A Stitch Across Centuries To Sail Across The Sands Of Time

Time of India

4 hours ago

The Goa-made stitched ship, Kaundinya, inducted by the Navy refutes the colonial claim that Europeans taught the world to sail. The vessel demonstrates how India built seaworthy ships thousands of years ago.
A 15-member Navy crew is expected to take the motorless vessel to Muscat, following age-old trading routes
In one quiet corner of Goa's Divar island, chisels ring out like ritual gongs. The thick scent of fish oil hangs in the air — acrid and unmistakable — seeping into skin, cloth, and memory. Woodchips carpet the floor, mingling with the discarded strands of coir rope, and somewhere in the din, the low murmur of Malayalam swirls between bursts of drilling and the slap of waves beating against timber.
In the middle of it all, Babu Sankaran works quietly. His hands, callused by decades of labour, move out of muscle memory — steady, precise, unhurried. He crouches low, chipping away at a wooden pulley he has carved earlier with his hands.
Sankaran wears what looks like the same overalls he had for years — frayed at the edges. Once a deep blue, it is bleached by sweat and sun into something paler.
Navy's antique armour
On May 21, when the yacht was commissioned and inducted into the Indian Navy, Sankaran stood on the pier to take in the INSV Kaundinya. The 20-metre wooden yacht
is stitched together like a suit of wooden armour, lashed with coconut husk rope soaked in fish oil and tree sap called kundroos.
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There are no nails. No bolts. Just knowledge passed from father to son, from generation to generation, now mostly forgotten.
But now, that legacy will sail from the brink of oblivion to the centre of the international seafaring spotlight.
The ship has no modern trappings, no creature comforts, and certainly no engine.
After all, this is no ordinary ship. It is the result of a 'completely crazy project' dreamed up by a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, Sanjeev Sanyal.
He was inspired by the painting of a 5th-century vessel painted onto the ancient rock walls of the Ajanta caves.
Shipwrights and artisans use the 'I-X' pattern to stitch the planks together, similar to the cross-stitch technique in embroidery, where the 'I' represents a straight stitch and the 'X' represents a cross stitch
India, a Sailing Guru
A 15-member Navy crew will command the vessel — not with modern motors but under full cotton sails, aided only by winds and trailing oars, as it was done centuries ago.
'When we really attempt to sail it, we will have to really relearn the art of sailing the square, trailing oar, flexible hull ship, something that no living being knows how to do,' Sanyal said.
'This ship is a unique piece of equipment that we have not sailed before.'
Indeed, the tradition defies time. Indian sailors have known for millennia how to read the monsoons and how to shape a hull that could rise with the tide and bend with the waves without breaking.
'We must challenge the narrative that Europeans taught the world to sail and travel,' said naval historian Commodore Srikant Kesnur (retd). 'This endeavour could be seen as the revival of cultural memories of India's maritime past.
When the crew of this ship sails to various ports and nations, it will arouse curiosity and interest in the name of the ship, the unique form of the ship, and its link with civilisations of the past.
'
Ancient ingenuity unsinkable
'This project is a resurrection of the past, a past that for the last 1,000 years was forgotten. It lived etched on coins, on paintings in caves… that ends now. We have India's own stitched ship,' said Prathmesh Dandekar, the managing director at Hodi Innovations, a shipyard at Divar.
The Indian Navy and the Union ministry of culture jumped on board and roped in Hodi Innovations to turn the dream into a floating, ocean-going objective: retrace the maritime legacy of ancient Indian seafarers.
'If you see today, we don't have any written information about these kinds of boats. And unfortunately, we have not found any shipwrecks,' Dandekar said. 'So, the whole idea for us is to sail this ship on those ancient trade routes to showcase that back in the day, India could build seaworthy ships and was a big maritime power.'
This vessel is expected to sail from Mandvi in Gujarat to Muscat in Oman, following the age-old trading routes that once ferried spices, ivory, cotton, and ideas across the Arabian Sea.
Babu Sankaran, master craftsman of stitched ships, has been working on wooden ships for 45 years
Rich travel history
The art of stitching, with a rope and hands, kept the hull flexible — able to absorb the ocean's fury without splintering. In the ancient days, it allowed Indian ships to reach Arabia, East Africa, and Southeast Asia.
That knowledge now rests in a handful of men like Sankaran — 61 years old, invisible in a crowd, his eyes trained to squint against the sun.
'At the age of 16, I went to Oman to work. I've been working on wooden ships for the past 45 years,' Sankaran said. 'There are others in my hometown of Vadakara in Calicut, but we are the last of this generation. This could well be the last ship I have stitched.'
He runs his hand along the INSV Kaundinya as it lies moored at the Karwar naval base. Every knot is an act of remembrance of ancient techniques. Every pull of the coir rope is a tug — not just towards the ocean, but towards the past.
Sankaran will soon fly to Abu Dhabi to work on another wooden dhow. 'They don't want a stitched ship. They will use nails,' he said.
The INSV Kaundinya's voyage may be months away. But the journey has begun to reclaim old knowledge and to again value labour done by hand. The skill, once orally passed from father to son along the coasts of Malabar and Coromandel, is now documented for posterity.