The longue durée of Indo-maritime stewardship – where the Mauryan embrace of statecraft, the Chola command of the Indian Ocean, and the Srivijayan trade networks India anchored, these are not ornaments, but the actual case for why India building at Great Nicobar is a restoration, not an imposition.

The Amnesia That Mistook Itself for Virtue

There is a peculiar form of intellectual capture that afflicts postcolonial nations. It comes not from the colonizer’s guns but from his categories. Among the most consequential pieces of that mental furniture, for India, is this: the idea that an India that acts in the world, that builds, projects, commands, reaches, is somehow the aberration, while an India that deliberates, defers, and withdraws into continental anxiety is the authentic and morally superior form.

This idea has no Indian origin. It is colonial sediment. Classical India was a civilization of extraordinary strategic appetite, commercial reach, and maritime ambition. It built empires at sea. It seeded civilizations across two oceans. It threaded the Indo-Pacific with the sinew of trade, culture, law, and statecraft long before the words “Indo-Pacific” existed.

The Great Nicobar Island, sitting at the southern tip of India’s Andaman chain, roughly 160 km from Sumatra and a few hundred kilometers from the main Strait of Malacca shipping lane, the most consequential maritime chokepoint on earth, is not a new frontier. It is an old one, remembered. At its deepest register, the debate about what India should build there is a debate about whether India will reclaim its identity as a civilization that has always been at home on the sea, or remain landlocked in its own imagination.

The World That India Made

Begin not with a treaty or a battle but with the pepper.

Pliny the Elder lamented the heavy drain of gold from Rome into India, calling India “the sink of the world’s most precious metals.” The figure of roughly 100 million sesterces per annum, with half going to India alone, appears throughout his Naturalis Historia as the primary ancient source for complaints about Roman gold flowing east for spices, muslin, gems, and aromatics (Simmons 2023). Roman senators debated sumptuary laws to curb the appetite for serica and indica – silk and Indian goods: “It was decided that vessels of solid gold should not be made for the serving of food, and that men should not disgrace themselves with silken clothing from the East.” (Tacitus’s Annals, Book II, Ch. 33). Two south Indian dynasties, the Pandyas and the Cheras, went as far as sending embassies to Rome to discuss the balance-of-payments problem. “In 70 CE, the Emperor Vespasian become so worried about the eastward drain of gold that he put a temporary ban on its export.” (Dalrymple 2024:66).

What the transaction reveals is the shape of the ancient world’s economy: it was organized around India. “Certainly, by the first millennium B.C. commerce was already thriving between the Red Sea and northwest India” (Abu-Lughod 1989:264). The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, that extraordinary Greek merchant’s manual from the first century CE, “demonstrates that navigation manuals for the sea route to India were highly refined by that time, confirming Europe’s long-standing trade with the subcontinent.” (Abu-Lughod 1989:265). It describes Indian ports – Barygaza (Bharuch), Muziris, Arikamedu – in loving operational detail (Parker 2008, Ch.4). The monsoon winds, which Indian and Arab sailors had mapped and mastered centuries before anyone else, were the engine of the entire Indian Ocean economy.

The first Roman contact with China was made possible by Indian merchants and sailors. Historian Josephine Quinn (2024:283) writes, “The real silk roads of the early first millennium CE were across the Indian Ocean, faster and cheaper than the overland journey, with Indian and Egyptian ports mediating trade between China and points west.” She further notes that trade between China and India had increased from the third century BCE, and “all it took to integrate the Red Sea into these networks was an understanding of the monsoon winds… the journey from the Red Sea to India and back could be completed well........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)