It was a good day for India. The prime minister commissioned the INS Vikrant, India’s first aircraft carrier that is wholly atmanirbhar (or, at least, has 76% Indian componentry). Granted, it’s not operational and won’t be until end-2023 (if not later). Granted, it was delayed by seven years because of technological lassitude and a cash crunch following a six-fold cost overrun. Granted, it can only handle helicopters at the moment as the completion of its aviation flight complex (AFC), crucial for its combat air arm, is at the mercy of its dawdling supplier, Russia. Nonetheless, its commissioning was a muscular symbol of maritime sovereignty on India’s 75th independence anniversary.
There was, however, one hiccup—a singultus that threatens to expand into a full-blown controversy. And this was the simultaneous unveiling of a new Indian Navy ensign, formally named ‘Nishaan’ (target/impression/indication). That the 72-year-old ensign needed refurbishing (its fourth and probably definitive) is not in debate: it has long had vestigial but pronounced tendrils of India’s colonial past.
But the truth is that despite a statement released by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) that it would do “away with the colonial past…befitting the rich Indian maritime heritage”, the new ensign is not entirely historically fidelitous. India’s maritime heritage goes a far longer way back than the PMO thinks it does: the best of naval times were, indeed, precolonial.
As it has since January 26, 1950, when India became a republic and the Navy Crest and flag were Indianised, the tricolour occupies the top left corner (the canton). The bottom right quarter, however, has been refashioned into a gilt-edged octagon inspired—going by a short documentary released by the Indian Navy (SpokespersonNavy @indiannavy)—by the Raja Mudra, the seal of the revered Maratha ruler Chhatrapati Shivaji. It’s a doffing of the establishment and natsec hat to his naval prowess.
According to an Indian Navy document: “The navy under Shivaji was so strong that the Marathas could hold their own against the British, Portuguese and Dutch. Shivaji realised the importance of having a secure coastline and protecting the western Konkan coastline....”
There is little to argue with here. Shivaji’s navy, which came into existence in the mid-17th century, increased its number of ships from 20 in 1659 to more than 100 in the early 1670s, even as its range of coastal patrolling and engagements increased.
But, as historians from southern India—both academic and amateur, politically motivated or socially—have begun to point out, Shivaji’s navy was not the apotheosis of India’s naval prowess. That credit must go to the ancient Tamil kings Rajaraja Chola I and his son Rajendra Chola I. In CE 1010–1200, the far-ranging Chola navy helped establish an empire that stretched from the upper Godavari in the north to parts of Sri Lanka to maritime South-east Asia (present-day Indonesia and Cambodia) to the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, about 750-km south-west of the subcontinental mainland. The Cholas ran maritime trade and commerce—and likely interpersonal relations, as well—as far and wide as China, the Malayan archipelago, and the Baghdad caliphate. It is an indication of its power, economic mettle, and naval endurance that the Chola empire—a full-blown thalassocracy—lasted more than a millennium and a half.
In a sense, the Chola navy was both imperial and bluewater—capable of ranging far and wide oceanically. Shivaji ran a defensive naval operation, and his navy was strictly brown water—designed for and tasked with manoeuvring in the near-shore littoral zone and rivers. The Cholas commanded giant tracts of both the west and the east coasts of peninsular India; Shivaji, the Konkan coast.
Fully cognisant of the naval eminence of the Cholas, the Indian Navy commemorated, as recently as November 2014, the 1,000th anniversary of the coronation of Rajendra Chola I. Referencing the Chola navy’s extraterritorial reach, celebrations were marked by the INS Sudarshini, a circumnavigating, three-masted barque of the Indian Navy, sailing to Nagapattinam, which had been a Chola naval base and a takeoff point for easterly adventurism and commerce. Commodore Amar K Mahadevan, Naval Officer in-charge (Tamil Nadu and Puducherry), had then said:
“It is only fitting that a circumnavigating ship is being involved in the celebrations of a king, whose navy has gone beyond boundaries even in those ancient times.”
Three years later, on November 26, 2017, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman (then the newly installed Union minister of Defence) had tweeted (tagging the PMO @PMOIndia and the prime minister @narendramodi, and hashtagging #MannKiBaat):
“900 years ago Chola navy was considered 1 of world’s best navies. Also mentioned in Tamil Sangam Literature. Women were part of the Chola Navy. Ship building was also well known about the Chola Kings.”
It can’t, therefore, be the case that the Centre, the PMO, the defence ministry, and the Indian Navy were or are unaware that Shivaji’s navy is not India’s first— and not its most outstanding and rangy, either. They knew about the paramountcy of the Cholas. All of it is unarguable, documented history.
There is no logical—or good enough—reason to supremacise one region over another in the business of historicality. It is, therefore, difficult not to assume that this ahistorical renovating of the ensign of a national defence force is meant to serve a regio-political purpose in which the south figures only tangentially, if at all.
This historiographical peripheralisation of entire swathes of India —predominantly the south and the east—in favour of highlighting the history of north and north-central India is a Nehruvian legacy. Left historiographers bought into it as much as the Right’s. In a sense, this had less to do with ideology than with provincialism. The partitioning of Bengal in 1947 has, for more than a half-century now, been rendered less notable than that of Punjab (strangely enough, finding itself in focus largely in the Hindutva Weltsicht, for the wealth of religious xenophobia that this history affords).
While contemporary historiography is seeking to repair this imbalance by highlighting the many subhistories of India that comprise the vast chequerboard of subcontinental history, the present dispensation seems far less interested in addressing this inequity than in exploiting it.
Veteran Journalist