The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History

by Sanjeev Sanyal

The Dutch Hand

surfeit

Thus, Ai and Run became the first colonies of the English East India Company!

The next major settlement was Bombay which was acquired from the Portuguese as part of the dowry when King Charles II married Catherine of Braganza. Bombay was then a group of small islands and the king leased them to the EIC in 1668 for ten pounds per annum.

ramparts

This is how Calcutta (now Kolkata) was founded.

mercenaries

French East India Company,

Danish East India Company was never able to make a success of its operations

This is how Elihu Yale, the Governor of Madras, amassed a large personal fortune before being removed from his post on suspicions of corruption. Part of this ill-gotten wealth was used to fund the university that bears his name. Thus, one of North America’s leading universities is built on money garnered through dodgy deals in the Indian Ocean.

kidnapping Indian children and selling them in faraway markets. A particularly intriguing case is that of an eleven-year-old girl, Meera, who was kidnapped from India’s west coast and then sold to the Spanish in Manila. She was then taken to Mexico where she is remembered as Catarina de San Juan. She came to be considered a popular saint although her veneration was explicitly prohibited by the Inquisition. Her life is an amazing tale of how a young girl adapted herself to survive all alone in a distant land and in very

Amazingly, an army unit that had fought for Marthanda Varma against Lannoy at Colachel survives in the Indian Army as the 9th Battalion of the Madras Regiment.

usurper

Tipu Sultan

connoisseurship

First Opium War. The

Second Opium War

Boxer Revolt in 1900–01.9

victuallers

Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy.

Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art

squalor.

altruism.

moored

endogamous

‘Mfecane’

The frictions between the British and the Afrikaners eventually led to the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). The Boers made pre-emptive strikes and laid siege on a number of towns including Kimberley. The British struck back with reinforcements shipped in from India. Indian soldiers would yet again play an important role in the course of events. Interestingly, Mohandas Gandhi also participated in the war by organizing a group of local Indian civilians into the Natal Indian Ambulance Corps that provided support to the British forces.

city and for a generation the word ‘Emden’ would be used as Tamil slang to denote maverick cunning or resourcefulness.

The balance worsened as the British began to recruit

war. They even managed to get Indian political leaders like Mahatma Gandhi to support the recruitment drive. Gandhi would initially recruit for non-combatant roles but would later help with the recruitment of soldiers.

It told an interesting pattern of how the British of that period recruited and deployed their Indian troops—the army casualties in Kut were mostly Hindu but here the naval casualties were largely Muslim.

Rash Behari Bose and his young lieutenant Sachindra Nath Sanyal.

Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of 18–23 February 1946.20

Unfortunately for the mutineers, they received no support from the Indian political leadership of the time. Both the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League asked them to surrender.

It is quite telling that the role of the revolutionaries in India’s freedom struggle is barely presented as a footnote in official Indian histories. Having come to power in 1947, the Indian National Congress would ensure that story would be told in a way that focused exclusively on its own role.

Amidst the chaos, a daredevil pilot from Odisha called Biju Patnaik flew secret missions into Java and rescued two key Indonesian rebel leaders from being captured (he would later go on to become the chief minister of Odisha).25 Prime Minister Nehru, meanwhile, organized the Asian Conference in New Delhi that pressured the UN Security Council to take action against the Dutch. It is remarkable that the first foreign policy action taken by newly independent India was to support Indonesia’s freedom movement. It was as if an ancient civilizational kinship had been suddenly rekindled. It was also appropriate that someone from Kalinga had played an important role in the sequence of events. It is said that Sukarno named his daughter Megawati, meaning ‘Goddess of the Clouds’ in Sanskrit, in honour of Biju Patnaik’s heroics in the sky.

Suez Crisis of 1956.