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Paper short abstract

This paper examines maritime routes shaping intellectual exchange across South, East, and Southeast Asia. Focusing on Bay of Bengal–Japan sea networks linking Tāmralipti, Calcutta, Kobe, Yokohama it traces how waterborne network shaped Japanese imagination of India as Tenjiku forging Asian modernity

Paper long abstract

This paper explores rivers and maritime routes that have profoundly shaped cultural mobility and intellectual exchange across Asia. Focusing on the historical continuum of Indo–Japanese connections through the Bay of Bengal and Japan’s coastal networks, it argues that water bodies were not passive backdrops but dynamic worlds that actively sustained, mediated, and transformed human and more-than-human life. From ancient port of Tāmralipti in Bengal to the fluvial corridors of Naniwa (Osaka), the Yodo River, and the Seto Inland Sea water networks enabled the circulation of textiles, commodities, Buddhist idea, world philosophies and people long before the emergence of modern nation-states. These waterways shaped enduring cultural imaginaries of Tenjiku (India) as a sacred and intellectual horizon, while also structuring everyday practices of navigation, livelihood, care, and risk. Merchants, monks, pilgrims, and sailors inhabited rivers and seas as ethical spaces where commerce, devotion, and survival were deeply entangled. The paper examines how fluvial environments of modern Indo–Japanese encounters shaped through colonial maritime infrastructures, especially the development of docks in British-era Calcutta, such as Kidderpore and Watgunge. The city’s contemporary landscape continues to bear silent traces of these earlier maritime ecologies standing as a living archives of encounter, preserving histories of connectivity alongside displacement, migration, and labor. Bringing together historical and cultural perspectives, the paper challenges inherited binaries between nature and society, land and sea, and ecology and politics. It proposes water routes as ethical and political actors in Asia’s transregional history, central to the making of Asian modernity and Indo–Japanese intellectual exchange.