There is a temptation, when invoking the Cholas, to slip into the alluring language of empire. The imagery is seductive: fleets crossing the Bay of Bengal, inscriptions proclaiming victory, temples rising as symbols of power. But that is not the inheritance modern India has ever sought to prioritize.
What is worth recovering from those ancient forbears, instead, is something quieter: a civilizational orientation toward the sea.
In Kalki’s evergreen classic, Ponniyin Selvan, the maritime world is not dramatized as spectacle. It is an organic assumption, natural and pervasive. Ships come and go. Messengers sail between courts. Ports hum with exchange. The Bay of Bengal is not a frontier or battlefield alone; it is connective tissue. Trade, culture, diplomacy, pilgrimage, the arc of human endeavour, all move across water as naturally as along roads.
Ponniyin Selvan offers an unexpected lens through which to view this disconnect. The Chola world Kalki evokes was instinctively oceanic. Rivers fed the land, but ships connected civilizations. Trade, culture, diplomacy, and influence moved easily across the Bay of Bengal. The sea was not a barrier. It was infrastructure.
Modern India, for understandable historical reasons, grew inward-looking after independence. Partition, continental wars, unresolved land borders — this shaped strategic culture. Security became synonymous with territory on land. The ocean remained important, but it was rarely central to the political and strategic imagination.
Yet geography never changed. Peninsular India still leans into the Indian Ocean. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands stretch toward Indonesia’s Aceh province almost like an outstretched hand. The Malacca Strait, through which so much of Asia’s trade flows, binds Indian and Indonesian strategic interests, whether policymakers acknowledge it or not. Geography has done most of the diplomatic work already. Energy flows, trade routes, submarine cables, and supply chains still pass through waters that connect India to Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and beyond.
Today, we rediscover and reconnect with that geography. There is an old diplomatic observation about Indonesia: that it is at once one of India’s closest neighbours and yet curiously distant. The phrase captures a paradox that sits quietly at the heart of India’s Act East policy.
As an archipelagic state, Indonesia lives by the sea. Its political identity, economic lifelines and security calculations are all maritime by necessity. The distance between India and Indonesia, then, has never really been physical. It has been conceptual.
Civilizational connections complicate the picture further. Indonesia’s cultural vocabulary still carries Indic echoes — in language, epics, symbolism, and even state iconography. But modern Indonesia is also deeply conscious of its sovereignty and wary of cultural patronage. Shared heritage invites dialogue, not hierarchy.
That distinction matters for India’s Act East policy. Influence in Southeast Asia will not come from invoking ancient links alone. It will come from reliability, delivery, and respect for ASEAN’s carefully cultivated balance.
Here again, the Chola analogy is instructive. Arulmozhi Varman in Ponniyin Selvan does not claim legitimacy by force or nostalgia. He earns it through restraint, credibility, and an ability to command trust across constituencies. Power accumulates quietly around him because it feels safe to do so.
India’s engagement with Indonesia and ASEAN requires a similar sensibility. Connectivity projects must be completed, not merely announced. Maritime cooperation must deepen steadily. Cultural diplomacy must be collaborative rather than declaratory. Above all, India must demonstrate that its rise enhances regional stability rather than complicating it.
Act East, viewed this way, is less a foreign policy innovation than a rediscovery. The Bay of Bengal once connected the Indian subcontinent organically to Southeast Asia. Reviving that connective instinct requires patience, institutional commitment, and imaginative confidence.
Indonesia is no longer quite “so far” as it once seemed. Naval cooperation has expanded, economic ties are strengthening, and political dialogue is more regular. But the psychological distance has not fully disappeared. Bridging it will depend on whether India can sustain maritime thinking not as episodic enthusiasm but as a strategic habit.
The Cholas understood something structurally true: that prosperity, influence, and stability for a peninsular civilization such as India’s are inseparable from engagement with the seas. Rivers nourish the interior; oceans connect the interior to the wider world. Inland strength and maritime reach form a system. That structural insight remains relevant.
In today’s Indo-Pacific, maritime awareness is about resilience. It concerns the security of sea lanes, the safety of commerce, the sustainability of fisheries, the governance of digital cables, the capacity to respond to disasters, and the ability to participate meaningfully in regional institutions. It is about presence over projection.
There is also a psychological dimension. Continental anxieties tend to produce defensive reflexes. Maritime orientation, by contrast, often encourages openness. Seas are shared spaces. They require cooperation to manage piracy, pollution, trafficking, and natural disasters. They reward coordination and sustained dialogue. As India seeks to deepen its engagement with Southeast Asia, the most valuable inheritance from the Chola period may be this instinctive ease with maritime interconnectedness — not the memory of campaigns, but the normalization of exchange.
Even the language matters. The Bay of Bengal was once described as a “Chola Lake.” That phrase may stir historical pride, but it risks misunderstanding in a contemporary context that prizes sovereignty and regional balance. A more fitting image might be that of a basin — a shared maritime ecosystem in which multiple societies have long participated.
The Kaveri in Ponniyin Selvan offers a better metaphor than the fleet. It flows steadily, nourishes widely, and reaches the sea without fanfare. Its power lies in continuity.
In that sense, India’s renewed attention to the maritime environment can be understood not as a departure but as a return to equilibrium. A peninsular country that forgets the sea becomes strategically lopsided. A peninsular country that remembers the sea regains balance.
The task, then, is to study orientation. How did earlier societies conceptualize connectivity? How did they integrate inland prosperity with maritime networks? How did trade, culture, and diplomacy reinforce one another across water? These questions are historical. But they are also contemporary.
Re-engaging Southeast Asia today requires humility, patience, and respect for regional autonomy that India has well understood since its independence. It requires institutional reliability more than rhetorical flourish. It requires demonstrating that maritime engagement enhances collective stability. The past offers neither blueprint nor justification. It offers perspective.
And perspective, in geopolitics as in literature, often begins with remembering where the rivers flow — and where they meet the sea.
The Kaveri again offers the metaphor. It does not begin as a mighty river. It gathers strength from tributaries, from rainfall, from terrain. By the time it reaches the sea, it carries an entire landscape with it.
Peninsular India may play a similar role in India’s re-engagement with Southeast Asia — gathering economic vitality, cultural familiarity, maritime confidence, and historical memory, and carrying them outward toward a region that is defined by civilizational osmosis. India’s future in Asia does not require any new geography. It may simply require listening more carefully to the geography it already has.
