This book is a narrative of maritime trade in India with special focus on Tamil Nadu. When such a book is written by K.R.A. Narasiah, who is not only a trained and experienced marine engineer but is also the author of Kadalodi, an acclaimed memoir of his seafaring experiences, one necessarily reads the book with expectation, looking forward to new insights. The seafaring prowess and the naval exploits of ancient Tamils are not only legendary but also attested by both indigenous and foreign historical and literary sources. The first chapter, which is mostly based on readings of the classical Sangam Tamil poetry, provide riveting vignettes of seafaring, ships, markets, merchants and trade in ancient Tamil Nadu. The subsequent chapter gives numismatic evidence for the same. These are followed by short chapters on medieval merchant guilds which controlled coastal trade, and on shipbuilding industry. History The author argues that maritime trade and shipping flourished in India until the advent of the Europeans: the Portuguese, the Dutch and the French. The arrival of the British sounded the death knell. The first part of the book ends with a chapter on the rise of shipping in independent India. In the penultimate chapter of the first section it might have been appropriate to give more details about the pioneering efforts of V.O. Chidambaram Pillai especially considering that this is the centenary year of his famous Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company. The second part of the book provides information, useful but necessarily dull, on the history of various Indian ports and their present condition. The book is not based on original research but draws from a fund of already published work from which it quotes extensively. However, the author makes no attempt to present it in any interpretive framework. Further, it is rather inexplicable that the author should display a lack of familiarity with a large and burgeoning corpus of writing on maritime history which has emerged as a specialisation in history-writing. The works of Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Holden Furber, Ashin Das Gupta, K.N.Chaudhuri and Sanjay Subrahmanyam come to mind readily. The veteran Tamil writer late `Chitti' P.G. Sundararajan, perhaps in his capacity as the uncle of the author, has contributed a foreword to the book. Contrary to the thrust of the book that Indian shipping was decimated by European supremacy on the Indian seas, the foreword blames Muslim invasions during the beginning of the first millennium. - - - Tuesday, Sep 26, 2006 - - -