INSV Kaundinya: Indian ship arrives in Muscat today

An official welcoming party has been arranged on its arrival at the port.

The ship embarked on her maiden voyage from Porbandar in the western Indian state of Gujarat to Muscat on December 29.

'Making final preparations for ceremonial entry—history under sail,' the latest update said on Wednesday.

An update on January 10 said, 'After yesterday’s update, we had several bouts of heavy rain. Everything is damp after that. Also, the local system disrupted the wind, but it is now back from the east. We did, however, get a nice sunset. It was still drizzling when we raised the sails. Now more than 2/3 done. We will soon face a problem the ancient mariners did not face - oil tankers and large container vessels. So far, we have encountered the occasional one, but tomorrow we will enter a heavy traffic corridor,' Sanjeev Sanyal, who is onboard the ship.

The journey began as an idea in the mind of economist Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of India's Economic Advisory Council. Sanyal was inspired by the painting in Cave 17 in Ajanta. An MoU between the Ministry of Culture and the Indian Navy followed in 2022. Hodi Innovations, a Goa-based private boat builder, was assigned the contract to build the 'stitched ship project'.

The vessel was built by a team of skilled artisans from Kerala, led by master shipwright Babu Sankaran. The team painstakingly stitched teak and jackfruit wooden planks on the ship's hull using coir rope, coconut fibre, and natural resin. No metal fasteners, nails, or bolts were used. Only traditional tools like hammers and chisels, needles and coir threads were used in construction.

'It was an iterative process; we made several scaled-down models of the boat before finalising the design and testing it at the IIT Madras,' Prathamesh Dandekar, MD, of Hodi Innovations, who was quoted by the India Today magazine.

Launched in March 2025, the vessel is named after a 1st century CE Indian sailor from India's east coast who journeyed to Cambodia and met and married a Cambodian princess.

Subject to mandatory approvals, the ship will be available for public visit for a couple of days (with registration), with a maximum of about 500 people allowed per day, according to sources in the Indian Embassy.

Built using the ancient Indian stitched-ship technique, this ship highlights India's rich maritime traditions as it tries to retrace our historic links with the Gulf region and beyond. It is now part of the Indian Navy fleet.

The legendary voyage of Kaundinya, dated to around the 1st century CE, must be understood within the broader framework of the Indian Ocean maritime network, in which the western coast of India and the Omani–Arab seaboard played a pivotal role. Kaundinya’s sea crossing reflects a well-established tradition of Indian blue-water navigation that connected India with Arabia, East Africa, and Southeast Asia centuries before the rise of European maritime powers.

By this period, Oman’s ports — notably Muscat, Suhar, and Sur — were already integral nodes in the Indian Ocean trading system. Omani and Arab sailors were masters of monsoon-driven navigation, a knowledge system shared with Indian mariners from Gujarat, Konkan, Kerala, and the Coromandel Coast. Ships similar to those associated with Kaundinya would have followed these seasonal wind patterns, enabling long-distance voyages across the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.