Page 37 - K M PANNIKAR and The Growth of a Maritime Consciousness in India

REVISITING PANIKKAR’S MARITIME INDIA
A Southeast Asian View
K.M. Panikkar’s concept of maritime India is embedded in two frameworks.
The first framework is constituted by the indigenous appreciation of oceanic
power manifested by the Cholas. The second framework is created by India’s
inheritance of the maritime thinking of colonial Britain. The premise of this
paper is that India’s oceanic ambit, revealed by the Cholas and restored
and expanded by the British, does provide a geographical basis for India’s
rediscovery of itself as a credible maritime power in the Indian Ocean today.
That rediscovery is an insistent need in the face of China’s naval assertiveness
in the Eastern Indian Ocean and of America’s openness to India playing a
determining place in the Indo-Pacific maritime region. The paper looks at
Southeast Asia today in the refracted light of Panikkar’s historiography, and
at the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (or Quad, consisting of Australia, India,
Japan, and the United States) in the context of an appropriate display of Indian
maritime resolve. The paper concludes that India’s maritime consciousness and
its consequent naval policy should draw on supportive external mechanisms
but with due regard to India’s strategic autonomy.

23-24 March 2021 | Sapru House, New Delhi 37