Page 51 - K M PANNIKAR and The Growth of a Maritime Consciousness in India

SEA POWER IN SHAPING A NATION
A Case History of 18th Century Bay of Bengal
An early glimpse of India’s maritime worldview can be gleaned from the
eighteenth-century Anglo-French interaction that stamped a lasting impact
on Indian History and influenced the events leading to the emergence of armed
maritime power in India and subsequently the Indian Navy. Command of the
Sea and Naval Operations in support of National Objective remained a living
lesson from these pages of Indian Maritime History. K.M Panikkar made the
case for strong maritime orientation for India. He asserted that India had a
powerful naval tradition and had enjoyed the command of seas around it until
the beginning of the sixteenth century. The paper encounters how Panikkar
gave importance to a different set of dates to underline a maritime perspective
of Indian history. One of the significant dates for Panikkar was 1784, which
marked France’s exclusion and maritime control over India coming in the hands
of a single Atlantic power —Britain. With the influx of history and international
relations theory, the paper engenders how Offensive Realism and Power
Transition Theory helps in understanding the influence of sea power on the
Maritime Security Policy and the relevance of Mahan on Indian thinking which
was less about his doctrine on decisive naval battles on high seas and more
about global interests and maritime strategy of a nation’s rising sea power.
With the interplay between IR theories and history, the paper will explicate the
emergence of the singular role of Sea Power in influencing the course of History
of Nations, the evolution of Maritime Security policy arraying the historical
example of the Anglo-French naval engagements in the Bay of Bengal Region
in the 18th century and draw a parallel with its ascendancy on Indian Maritime
History as an outcome of Sea Power and Strategy.

23-24 March 2021 | Sapru House, New Delhi 51