Navy stitches past with present to sail into future

KARWAR: The Navy commissioned INSV Kaundinya , a 20m-long sailing yacht based on a 5th-century fresco at the Ajanta caves , at the Karwar naval base on Wednesday.

The wooden ship , stitched together entirely by hand in Goa, will embark on a transoceanic voyage along the ancient trade route from Gujarat to Oman, scheduled for later this year. Naval officials said if the first voyage is successful, the yacht will then sail from Odisha to Indonesia later.

The induction of this wooden vessel comes 40 years after the Navy decommissioned INS Bhatkal, its last wooden-hulled minesweeper.

"We knew that these stitched ships were used to cross the ocean from very ancient times. We know that Indians were sailing the oceans from the bronze age, from the Harappan period. There's enough evidence of Indians crossing from the ports of Gujarat to Oman and Bahrain and going all the way to Mesopotamia," said Sanjeev Sanyal, PM's economic advisory council member, who initiated the whole project.

"The problem is that there are no records of exactly what sea-going ships during the Harappan period looked like. There are some texts, like the 'Yukti Kalpa Taru', which we used. We used some testimonies of ancient travellers from other countries who came to Indian Ocean," said Sanyal.

With no detailed blueprints available, multiple stakeholders put their heads together to get INSV Kaundinya to sail. "From Sanyal's vision to Malayali shipwright Babu Sankaran's skill, and from the Navy's oversight to the Goan shipyard Hodi Innovations' determination, the stitched ship replica is a model for successful collaborations," said Commodore Srikant Kesnur (retd).

INSV Kaundinya is named after India's first known mariner who, according to legend, established the Fuhan dynasty after marrying a Naga princess.

"Kaundinya is not mentioned in Indian records, but we know of him from records of Cambodia and Vietnam. We can only guess where he came from, but just as a hint, there is still a gotra called Kaundinya that lives along the Odisha-Andhra coast, and it is possible that Kaundinya is actually not his first name but his gotra name," said Sanyal.