Narrating the Maritime Past: Heritage, Cultural Diplomacy and India’s Engagement With the Indian Ocean

Abstract

Since 2014 the Indian state has presented the history of the Indian Ocean as a resource for present partnerships in the region. This article asks how that history is selected, organized and used in cultural and heritage diplomacy, and what the process reorganizes and leaves out. Its main case is Project Mausam, a transnational heritage initiative launched by India's Ministry of Culture in 2014, with ASEAN–India cultural cooperation as a comparative case. Drawing on a qualitatively coded corpus of 19 official documents (58 passages) from 2014 to 2025, an audit of recurring historical claims against Indian Ocean and Southeast Asian historiography, and the UNESCO World Heritage record, the article makes three arguments. First, vocabulary is institutionally located: India's heritage agencies describe a plural 'Indian Ocean world' of routes and exchanges, whereas 'civilizational' language appears in diplomatic and jointly negotiated texts. Second, Mausam's selectivity lies not in how it describes the past but in what it acts upon: its plural Afro-Arab-Asian frame persists from 2014 to 2025, yet the nomination themes on the parliamentary record are Indic in origin and outward in direction. Third, Mausam exemplifies declarative heritage diplomacy: twelve years after its launch at UNESCO, no Mausam-derived entry appears on India's Tentative List, while in ASEAN–India texts the civilizational clause survives but its operational vehicle passes to ASEAN-owned instruments. The article concludes by considering what a heritage diplomacy that treats partners as co-authors of the connected past would require, and sets out the resulting policy implications for India's heritage diplomacy.

Keywords

• Heritage Diplomacy
• Project Mausam
• Indian Ocean
• Civilizational Discourse
• ASEAN-India Relations