Reaching There

India as an ancient maritime power is a theme I was not aware of until I read the book 'The Ocean of Churn' by Sanjeev Sanyal. India has over 7000 kilometers of the maritime border that it shares with Bangladesh, Indonesia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and the Maldives. If you look at these countries at the history of these modern countries you can see the impact of inter-trade of Southeast Asia that was connected through trade routes. The Ocean of Churn The book brings to light the history of India that's largely ignored by norther Indian readers. And it's not because of a made-up Aryan-Dravidian divide (by the way the whole Aryan Invasion/Migration or origination of pastoral activities from Steppes have been proven incorrect in 2019!) but because our history books never talked about Nandivarman, Kharavela, Kaundinya and others who ruled over various parts of India during different time periods and also confronted the foreign invaders from the w...

As a kid, I was fascinated by the section on Indus Valley Civilization in my history book at school. To imagine an ancient India where the cities were laid out in a Manhattan-like grid, with an upper and a lower city, an advanced drainage system, and ports from where traders traveled as far as ancient Sumeria or Egypt. It's just a captivating part of our country's ancient history. I let my imagination run far with some help from the pictures of Mohenjo-daro, Harappa or Dholavira but I'm unable to relate to these ancient ancestors that traversed the same land where I was born thousands of millennia later. Seal from Indus Valley Civilization Living Modern History And then I have the modern history of India when the entire concept of India was formed from scratch. It was in the time of Dadabhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishna Gokhale,  Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Motilal Nehru, Mahatama Gandhi and other leaders of modern India spent decades of their lives to build th...