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........

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