"He who rules on the sea will shortly rule on the land also" declared Khaireddin Barbarosa to Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. The history of no country illustrates this principle better than that of India. There have been invasions and conquests of India from the land side on many previous occasions. But such invasions and conquests have either led to transient political changes, or to the foundation of new dynasties, which in a very short time became national and Indian. In fact it may truly be said that India never lost her independence till she lost the command of the sea in the first decade of the sixteenth century.
In the following pages an attempt is made to trace the influence of the Indian Ocean on the shaping of Indian history and to discuss the vital importance of oceanic control to the future of India. There has been an unfortunate tendency to overlook the sea in the discussion of India's defence problems Until now, the discussion has proceeded on the assumption that the security of India is a matter exclusively of the North-West Frontier and of a strong enough army to resist any aggression across the Hindu Kush. This is an entirely one-sided view of Indian history. No doubt most of the invasions of India have come from that side; and others may come from that quarter in the future also. The North-West Frontier and perhaps the North-East Frontier also will therefore remain important strategic areas for the defence of India. But an examination of the factors of Indian defence will show that ever since the sixteenth century from which time the Indian Ocean became the scene of a struggle for the control of the sea, the future of India has been determined not on the land frontiers, but on the oceanic expanse which washes the three.
sides of India. It is true that till the beginning of the sixteenth century Oceanic problems had not intruded themselves on the history of the mainland. The reasons for this are obvious. In the first place, the control of the Indian waters was in Indian hands till the middle of the thirteenth century, and no power strong enough to challenge Indian control appeared on the ocean. The Arabs who succeeded to the supremacy of the sea, after the breakdown of Chola naval power were only commercial navigators and were not the instruments of any national policy, nor had they the support of any organised govern-ment. In short till the arrival of the Portuguese at Calicut, no naval potoer had appeared on Indian waters.
What Vasco da Gama and his successors introduced into Indian history was the claim to an exclusive control of the seas, a conception wholly at variance with what had been accepted as the "natural law" both in Europe and in Asia. The might of Portugal was organised in order to enforce such a claim, and Alfonso Albuquerque by conquering Socotra, Ormuz and Malacca and by organising an impregnable territorial base in India established effectively that supremacy of the sea which his master claimed on the basis of the Bull of Pope Calixtus III. From that time till today the Ocean has dominated India. The unique glory of the Moghuls could not hide the fact that on the sea they were totally helpless, and Akbar himself had to suffer the humiliation of the trade of the Empire being interrupted and the pilgrim traffic to Месса harassed by the Portuguese on his coast. The Moghuls with their Central Asian tradition had no recognition of the importance of the sea. It is only when the Sidis of Janjira offered their services against the growing Maratha power on the sea that Aurangazib gave his half-hearted recognition to a fleet being organised on a reasonable scale. On the whole, the Moghul view of the sea was that of Kalif Omar who when he was told by his General, at the time of the conquest of Egypt, that "the sea was a huge beast which silly folk ride like worms on logs" ordered that no Mussalman should risk his life on such an unruly element without his express orders. The result was that during the 200 years of Moghul greatness, not only was the Indian sea entirely under alien control but simultaneously with the development of Moghul power, the foundation was being laid by others for a more complete subjection of India, than any land power at any time could have conceived.
The importance of the sea came to be recognised by the Indian Rulers only when it was too late. Sivaji was near enough to the Portuguese base of Goa to realise its importance and did initiate a policy of naval expansion which in the heyday of Maratha power ruled the Konkan waters. Hyder Ali also did not fail to realise its vital importance as his agreement with the Bailee de Suffren conclusively proves. But by the time of Sivaji the control of the seas had already passed to to the Dutch and the British; and by the time of Hyder Ali, the British were the undoubted masters of the Indian Ocean, though the transcendent genius of Suffren eclipsed the fact for a short time.
For 157 years (i.e. since the departure of Suffren in 1784 to the fall of Singapore in 1941) the mastery of the sea over Indian history was complete but unobtrusive. The question of sea power did not arise as the Indian Ocean was a British lake. It was as natural and as normal as the air we breathed. during that time and no one was interested in discovering the relation of the sea to Indian Defence. In the result the entire emphasis was on the land frontier and Indian Defence was equated with the maintenance of a powerful army on the North-West Frontier.
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