By Muskan Shafi Malik

At a time when global tensions ripple across the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow maritime corridor through which nearly a fifth of the world’s oil passes, it is tempting to view India’s interest in the region as purely contemporary, driven by concerns over energy, security, and its diaspora.

Such a reading, however, obscures a deeper historical reality. 

India’s engagement with the Persian Gulf, and with Hormuz in particular, is not a recent strategic compulsion but part of a long-standing seafaring consciousness that predates colonialism and, in many ways, helped frame the contours of colonial rule itself.

To understand India’s present, one must first recover this forgotten past.

Long before European intervention, the Indian subcontinent was embedded in a dense web of Indian Ocean exchanges. Historians such as K. N. Chaudhuri have shown that between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Indian Ocean functioned as an integrated commercial domain, linking East Africa, India, Arabia, Persia, and Southeast Asia. 

Trade was central to political and social life. As Chaudhuri observed, “the Indian Ocean was a vast arena of economic and cultural integration long before the rise of Europe.”

Ports such as Surat, Calicut, and Masulipatnam were active nodes in a wider transregional system. At the center of this network........

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