“Threads of the Past: India’s Navy Weaves a New Maritime Destiny”, India Narrative, January 05, 2026
“INSV Kaundinya’s stitched wooden hull is more than a nostalgia project; it is a floating argument that India’s maritime story did not begin with Vasco da Gama and does not end with the Royal Navy. By retracing pre‑colonial trade routes to Oman in an engineless sailing vessel built with indigenous craft traditions, India is making a pointed claim: the seas of the Indian Ocean are once again a civilisational space, not a colonial frontier.
INSV Kaundinya is India’s first naval sailing vessel built using a stitched‑plank technique, where wooden hull planks are literally sewn together with coir and sealed with natural resins, reviving methods used on the western coast for centuries before European shipyards arrived. The ship was conceived through a tripartite project between the Ministry of Culture, the Indian Navy and a Goa‑based yard, with artisans from Kerala leading construction, and commissioned into the Navy at Karwar in May 2025. Now on its maiden overseas voyage from Porbandar to Oman as an engineless, wind‑powered vessel, it symbolically follows an ancient corridor that once connected Gujarat’s ports to Arabia and East Africa.
This is happening against a wider backdrop of India trying to escape the inherited mental map of “continental India plus a colonial Indian Ocean,” a frame that reduced the seas to security chokepoints under Western stewardship. New Delhi’s vocabulary has shifted—“Indo‑Pacific,” “SAGAR,” “civilisational connectivities”—but Kaundinya turns that vocabulary into wood, rope and sail, visually asserting that the ocean was India’s highway long before it became someone else’s shipping lane……”
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