who frequented India's shores are explored here in vivid detail, with the sea providing a riveting backdrop of adventure, migration, invasion and rich cultural networks. While the arrival of the Europeans, the subsequent Raj and their consolidation of terrestrial networks marked the gradual decline of our maritime dominance, the seas hold sway over our geopolitics even today.

Combining scholarly rigour with a storyteller's flair, Empires of the Sea presents India afresh as a nation of pluralities made possible by virtue of its long-standing maritime relations with the world at large.

Radhika Seshan retired as Professor and Head of the Department of History, Savitribai Phule Pune University. She is now visiting faculty at the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Pune. A reputed academic writer, she is the author and editor of several books, including Narratives, Routes and Intersections in Pre-Modern Asia, Trade and Politics on the Coromandel Coast: Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries and Medieval India: Problems and Possibilities. She currently lives in Pune.

Can water have a history? Technically, the answer would have to be 'no', because history, after all, must trace humans and human affairs. But the extent of ways in which water has influenced human lives makes our connections to it a crucial part of human history. So then, the question would have to be amended to ask whether water has a history, and if it does, how can this history be traced. Water and human movement over and across it is a strong, continuing theme in folklore and world literature. They are both replete with fabulous stories of witches and wizards who feel sick while crossing water, sprites who haunt the open waters, sirens and mermaids who lure sailors and cause shipwrecks and drownings, the mythical Loch Ness monster believed to inhabit Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands, stories of Sinbad the Sailor's voyages that primarily took place across Indian Ocean, old maps of the world showing monsters around their edges with the words 'here be dragons' and much more.

There are other stories, more specific to India. A famous one is of the samudra manthan, the great churning of the ocean, which resulted in many more stories: the emergence of the poison that Shiva swallowed (making him Neelakantha), the sharing of the nectar, and the role of the devas and rakshasas. But something embedded in here is also the idea of water and its use as a divisive force. This was last seen in society when those belonging to 'lower' castes were not permitted to draw water from village wells. Going back to folklore, another equally famous story is that of Vishnu's matsya avatar, in which the deity took the form of a fish to lead the sages to safety. And these are not the only stories.

There are also ones about the purifying qualities of water, particularly rivers like the Ganga and the Yamuna. Linked to these stories are more tangible representations, in the form of iconography.