India ignored its aqua ‘geography of histories’, favouring the terra

Murud-Janjira, the impregnable fort of the Siddis (black African slaves brought to India, who became rulers in their own right), sits in the Arabian Sea just 165 km south of Mumbai. Photo: iStock

In India, while the geography of the country is taught from the early school years, it is usually forgotten as quickly as it is learnt. And while some might remember that India is bound by sea all along the south, the connections with the sea do not consciously register — for a great many people even today, the sea is a very distant object. It may perhaps impinge on the consciousness a little more when there are reports of cyclones or storms (or the tsunami that hit some years ago in 2004), but the expanse of the sea, the links with the oceans, and the historical and geographical connections are typically rather hazy.

Moreover, children are mostly taught about only two parts of India — the plains to the north, and the peninsula to the south. But historically, India was defined slightly differently. In early Indian Sanskrit texts, the subcontinent is seen as divided into five major regions, the Madhyadesa (middle country), Udicya or Uttarapatha (northern India), Pracya (eastern India), Dakshinapatha (Deccan) and Aparanta (western India). The term Dakshinapatha came to be used in two ways: the entire peninsula, or more commonly, a more limited area from the Narmada to the Tungabhadra and Krishna rivers. To the south of this lay the Dravidadesa or Tamilakam. On the other hand, as defined in the Imperial Gazetteer, the ‘Deccan’ has also been understood as referring to the entire landmass south of the Vindhya mountains and the great Gangetic plain, and so it can be taken to mean the entire peninsular region of India. It is in this sense that the Imperial Gazetteer defined it, when the ‘Deccan’ was stated to include ‘in its widest sense the whole of peninsular south India lying south of the Vindhya mountains and the Narmada river which separate it from the north’. Within the peninsula itself are five clearly demarcated regions — the Western Ghats skirting the Arabian Sea, the northern Deccan plateau, the eastern plateau, the Eastern Ghats towards the Bay of Bengal and the coastal strip between the ghats on either side and the sea itself. While studies have traditionally tended to focus on only the western part of the plateau as the ‘Deccan’, it is to be remembered that the plateau region in fact covers much of the northern peninsula. Furthermore, the ghats bordering it extend almost all the way down to Kanyakumari. The western coastal strip is generally narrow, being indented and segmented by spurs from the Western Ghats or by small rivers flowing to the sea from the hills. The Eastern Ghats are less continuous, with a wider and more fertile coastal strip, containing, as it does, the deltaic plains of the two major river systems of the Deccan plateau, the Krishna and Godavari.

On both the coasts, the ghats are given different names in various regions. So, for example, the Western Ghats up to Karnataka are also often referred to as the Sahyadri ranges. What is normally understood as the Deccan plateau proper is a broad quadrangle covering most of the presentday Maharashtra state, with a topography typical of plateau land. As it begins to give way to the plains in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka (the south-eastern and southern plateaus), the geography becomes rougher and rockier, and is interspersed with forest land and riverine stretches. The western coastal strip is a narrow strip of land, very rarely extending more than eighty kilometres inwards from the sea. This strip is particularly narrow from the Tapi river to Goa, after which it widens a little on the Karnataka coast and finally includes all of present-day Kerala, for the ghats here form the demarcation between Kerala and modern Tamil Nadu.

This coast is technically divided into three parts, excluding Gujarat. The northernmost section is called the Konkan, which is further sub-divided into two segments — the northern one running approximately from the Tapi to Chaul (modern Revdanda) and the southern from Chaul to Goa. South of Goa is the Canara coast, stretching till Mount Eli (Ezhimala) in modern-day Kerala, known to early travellers as Mount Dilli or Dely. The Malabar coast begins here and extends all the way to Kanyakumari, the tip of the peninsula. However, in maritime economic terms, it is rather difficult to limit oneself only to this western stretch of the coastline, for connections extend northwards into the Gujarat coast and eastwards across the ghats into the plateau region.

The Eastern Ghats, as mentioned earlier, are not continuous, which means that access to the interior from the coast (or vice versa) is much easier. The eastern coastal strip features deltas and various other water bodies, including, in the northernmost part of the region, Chilika Lake in modern-day Odisha; Kolleru Lake between the Krishna and the Godavari deltas, approximately in the centre of the coast; and Pulicat Lake, which lies towards the southern edge of the Deccan region. All these lakes used to be hubs for trade and fishing, with Pulicat also being the heart of a thriving weaving industry through most of India’s medieval era.

Both coasts are, of course, marked by innumerable ports. A brief survey of these ports is enough to indicate the ever-present climatic and natural hazards they faced. The physical geography of the west coast, given its numerous indentations, offers ample natural shelters all along its length, with the two largest natural harbours being Mumbai (Bombay) and Goa. However, throughout the medieval and early modern period (approximately the eighth to eighteenth century), the harbours of ports like Mangalore, Honawar, Bhatkal or Chaul were no less important in terms of the traffic they handled. On the other hand, several western ports also suffer from a common basic disadvantage, in that they face the full fury of the southwest monsoon. This meant the effective closure of ports for four months of the year in pre-steamship times, and after the monsoon’s retreat, incoming ships having to contend with the dangers of sandbanks and shoals that shifted during the monsoon months. Fortunately, since many ports such as Rajapur, Chaul and Dabhol — three of the most significant ones in the medieval period — are located on creeks, they offer some protection to smaller ships. Larger ships, though, cannot enter these anchorages.

In contrast, the east coast is far less indented and therefore has virtually no natural harbours. It has its own natural hazards, not the least of which is the silting up of ports near deltas due to silt brought down by the rivers. Delta mouths are also notoriously unstable, so that, at the end of a monsoon cycle, it is eminently possible that a channel of regular use earlier is no longer usable or has vanished altogether. In addition, the Bay of Bengal poses the major potential problem of cyclones, for, given that it is a relatively more enclosed sea, the possibility of circular winds is much higher than on the west coast. Ports on the east coast, lacking natural harbours, were open roads (unlike the present-day harbours that have provided built spaces). This meant the ships had to be laden and unladen in open waters, where the dangers of high surf, rolling waters and random winds had to be managed before goods could be brought to shore. Such looming hazards, thus, made it difficult for any one port to emerge as the single most important point on the east coast, resulting in the multitude of functional ports. They all naturally turned to the area immediately to their interior, which could also be common to two or more ports. Along with participating in the general internal trade in the south, each port was also dependent on the political situation in its vicinity for continued prosperity. The traditional trade patterns from the west coast typically looked to the Arabian Sea littoral, and those on the east coast across and along the Bay of Bengal. But these were not hard and fast divisions, as merchants belonging to both coasts traded in all territories of the Indian Ocean world. The trade routes across this waterbody had long been established; it was only the rulers of the various lands bordering the sea that changed.

Excerpted with permission from Empires of the Sea: A human history of the Indian Ocean World by Radhika Seshan. @2024Pan Macmillan India