India's Maritime Strategy: Historical Sea Power and Modern Naval Doctrine

India's relationship with the sea predates its modern statehood by millennia. The Satavahana dynasty built sustained prosperity on Indo-Roman trade running through Malabar's ports, while the Chola Empire at its height projected naval power into Southeast Asia — most notably through Rajendra Chola's 11th-century expedition against Srivijaya — not for territorial conquest but to keep sea lanes free and assert Indian authority across two oceans. Chinese chronicles of the Song dynasty record Chola embassies, evidence that Indian sea power once commanded recognition as far as East Asian courts. By the 12th century, an estimated quarter of world economic output passed through Indian shores, constituting a genuinely maritime civilisation.

This command eroded not from lack of skill but from structural causes: state patronage for shipbuilding receded, and religious injunctions against crossing the ocean took hold in parts of the subcontinent. Arab, Chinese, and eventually European traders filled the vacuum. The colonial period, as strategist K.M. Panikkar argued in India and the Indian Ocean (1945), did not begin with a land invasion — it began with ships arriving at ports India could no longer control. Panikkar's thesis was stark: India's subjugation was fundamentally a story of ceding command of the sea, not of armies overrun on land. This insight, written in 1945, took decades to be institutionalised in Indian strategic doctrine.

Independent India's strategic culture remained stubbornly land-centric for much of its first four decades, shaped by wars fought along northern and western land frontiers. The Navy was the junior service in resource allocation and public imagination alike. The shift came gradually, accelerating as India's economic integration with global trade deepened and its dependence on sea-borne energy imports grew.