India has strong maritime traditions, but it is not a nation with a maritime outlook. This is the result in part of geography and in part of its history. It is a simple strategic reality that India, although a peninsula, has land borders that are twice the length of its coast. Equally significant is that relations with Pakistan have been tense, when not overtly hostile, over the entire period since partition and independence in 1947, while an undeclared war was fought with China on the disputed northern border in 1962, over a boundary that has yet to be agreed in 2015. Relations with other neighbours on land, such as Nepal and Bangladesh, have been somewhat less fractious, but never entirely comfortable.

And it is a simple historical fact that “India” as an entity is the result much more of its domination by the British than of its pre-colonial past, and that diversity marked – and continues to mark – the Indian maritime domain as much as that of the land. The sub-continent, made up of a patchwork of competing states, fell to the British as much through the latter's successful division of local rivals as through outright conquest. This was just as true at sea. Later proponents of Indian sea power were quick to point out that such a lack of Indian unity benefited the intruders much more than their undoubted technological superiority.