The Irish mutiny at Jalandhar, 1920

The Connaught Rangers were an Irish Catholic regiment of the British Army, formed in 1881 by amalgamating the 88th and 94th Regiments of Foot. Its home depot was at Renmore Barracks in Galway and it recruited mainly in the province of Connacht. These were men from Galway, Mayo, Roscommon, Clare and Westmeath — the western and midland counties that became the Irish Free State. The regiment's nickname was "The Devil's Own", and it has the most oddest of Indian connections.

The Jalandhar Cantonment (or Jullunder Cantonment) is one of the oldest cantonments in India, established in 1848 after the first Anglo-Sikh War. In 1920 the cantonment was the scene of mutiny by Irish soldiers who were protesting against martial law in Ireland by refusing to obey orders. They took down the Union Flag and replaced it with the flag of the Irish Republic proclaimed in Dublin. This is the only entry in the cantonment's own official history that connects Jalandhar (and thus, India) to Ireland. The cantonment sits on the Grand Trunk Road, 89 kilometres from Amritsar and 371 kilometres from Delhi. Jullundur — as Jalandhar was then spelled — was therefore less than 90 kilometres from the site of the Amritsar massacre of April 1919. The soldiers who mutinied were stationed in the immediate shadow of that event, in a Punjab still seething with anger.

The morning of Sunday 28 June 1920; Wellington Barracks, Jullundur. At eight in the morning, Joseph Hawes, Patrick Gogarty, Christopher Sweeney and Stephen Lally, all members of C Company, approached an officer they felt they could trust, Lance Corporal John Flannery, and told him that they wished to ground arms and cease fighting for the British Army due to the oppression of their friends in Ireland. Hawes was from Kilrush, County Clare. He had been home on leave in October 1919 and had personally witnessed British soldiers with bayonets drawn preventing a hurling match from taking place. Letters from home describing Black and Tan violence had been arriving at the barracks, which A hastily recruited British paramilitary force that became synonymous with colonial terror in Ireland during the War of Independence. 

By the following morning over three hundred soldiers had joined the protest. The mutineers doubled the guard, distributed the task of making regular patrols, placed a permanent guard to monitor the senior officers, put a guard on alcohol, and commissioned a hundred green, white and orange rosettes from the local bazaar. They replaced the Union Jack with an Irish tricolour, declared their barracks Liberty Hall — the name of the Dublin building where the 1916 Rising had been planned — and sang rebel songs. The mutineers captured the cantonment armoury, took their English officers hostage and declared the Jalandhar cantonment the seat of the "Free Irish Government in exile." A clamp of secrecy descended on Jalandhar such that no details about what was happening inside the cantonment could leak out. For the next fifty years the world would remain largely oblivious of those events. All the Indian soldiers were moved away from Jalandhar, a tight censorship descended on the town, and it was officially stated that a major secret war exercise was under way in the cantonment. The British mobilised two battalions — the South Wales Borderers and the Seaforth Highlanders — who arrived with artillery and machine guns.

James Joseph Daly

On 30 June, Frank Geraghty of Castleblayney, County Monaghan, and Patrick Kelly were detailed to travel to Solon (Solan, in Himachal Pradesh of today) in the Simla Hills to communicate the fact that the troops in Jullundur had mutinied and to give instructions that if they mutinied, it would be on the lines of passive resistance with no violence. Geraghty appealed to James Joseph Daly as the most competent man and the one he knew personally wished to carry out a mutiny. Daly was a 20-year-old private from Ballymoe, County Galway. He had joined the Connaught Rangers in April 1919 — while the War of Independence was already underway — and been posted to India. His brother William had been one of the original mutineers at Jullundur. When Geraghty and Kelly were arrested on arrival at Solon, Daly heard enough of their shouted messages through the guardroom bars to understand what had happened.

Dagshai Prison, Solan

That night Daly rallied forty men. The Catholic chaplain at Solon, Father Benjamin Baker, persuaded the mutineers to deposit their weapons in the magazine for safekeeping. Then Daly changed his mind. A party of men led by Daly made an attempt to recover their arms and in the engagement two of them, Patrick Smythe and Peter Sears, were killed. Peter Sears had not even been involved in the attack on the magazine — he was returning to his billet when hit by a stray bullet. Eighty-eight mutineers were court-martialled: seventy-seven were sentenced to imprisonment and ten were acquitted. James Daly was shot by a firing squad at Dagshai Prison (today, the Dagshai Jail Museum, in Solan) on 2 November 1920. He was the last member of the British Armed Forces to be executed for mutiny. Eighteen others had also been sentenced to death. All eighteen had their sentences commuted. Only Daly was shot — specifically, as the Viceroy Lord Chelmsford stated, because the British could not afford to show leniency toward a mutineer in the Punjab while trying to maintain discipline over Indian troops still inflamed by Amritsar. Three memorabilia are associated with James Daly: the Connaught Rangers medal, a cross, and a frayed prayer book containing pages with Daly's fingerprints smeared in blood, indicating he was clutching the book when he was shot dead.

The guardroom at the
Jullunder Barracks
(Wellington Barracks)

The guardroom today, where the mutiny of the Irishmen in the British army is still remembered in India, stands at the site. The cantonment remains an active Indian Army establishment. The mutiny is noted in the cantonment's own official history, making Jalandhar one of the few places in India where an Irish event is formally acknowledged in local institutional memory. The Fateh newspaper of Delhi praised the Jullundur mutineers' actions as an adoption of Mahatma Gandhi's principles of civil disobedience and an illustration of how patriotic people can preserve their honour, defy the orders of the Government, and defeat its unjust aims. 

The bodies of Daly, Smythe and Sears remained in India for fifty years. In 1923, following Irish independence, the imprisoned mutineers were released and returned to Ireland. In 1936, the Free State's Fianna Fáil government awarded pensions to those whose British Army pensions were forfeited by conviction. In 1970, the bodies of Daly, Sears and Smythe were repatriated from India to Ireland for reburial. Daly was reinterred in Tyrrellspass, County Westmeath. A memorial to the mutineers stands in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.

The former names of Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean

Cities, towns, countries, and land features have been renamed for centuries and are in our closest political atmosphere. Renaming of places has shaped world politics, history, and lifestyle of people and acted as markers with the rise and fall of empires. When the British left India, hundreds of Anglicised names and European spellings got renamed to its native or a new one. When governments collapsed in the Soviet Union, Petrograd became Leningrad and finally St. Petersburg. On the departure of the Dutch from the New World, and the arrival of the English, New Amsterdam became New York. With the end of Belgian colonialism, Zaïre turned into the Democratic Republic of Congo, and almost all the Belgian names turned Bantu. And there are countless such examples that have shaped world history. 

But what about water bodies? The major oceans, seas, bays, gulfs? Rivers that shape world geography, lakes, ponds, and even smaller tributaries and distributaries. Maritime warfare has seen umpteen number of name changes that took place around us and also contributed equally in giving world history a direction. And one of the key water body systems was the ones around the Indian subcontinent - Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean, and Bay of Bengal. Connecting Arabia to India and to the various kingdoms and empires of Southeast Asia, these water bodies decided the fate of the world and are still the major game-changers. This post shall talk about the various names of these water bodies and how they systematically oriented world order. 

The Arabian Sea

The sea touching Mumbai, Karachi, and Muscat has worn more names than almost any other body of water — each one a timestamp of who controlled it.

The oldest names came from the Indian interior. The Rigveda (~1500 BCE) called it Paraavat Samudra — "the farther sea, where the sun sets" — a directional name from the perspective of the Punjab heartland. By the Puranic era it had become Ratnakara, "the mine of gems," honouring the pearls, corals, and trade wealth that flowed from its depths. Tamil Sangam poets called it simply Kudakadal — the Western Sea.

The Persians were the first to map it formally. In 515 BCE, Achaemenid emperor Darius I sent a Greek sailor named Scylax of Caryanda (in today's Türkiye) down the Indus River and westward along the Arabian coast all the way to Suez — a thirty-month voyage. For Darius, the sea was Darya-e-Hind, the Sea of Hind. Hind was Persian for Sindhu, the Indus River. This single etymological chain — Sindhu → Hind → Indos → Indus → India — is what eventually gave the ocean its modern name too.

The Greeks collapsed the entire northwestern Indian Ocean — Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, Arabian Sea, Persian Gulf — into one name: the Erythræan Sea, after a mythological Persian king called Erythras. Alexander's admiral Nearchus sailed it in 326 BCE after the Indian campaign. The anonymous Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (~50 CE) became the definitive Greco-Roman trading guide to its ports. Romans formalised it as Mare Erythræum.

Medieval Arab geographers, despite their sailors dominating these waters for centuries, couldn't agree on a name. Some called it Bahr-e-Fars (Persian Sea), inheriting Sassanid terminology. Others used Bahr-al-Hind (Sea of India), the Green Sea, or the Sea of Oman. Arab commercial dominance peaked under the Abbasid Caliphate (8th–13th centuries), with dhows reaching as far as China — yet no single Arab name ever became universal.

The Portuguese settled it. When Vasco da Gama arrived at Calicut in 1498, he sailed a sea visibly run by Arab merchants at every port. Portuguese maps began calling it Mar Arabico. British geographical standardisation confirmed it in the 18th century, and the International Hydrographic Organization formalised the name in the 20th. "Arabian Sea" is ultimately a Portuguese-British cartographic decision — made not because Arabs discovered it, but because Arab traders were the most visible presence on it when Europeans arrived. A Vedic poet called it the sea of gems. A Persian emperor called it the sea of India. A Greek merchant called it the Red Sea. An Arab navigator couldn't decide. A Portuguese explorer named it after the people he kept meeting on its shores.

The Bay of Bengal

The sea that curves along India's eastern coast, touching Bengal, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, and the shores of Myanmar and Sri Lanka, has always been understood differently — wilder, more monsoon-driven, and for much of history, the gateway to Southeast Asia.

The oldest Indian names were again directional. The Rigveda called it Purva Samudra — the Eastern Sea, where the sun rises — the mirror image of the Arabian Sea's western designation. The epics called it Mahodadhi, "the great vessel of water," the ocean Rama's armies gazed upon before crossing to Lanka. In Odisha and Andhra it was Kalinga Sagar, named after the powerful kingdom that dominated its western coast. Tamil Sangam poets called it Vangakadal or Vada Kadal — the Bengal Sea, or the Northern Sea.

The Sanskrit classical tradition also used Vangasagara — Sea of Vanga, the ancient kingdom of Bengal — reflecting how the bay's identity shifted depending on which coast you stood on. From the Tamil south it was the northern sea. From Bengal, it was the great eastern ocean.

Greeks and Romans named it with characteristic Ganges-centrism. Ptolemy (~150 CE) called it Sinus Gangeticus — the Gulf of the Ganges — because the Ganges was the most famous river of India and this was simply that river's gulf. Roman maps continued using the name for centuries after it had faded from use on the subcontinent itself.

The bay's most significant historical moment came under the Chola Empire. It was across this sea — their Vangakadal — that Rajendra Chola I launched his famous 1025 CE naval campaign, devastating the Srivijaya Empire in Sumatra. The Cholas understood this sea not as a boundary but as a highway.

European cartographers called it variously the Sea of Bengal or Gulf of Bengal, after the Bengal region defining its northwestern shore. The name "Bay of Bengal" consolidated in British colonial usage through the 18th century, driven by the importance of the Bengal Presidency as the centrepiece of British India. What that name obscures is that this was never one civilisation's sea — it was the Kalinga kingdom's trading coast, Rama's mythological horizon, the Chola navy's launching pad, the Buddhist missionary route to Southeast Asia, and a British administrative convenience, all layered over three thousand years.

The Indian Ocean

Of the three, the Indian Ocean has the most contested naming history — because its name has always been political.

The oldest Sanskrit name was Ratnakara — "the mine of gems" — used in the Puranas as a collective name for the great southern ocean. The epics used Mahodadhi for its expanse. The Vedic tradition generally conceived of it as the cosmic receptacle of all rivers rather than a navigable sea with fixed boundaries.

The Persians under Darius I called it Darya-e-Hind — the Sea of Hind — after their province Hinduš on the Indus. This is the name that, filtered through Greek as Oceanus Indicus, eventually became "Indian Ocean." Pliny the Elder (~77 CE) was apparently the first author to formally use Oceanus Indicus in his Natural History — one of the earliest documented uses of the "Indian" label on this ocean.

Ptolemy's maps (~150 CE) called it Mare Indicum and imagined it as a giant enclosed lake, with an unknown landmass connecting Africa and Asia to the south. This geographical misconception persisted on European maps for over a thousand years. Medieval Arab geographers called it Bahr al-Hind — the Sea of India — or the Sea of Zanj in its southern reaches near East Africa. Chinese navigators of the Tang and Song dynasties, and most famously Zheng He's fleet in the early 15th century, called it the Western Ocean — a reminder that geography is always relative to where you stand.

The Portuguese, arriving via the Cape of Good Hope in 1497–98 under Vasco da Gama, called it the Mar da India. The name "Indian Ocean" became standard through European cartographic convention during the 16th and 17th centuries and was formalised by the International Hydrographic Organization in the 20th century.

Arabian Sea — Historical Names
Period	Name	Meaning
~1500 BCE	Paraavat Samudra	Western sea, where the sun sets (Rigveda)
~1500 BCE	Sindhu Sagar	Sea of the Indus River (Sanskrit)
~400 BCE – 400 CE	Ratnakara	Mine of gems (Puranas)
~515 BCE	Daryaye Hind	Sea of Hind (Achaemenid Persia)
~300 BCE – 300 CE	Kudakadal	Western Sea (Tamil Sangam)
~5th c. BCE – 18th c. CE	Erythræan Sea	Sea of King Erythras (Ancient Greek)
~1st c. CE	Mare Erythræum	Erythraean Sea (Roman)
~6th – 17th c. CE	Bahr-e-Fars	Sea of Persia (Sassanid / Medieval Arab)
~7th – 14th c. CE	Bahr-al-Hind	Sea of India (Abbasid Caliphate)
~15th c. CE	Mar Arabico	Arabian Sea (Portuguese)
~18th c. CE – present	Arabian Sea	Named after Arab traders (British cartography)
Bay of Bengal — Historical Names
Period	Name	Meaning
~1500 BCE	Purva Samudra	Eastern Sea, where the sun rises (Rigveda)
~400 BCE – 400 CE	Mahodadhi	Great vessel of water (Sanskrit Epics)
~300 BCE onwards	Kalinga Sagar	Sea of Kalinga (Odisha tradition)
~300 BCE – 300 CE	Vangakadal	Sea of Vanga / Bengal (Tamil Sangam)
~300 BCE – 300 CE	Vada Kadal	Northern Sea (Tamil Sangam)
~300 BCE – 300 CE	Gangasagara	Sacred sea of the Ganga (Sanskrit)
~150 CE	Sinus Gangeticus	Gulf of the Ganges (Ptolemy)
~16th – 18th c. CE	Gulf of Bengal	Named after Bengal region (Portuguese / Dutch)
~18th c. CE – present	Bay of Bengal	Named after Bengal Presidency (British)
Indian Ocean — Historical Names
Period	Name	Meaning
~1500 BCE	Samudra	Assemblage of waters (Rigveda)
~1500 BCE – 400 CE	Ratnakara	Mine of gems (Puranas)
~515 BCE	Darya-e-Hind	Sea of Hind (Achaemenid Persia)
~5th c. BCE	Erythræan Sea	Entire NW Indian Ocean zone (Ancient Greek)
~77 CE	Oceanus Indicus	First formal use of Indian label (Pliny)
~150 CE	Mare Indicum	Indian Sea (Ptolemy)
~7th – 14th c. CE	Bahr al-Hind	Sea of India (Medieval Arab)
~7th – 14th c. CE	Sea of Zanj	Named after East African coast (Arabic)
~15th c. CE	Xi Yang	Western Ocean (Chinese — Zheng He era)
~15th c. CE	Mar da India	Sea of India (Portuguese)
~18th c. CE – present	Indian Ocean	Named after India, itself from Indus River (British)