India’s Maritime Revival: ‘Character of the People’ And the Sea Power of a Nation

Alfred Thayer Mahan identified six conditions of sea power, of which five have been extensively applied to India’s naval rise. The sixth, ‘character of the people’, remains largely absent from this literature. This article argues it is Mahan’s most neglected condition and, for India, one of the most strategically significant. It operationalises the concept along three dimensions, namely, popular-vocational, commercial-industrial, and symbolic-institutional, and argues that genuine revival requires convergent movement across all three. India’s maritime reorientation is better understood as a deliberate cultural construction drawing on episodic historical resources and rational strategic adaptation than as the recovery of a suppressed civilisational essence.