What INSV Kaundinya Actually Stitches Together
The wooden sailing ship rekindles ancient India's bustling trade and cultural links with the ancient world to its east and west.
Showcasing India's little-discussed but longstanding maritime tradition reached a (nautical) milestone with the launch of INSV Kaundinya at Karwar Naval Base in Karnataka last week. The re-creation of an ancient Indian 'stitched" ship as a joint venture between the Indian Navy and Ministry of Culture was discussed in a Firstpost article, ' Why recreating a 5th century stitched ship is as important as Chandrayaan ' (September 23, 2023) , but even the name has a story.
Writers like Amitav Ghosh, William Dalrymple and Sanjeev Sanyal have dwelt on the Indian influence on the cultures of south-east Asia thanks mainly to sea-borne trade. But these are yet to become common knowledge in the way that, say, the life and times of Ashoka have in India. That is why the name Kaundinya is particularly apt for this stitched ship as he was the first known Indian who sailed to South-East Asia and ended up founding Cambodia's first Hindu kingdom.
Kaundinya is thought to have hailed from India's east coast, probably somewhere in Ganjam district of Odisha or the adjoining Srikakulam district in Andhra, both of which were part of the ancient Kalinga kingdom and included the bustling Kalingapuram port. That is because 'Kaundinya" is a gotra common to Brahmins in the south-eastern Indian coastal region even today, indicating the ancient mariner's probable antecedents and reiterating Odisha's maritime legacy.
The kingdom Kaundinya and Soma founded nearly 2,000 years ago is now referred to as Funan based on Chinese texts written over a millennium later, but contemporary Khmer sources cite names such as Shresthapura, Bhavapura, Vyadhapura and Aninditapura, pointing to its Indian/Hindu links. The Indian propensity to not chronicle anything till relatively recently has led to Chinese records dominating the discourse, hence Funan is the better known name.
Incidentally, even Kaundinya's marriage to Soma is not the only such instance. It is said that an Indian princess Hwang-hok (Yellow Jade in Korean) of Ayodhya sailed away to marry Emperor Kim Suro of Gaya in Korea and became Empress Heo, not long after Kaundinya. Today, many Koreans claim descent from their 12 children. Curiously, the ancient burial mounds in Assam called moidam are amazingly similar to those of Korean royalty including that of Suro and Heo.
Tales of the connections between ancient India and the cultures and kingdoms of south-east Asia and beyond have been far too persistent to be dismissed now as being without any basis. Academia (western-dominated as it has been) tended to firmly relegate such stories to the realms of mythology earlier, unwilling to even acknowledge that India had much of an international profile beyond the well-documented spread of Buddhism eastwards. India's Hinduism was sidelined.
Thus, the story of the seafaring Kaundinya and his marriage to the Naga princess Soma nearly 2,000 years ago also never gained traction. That watershed event is remembered in Cambodia till today, but not many Indians visiting there are aware of it even if they do know that Hinduism was once the main religion in the region, indicating ancient links with India. Even a cursory research reveals details about profound cross-cultural connections, going beyond architecture and culture.
Hinduism's cultural influence seen there, hark back to their earliest kingdoms, but now there is even DNA proof that 'proto-historic" South-East Asians had Indian lineage, indicating a wide intermingling between the peoples of India and that region – probably even predating Kaundinya's arrival. South-East Asian genealogies today have some Indian ancestry, but new studies on an ancient boy's skeleton in Cambodia have revealed a 40-50% South Asian/ Indian DNA.
Radiocarbon testing of that ancient boy's bone dated it to the early period of Funan (the kingdom Kaundinya co-founded), showing that the Indian gene flow to Cambodia started 1,000 years earlier than the previously posited 12th to 14th century on the strength of genetic studies of current populations. The researchers also say they expect to find further traces of interactions with South Asia (India?) —corroborated by archaeological evidence—from about 4th century BCE.
Paleogenomics does not make for racy reading, but its findings certainly add heft to the 'mythological" stories of connections between the Hindu kingdoms and cultures of ancient India and the populations of South-East Asia. Later in the first millennium CE the Indian connection becomes too evident to gloss over, such as the arrival in 731CE of a boy prince from Simhapura in Champa kingdom (now Vietnam) to ascend the Pallava throne in South India as Nandivarman II.
That the INSV Kaundinya was launched on India's west coast is apt too. For millennia ancient Indian ships set sail from Khambat, Kutch and the Konkan coast to the west. The Sindhu-Sarasvati civilisation had robust trade relations with the cultures of the Euphrates and Nile to its west, most of it conducted via the seas. Harappan seals found at Dilmun (now Bahrain) attest to the fact that it was an entrepot for goods from India like lapis lazuli, carnelian, pearls and ivory.
And later, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea mentions that 'cloths and precious stones, timbers and spices—particularly cinnamon" and even iron, steel, skins and muslin were transported from India mostly on Indian vessels and transhipped at Socotra Island or Cape Guardafui (off the Horn of Africa) from the 1st century CE onwards. Exploration of the huge Hoq Cave in Socotra has revealed many inscriptions (more like graffiti really) on its walls in ancient Brahmi script.
Socotra is said to be derived from the Sanskrit name Dvipa Sukhadara (Island of Bliss) or its Greek contraction Dioskorida. But the fact that there were many Hindus engaged in this trade is also underlined by their reverence for a deity named Socotri Mata or Sikotar Maa, propitiated by the seafarers to protect them from being shipwrecked. Temples were dedicated to her in Gujarat and Sindh, not only as Sikotar Maa but also as Vahanvati, always depicted sitting in a boat.
Coins of the Satavahana or Andhra dynasty (2nd century BCE to 3rd century CE) featuring sailing ships that look astonishingly like the INSV Kaundinya point to the importance of maritime trade for that huge Hindu empire straddling the peninsula. They maintained many bustling ports including Bharuch, Sopara and Kalyan on the Arabian Sea and Ghantasala and Machhilipatnam on east, trading with both South-East Asia and the expansive Roman Empire to the west.
So, the good ship INSV Kaundinya stitches together the proto-history and history of maritime India, resurrecting not only the shipbuilding prowess of ancient Indians but also India's longstanding ties—commercial and cultural—down the millennia with the world. Later this year the wooden vessel will sail to Oman, retracing the route that other stitched Indian ships had made for centuries. May it always have 'fair winds and following seas" as the old nautical blessing goes!
The author is a freelance writer. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18's views.
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indian navy
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New Delhi, India, India
First Published:
May 27, 2025, 12:18 IST
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