A geopolitical history of the Indian Ocean arena

The first half of the second millennium of the common era — 1000-1500 — witnessed a politically decentralised and vernacularised India, especially southern empires and kingdoms, extending influence across the Indian Ocean interregional arena. An equilibrium based on economic and cultural exchanges typically reasserted itself following rare episodes of geopolitical conflict. The appearance of the Portuguese at the onset of the second half of the second millennium injected a new volatile and violent element into oceanic geopolitics. The Portuguese made systematic resort to armed trading and introduced a system of cartazes, attempting to dominate shipping in the Indian Ocean. 

However, one needs to dispense with the erroneous notion that Vasco da Gama’s arrival on the Malabar coast inaugurated a 500-year-long era of European control of the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese were never able to realise their ambition of establishing a monopoly over the trade in spices — cloves, nutmegs, and mace — and were limited to a few factory-fort coastal enclaves. Even the more powerful English and Dutch trading companies had to adjust to the pre-existing rhythms and patterns of Indian Ocean economic and geopolitical formations during the long 17th century. Anglo-Dutch rivalry was a key part of the geopolitics of this period even as the Europeans sought trading permissions from Asian rulers. 

The early modern era witnessed the rise and consolidation of powerful empires — the Ottoman, Mughal, and Safavid — that skilfully granted a measure of autonomy to merchants in port cities. The great Mughal port city of Surat was far more important in Indian Ocean flows of trade and culture from the 1570s to the 1720s than any of its European-dominated counterparts.  Cosmopolitan in both composition and attitude, such ports and emporia connected the coasts with a vast hinterland. Exports of Indian textiles made the subcontinent a metropolitan magnet of wealth, especially through the inflow of silver. 

Most medieval and early modern historians had assumed that the organic unity of the Indian Ocean world was sundered by the onset of European imperial domination from the late 18th century onwards. In my 2006 book, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire, I showed that the Indian Ocean space remained relevant and resilient in modern times, bound together by specialised flows of capital and labour, skills and services, ideas and culture. This was not an argument about continuity — qualitative changes did occur. Yet British supremacy at sea rested on a reordering of oceanic links. British control over long-distance financial flows enabled them to defeat the Maratha confederacy and the Sultanate of Mysore, which had access to both the Malabar and Coromandel coasts, in the wars of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. 

The great divergence in the economic fortunes of Euro-America and Asia took place around 200 years ago in the 1810s and 1820s as Indian manufactured products lost their ability to compete in global markets in colonial conditions. However, the sea change in sovereignty across the Indian Ocean arena had to await the period of Crown raj after 1858 following the collapse of the East India Company. The British juxtaposed to their novel concept of unitary sovereignty over their directly ruled territories in India a personalised version of sovereignty attached to princely rulers, Gulf sheikhs, and Malay sultans so long as they acknowledged ultimate British paramountcy. 

A dramatic demonstration of these forms of British imperial power was evident during the viceroyalty of George Nathaniel Curzon between 1899 and 1905 — the high noon of colonial rule. In addition to asserting monolithic sovereignty over the provinces of British India, he led a naval flotilla out of Karachi harbour to the Gulf in 1903. This imperial spectacle projected the Indian Ocean dimension of the Queen-Empress’ sovereign claims. The Western empires — the British, French, Dutch, and American — came to a shared understanding of their borders and spheres of influence. The Mughal empire, with its concepts of layered sovereignty and fuzzy borders, had come to a formal end but the Ottoman empire still survived. The Middle Eastern theatre of World War I was the stage for the first Gulf War of the 20th century, fomented by both conceptual and geographical conflicts over frontiers and sovereignty. Many of the contemporary predicaments of West Asia had their roots in British and French policies of this era. 

The Curzonian geopolitical ambition was contested on two planes: the cultural and the political. Swadeshi internationalists from 1905 onwards utilised the resources of imperial infrastructure to mount anti-imperialist resistance that transcended the colonial borders of India. Mahatma Gandhi in his South African phase and in fusing his noncooperation with the Khilafat movement operated across the domain of the western Indian Ocean. The Tagorean vision articulated during the poet’s voyages to Southeast Asia in 1927 and to Iran and Iraq in 1932 offered a vibrant cultural alternative to Curzon’s imperialist geopolitics.

Subhas Chandra Bose’s transfer in a rubber raft from a German to a Japanese submarine in a turbulent Indian Ocean in late April 1943 signalled a successful undermining of British domination of the strategic sea lanes.  The armed struggle for liberation that he led between 1943 and 1945 had an Indian Ocean scope, rallying the Indian diaspora across East and Southeast Asia in support of the freedom of their homeland. The successful undermining of the loyalty of Indian soldiers to the British king- emperor and its replacement with a new allegiance to India’s freedom paved the way for independence across Asia. 

The full potential of anti-colonial dreams of Asian solidarity was not realised in the immediate decades after formal political decolonisation because many postcolonial states opted to inherit colonial ideas of monolithic sovereignty and hard borders. Even the quest for a measure of Afro-Asian solidarity, as in Bandung in 1955, was constrained by a statist bias. A genuine decolonisation of the mind requires a questioning of the limitations of the nation-state form replicating the structures and ideologies of colonial states.  

I have argued in my 2024 book, Asia after Europe: Imagining A Continent in the Long Twentieth Century, that Asia in the 2020s has been recovering the global position — both strategic and economic — that it had lost in the 1820s. Whether the 21st century will turn out to be an Asian century depends, however, on the ability of Asian statesmanship to temper competition and rivalry in the Indian Ocean interregional arena.

  Addressing the Indian Parliament in 2007, the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe envisioned “a confluence of the two seas”: the Indian and the Pacific Ocean. Before this vision could be given strategic shape, China led by Xi Jinping broached a far more ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), including a maritime silk route ringing the Indian Ocean. A grand BRI summit was hosted in Beijing in May 2017, a gathering that India boycotted. The United States’ (US’) evocation of an Indo-Pacific framework in 2022 seemed a belated and weak response to the web of overland and oceanic ties forged by a resurgent China.

  At a key historic moment of Asia’s collective rise, India has not articulated a clear Indian Ocean doctrine, far less a grand strategic vision of its role in this vital interregional arena. India requires a stronger naval presence backed by diplomatic engagement to ensure freedom of navigation in the Indian Ocean. In the name of the vague concept of strategic autonomy, India’s current engagement in this oceanic space has all the hallmarks of ad hoc-ism. The result has been international diplomatic isolation at key moments of crisis. 

In 2016, India joined the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank as a key founding strategic partner. Yet in 2019, a timid decision was taken not to join the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a gigantic free-trade bloc of 10 Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries plus China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, despite having been part of the negotiations for many years. In the shadow of Donald Trump’s tariffs of 2025, that decision looks like a missed opportunity to link up with the world’s most dynamic economic region. 

  The slight improvement in relations with China seems a little too reactive to the difficulties caused by an unpredictable US.

Perhaps there is something to be learned from the Chola empire of a thousand years ago: not the singular episode of a naval encounter, but the more sustained economic, cultural, and geopolitical engagement with the Indian Ocean space. If India stays obstinately away from multilateral fora in its immediate and greater neighbourhood, some other power will invariably step into that vacuum. It would also be wise to avoid Curzonian imperial arrogance that alienates interlocutors and partners instead of bringing them on board.  There is much more to learn from our anticolonial history of seeking solidarity across the mountains and the seas in a multipolar Asia. A hundred horizons of the Indian Ocean beckon us.