India is the only country with an ocean named after it — and yet 95% of its trade sails on foreign ships. Sanjeev Sanyal delivers a sweeping maritime history of India while making the urgent policy case for rebuilding India as a shipbuilding superpower.
He traces India’s oceanic civilisation from Harappan ports at Dholavira and Dwarka trading with Mesopotamia, through the merchant guilds (Ayyavole 500, Manigramam) that operated like multinational corporations, to Rajendra Chola’s 1025 AD naval raid on Srivijaya — a geopolitical masterstroke that opened the India-China trade corridor. The talk then pivots to Admiral Zheng He’s treasure fleet, abandoned by Mandarin bureaucrats in 1435, which left a vacuum the Portuguese filled. The lesson: never extrapolate current power trends.
The climax is Sanyal’s revisionist account of the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of 1946 — 80 ships, 20,000 sailors in open rebellion in Mumbai — which he argues was the single most important event triggering Indian independence, suppressed for decades by the Congress government that followed.

About the Speaker:

Sanjeev Sanyal is a leading Indian economist, historian, and member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council. A Rhodes Scholar and former Global Strategist at Deutsche Bank, he now shapes India’s economic policy and global financial engagement. He was named Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2010. He is also a well-known environmentalist and urban theorist. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Oxford University, an Adjunct Fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies, Singapore and a Senior Fellow of the Worldwide Fund for Nature. He is an accomplished writer of many critically acclaimed books.