Arabian Sea

Trade between Arabia and the Indian west coast is older than any of the religions now practised on either side of it, and when Islam appeared it moved along a route already running. Arab merchants settled at the ports of Malabar and the Konkan, married locally, and produced the Mappila communities of Kerala and the Konkani Muslims of the coast north of them, communities that trace their Islam to commerce rather than conquest and that were established centuries before any Muslim army reached the south of India. The mosque at Kodungallur in Kerala carries a tradition of foundation within the Prophet's own century, which is not independently documented but which the community has held for a very long time.

The same water carried the hajj. Pilgrims from Gujarat, Malabar and the Deccan sailed to Jeddah on the monsoon, a journey of months each way that put Indian scholars in Mecca and Medina for extended periods and brought them home as teachers, a circulation Michael Pearson traces as one of the ocean's constant institutions. The pilgrim traffic was large enough that Mughal and later British authorities regulated it.

Zoroastrians came the other way. Tradition places the arrival of a group fleeing Iran at Sanjan on the Gujarat coast in the eighth or tenth century, negotiating settlement with a local ruler, and Mary Boyce's history follows the community from that landing to the Parsi presence in Bombay.

The coastline is a line of shrines. The Haji Ali dargah at Mumbai stands on an islet reached by a causeway that the tide covers twice a day, so that access to it is governed by the sea; the tomb complexes of the Hadrami sayyid families, whose ocean-wide network Engseng Ho has traced from the Hadramawt across to Gujarat, Malabar and beyond, run down the same coast. Sufi orders spread with the trade, and sailors and fishermen made vows at these tombs before a voyage.

Hindu practice on the coast is bound to the sea in its own way. Offerings are made to Samudra, the ocean, and to Varuna, the god of waters and of oaths; immersion of images at the end of festivals takes place from these beaches; and the shrine of Hinglaj Mata in the Balochistan desert near the coast, counted among the Shakti Peethas, is the westernmost major Hindu pilgrimage and is reached by Hindus from Pakistan and India across arid country behind the shore.

Christianity has its own claims here. The Saint Thomas tradition brings the apostle to the Malabar coast, and Goa on the same coast holds the body of Francis Xavier in the Basilica of Bom Jesus, exposed to public veneration at intervals of about a decade. The modern sea carries oil tankers, a seasonal fishing ban timed to the monsoon, and hajj traffic that now goes almost entirely by air.