Cities are in vogue these days with talk of smart cities and of turning Mumbai into an international financial centre. Unfortunately, most of the discussion centres on the hardware: buildings, flyovers, monorail…. Urban hardware is indeed important. But great cities like Mumbai also need world-class ‘software’. Look at any great city and one will see it’s not just about glass and chrome office buildings and swish airports, but also about social interaction, economic activity, culture, entertainment and urban buzz.

So, the debate about the future of Indian cities must not be limited to functional civil engineering, but extended to things that bring a city to life. It is extraordinary that a proud civilisation like India has hardly built a world-class purpose-built museum since Independence. Yet, we would have happily paid to see the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris, and gawked at the displays of Indian artifacts, when similar artifacts lie forgotten all over India.

This is not about sentimentality. Great museums are an important ‘soft’ ingredient of a metropolis and can have real economic value. The Louvre, for instance, welcomed 9.3 million visitors in 2013, the Met 6.8 million, while the British Museum had 6.7 million visitors. Museums in the US employ 400,000 people and directly contribute $21 billion to the US economy. Indeed, cities like Bilbao have anchored their revival on the back of a great museum. This is why there is a case for building an iconic maritime museum in Mumbai.

But why a maritime museum? Indian history textbooks give the impression that the country’s past is all about land-based empires. But Indian civilisation has always had a huge maritime footprint. After all, it is the only country that has an ocean named after it.

There is evidence that the Harappans were trading with Mesopotamia 4,500 years ago. After the collapse of the Harappan civilisation, ‘Indians’ continued to explore the Indian Ocean. By the 6th century BC, merchants from Odisha were sailing along the eastern coast of India and were settling in Sri Lanka in large numbers.

This is why the Sinhalese majority of Sri Lanka is of Odiya-Bengali origin and speaks a related language.

Water Babies

By the 3rd century BC, Indian merchants were confident enough to sail across the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia. This trade led to the spread of Indic culture to this part of the world and we see the rise of Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms in Java, Sumatra, Cambodia and Vietnam. By the 2nd century BC, we also saw flourishing trade relations with the Greeks and later the Roman Empire. Eventually, Indian seafarers and merchants would create a maritime network that stretched from China in the east to Iraq and Alexandria in the west.

Although Indian maritime activity was mostly about peaceful trade, some Indian kingdoms did project naval power. The best-known examples are the naval raids by the Cholas on the Srivijaya kingdom of Sumatra in the 11th century. In the 18th century, the Maratha navy led by Admiral Kanhoji Angre gave the British and Portuguese a hard time.

All this maritime activity had a profound impact. Syrian Christians, Arabs, Parsis and Jews came to India as traders and refugees, and brought their cultures with them. Just as Indian merchants spread Hinduism and Buddhism to Southeast Asia and beyond. The second-oldest mosque in the world is in Kerala, quite close to some of the oldest apostolic churches in the world, while the largest Hindu temple ever built, Angkor Wat, is in Cambodia.

Even Indian cuisine has been profoundly influenced by spices brought from Indonesia, crops such as tomatoes and potatoes introduced by the Portuguese, and assorted Arab and Persian influences. A maritime museum is a great way to celebrate this history of our globalisation and trade, and the extraordinary diversity created by the cross-pollination of ideas, food, religions, literature and, as aconsequence, cultures.

Mumbai is the obvious location for it, given its strong maritime traditions. The problem in a crowded city is to find real estate to match the ambition of such a project. Fortunately, there are plans to redevelop 1,800 acres of Port Trust land spread across the city’s eastern seaboard. Much of it will go towards offices, residential buildings and open areas. However, there is a case for using a maritime museum as a key anchor tenant to create a cultural hub that serves not just as a reminder of our glorious maritime past but also that has theatres, lecture halls, restaurants and other amenities that contribute to a vibrant urban environment.

Mumbai’s Capital

Ideally, it must be an iconic waterfront building that adds to the city’s skyline, like the Sydney Opera House or the Bund in Shanghai. How long will Mumbai’s architectural personality depend on the colonial era? As the commercial capital of a rising 21st-century power, it must recast its image in a way that both captures our past and points the way to our future, and becomes by itself one of the key reasons for people to visit the city.

Our hope is that government, business, civil society, academia and others will get behind this effort to enable us to tell our own history. In Mumbai. On the waterfront.

 (Sanjeev Sanyal is global strategist and managing director, Deutsche Bank, and Reuben Abraham is CEO, IDFC Institute.)