Book Review #98: The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History By Sanjeev Sanyal

Title: The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History

Author: Sanjeev Sanyal

Publishers: Penguin India

Genre: Geo-political History/History/Maritime History

Pages: 374 (Paperback)

Source: Personal Copy

Being a regular reader of the history I was fascinated by this book by the author Sanjeev Sanyal. Having read his previous book "Land of the Seven Rivers" I was all eager to read this new book. In his previous book, he talked about the seven important rivers of India including the mighty Saraswati River. The Land of seven rivers was summed up in one line as “Seven Rivers (Sapth Sindhu), One Country, Five Millennia, Startling History”.

Asian histories have been rendered in a biased manner since time immemorial. As a famous saying that goes, until an animal has its own history, the history of the hunting will always glorify the hunter. If we take any history curriculum in Indian education system, we can read leaps and bounds of Mughul Empire, the British regime, the Sultanates and such similar accounts. 

Unfortunately, we won’t be able to read the histories of Cholas, Pandyas, Pallavas in greater detail and their glories have been limited to few pages here and there. This book, one of a kind in its genre, breaks that stupor and gives us a riveting account of how the Indian Ocean has shaped the human history. Indian Ocean is itself a big mystery. It holds many unresolved or undiscovered history that is hidden deep into its core. Author Sanjeev Sanyal tried to uncover this in this vast researched and well articulated book and succeeded in satiating his readers.

The book opens up by a fascinating tale of how the Pallava dynasty has traced an heir to their Kingdom when the erstwhile King, Parameshwara Verman II died in 731 CE. A delegation of Brahmin scholars, which travelled across the Indian Ocean to the far ends of Cambodia, and got back an heir that traced his roots to the Pallava dynasty from five long generations ago!! Thus, the reign of Nandi Verman II has started.

Hundreds of questions pop up as we read further through the book. For example:

Why did Vasco Da Gama worship in a Hindu temple when he set in India for the first time?

Why there are fossil remain of marine animals have been found in the Himalayas?

How come the Parsi community of India embraced the Guajrati culture so effortlessly?

How did the Sinhalese come to Sri Lanka?

What was the connection of the Sri Vijaya Empire with the Chinese?

How did the world’s second Mosque (King Cheraman Perumal) have been built in Kerala, India? What was the motive behind it?

How did Portuguese and Dutch have taken advantage in conquering parts of India?

How come we see oriental faces of engravings by Pallavas?

And so on…

The Ocean of Churn begins its journey even before the formation of the Indian Ocean. It talks about the super continent called Gondwana (This name is derived from the Gond tribe of the central India) that existed more than 270 million years ago and the mighty Saraswati River and how it dried up due to the tectonic plate shifts, how the Himalaya has been formed, and how the races have been migrated from India to outside world. This book traces the history through the Ocean way. How people set up its civilizations, how their trade hub got established, what was their commercial aspects, how they dealt with various traders inside and outside their territory and so on.

Sanjeev Sanyal views this history as Complex Adaptive System. Given his background in Economics, where he considers multiple factors act upon a system to determine the direction it takes. From Harrappan times, Indians have been trading with the world in many ways. Maritime trading is the major aspect during those times when land routes were hardly discovered. The powerful Chola king, Rajendra Chola made a naval attack on the Sri Vijaya Kingdom of Sumatra by 1025 is one such example. Chola Empire was one of the powerful empires in the entire South Asia region during that time. There were a major geo-political-economic alliances or rivalries between Indians, Chinese and the Sri Vijaya Kingdom.

Kerala being the hub of the maritime trade have witnessed a vast amount of geo-political-economic tradeoffs. As a testimony to those, even today in Kerala, we have the world’s second Mosque and India’s first mosque (Cheraman Perumal Mosque) built by the king Cherman Perumal by the orders of Mohammed the prophet himself in 629 AD. We also get to see the memorial of St. Thomas (doubting Thomas fame), a disciple of Jesus, who visited Kerala via sea route.

Overall, this book is a well researched one. It starts right from the origin of India Ocean due to the tectonic plate shifts and ends right at the transformation of Bombay to Mumbai with the reclamation of land over the Ocean. This book is full of rich details of all Kingdoms that throve around the Indian Ocean, Indian coastline, and several islands of the Indian Ocean that also had cultural trade ties with India and its Kingdoms.

Author personally visited several of these places that he mentions in his book. It shows what kind of painstaking research that he has put in this book. It is extremely informative and knowledge enhancing. As the author himself remarks at the end of the book “A systematic bias I have found in the existing literature is the preference given to the writers and sources from outside the continents.” This is evidently true, as we are fed with the histories that are written by mentally enslaved minds. It is time to look through a new perspective and stop looking towards the west for our recognition. India was and is an ancient lands with many millions years of history. Authors like Sanjeev Sanyal should be encouraged by reading these kinds of books.

My Rating:

5/5