MANY littoral areas of the Indian Ocean still harbour people who hold firmly on to ancient seafaring practices. Studying these techniques is both a challenge and a fulfilling guide to those probing the past. However, research on seafaring traditions has focussed on areas beyond the Indian Ocean and is influenced by Western ideas. Just such a bias was conspicuous at the recent International Seminar on Techno-Archaeological Perspectives held in New Delhi, where a Western expert bluntly asked, "Why do you want to open the Indian Ocean papers?" He said that they had been lying around for 800 years and another 80 would do them no harm.

The seminar, organised by the Indo-French Exchange Programme, concentrated on the boat-building and navigation techniques of the seafarers of the Indian Ocean region -- the Indian subcontinent and its neighbour islands, the Gulf countries and the Far East.

Opening the seminar, Amitav Ghosh, social scientist-turned-writer, emphasised the importance of understanding the maritime history and archaeology of the Indian Ocean, whose maritime trade links have extended as far as the Mediterranean, if not farther. But, at the seminar, an obvious rift existed -- as Ghosh put it -- between those archaeologists and historians who confine themselves to the relics of the past and those who prefer to study living traditions.

B Arunachalam, a Bombay-based geographer who has studied indigenous maritime techniques, says that most West-oriented scholars fail to recognise the value of studying seafaring communities to understand the past. Ashok Jain, director of the National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies, also points out, "This is because traditions hardly exist in Europe. Moreover, Western university education is rather strait-jacketed and confined within the boundaries of disciplines. And a great amount of inter-disciplinarity is needed to understand these traditions."

Calling for a change in the self-imposed geographical focus of historians, Ghosh said, "The Indian Ocean has been the centre not only of many different cultures, but also of cultural exchanges since times immemorial."

Scholars pointed out that very little has changed in the basic maritime technologies over thousands of years and the past can be reconstructed by studying the present. People are still making boats by sewing planks together. And they are still traversing the seas, guided only by the wind, the stars, the waves, with outstretched hands and sometimes, improvised versions of sextants and astrolabes.

Says Arunachalam, "Technology as we understand it now is different from what it was earlier. Past technology developed partly through experience and partly out of necessity. Although hardly any literary tradition which goes back more than 3 or 4 centuries exists on the construction and running of crafts in India, the earlier techniques of boat-building can be reconstructed by documenting and understanding living practices and studying oral traditions."

Said Sean McGrail, an archaeologist at Oxford's Institute of Archaeology, "The understanding of economic history remains incomplete if we don't look at the people involved in the trade or their level of technological development."