An enthralling journey through 2,000 years of India's steadfast relations with the seas.

The Indian Ocean world's significance in human history is impossible to dismiss. The 1,000-odd kilometres of the subcontinent's coastline - which underpinned some of the world's greatest empires and shaped countless human lives - therefore make for the perfect dock from which to embark on a journey through the centuries for a vital reappraisal of India's history.

In this eye-opening book, noted historian Radhika Seshan sets out to map our age-old connections with the seas, tracing maritime linkages from the Harappan period all the way to the long colonial era. Her re-examination of India's past through the prism of water reveals the extent to which this conduit enabled trade and the movement of people, often leading to the establishment of crucial ports, communities, kingdoms and empires. The Chola, Chalukya and Vijayanagar empires, historic ports such as Muziris and Bharuch and accounts of travellers, explorers, merchants and monarchs who frequented India's shores are explored here in vivid detail, with the sea providing a riveting backdrop of adventure, migration, invasion and rich cultural networks. While the arrival of the Europeans, the subsequent Raj and their consolidation of terrestrial networks marked the gradual decline of our maritime dominance, the seas hold sway over our geopolitics even today.

Combining scholarly rigour with a storyteller's flair, Empires of the Sea presents India afresh as a nation of pluralities made possible by virtue of its long-standing maritime relations with the world at large.

Radhika Seshan retired as Professor and Head of the Department of History, Savitribai Phule Pune University. She is now visiting faculty at the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Pune. A reputed academic writer, she is the author and editor of several books, including Narratives, Routes and Intersections in Pre-Modern Asia, Trade and Politics on the Coromandel Coast: Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries and Medieval India: Problems and Possibilities. She currently lives in Pune.