1947 : Karenni States politics

British India was administered through a dual system of provinces and Princely States, spanning from Balochistan to the southernmost tip of the Madras Presidency, and from Bengal to Bombay. On historical political maps, British provinces are typically marked in shades of red, while the native states appear in yellow or chrome. However, during the period between 1824 and 1937—when Burma was annexed to mainland India—a small native territory existed that juggled various administrative possibilities, including the potential of remaining a separate sovereign nation. This was known as the Karenni States (often marked simply as "Karen Tribes" on maps and known today as Kayah State). While members of the Indian National Congress rarely involved themselves in Burmese politics, the pivotal year of 1947 inextricably connected Burma, India, and the Karenni States.

In August 1947, British India was partitioned into the independent Unions of India and Pakistan. Amidst the ongoing upheaval of partition, its former province, Burma, adopted its own constitution just a month later, in September 1947. At that time, Burma was organized into the following administrative units:

1. Sagaing
2. Shan States
3. Wa States
4. Magwe
5. Arakan
6. Mandalay
7. Pegu
8. Irrawaddy
9. Tenasserim

The Karenni (or Karen) tribes were historically administered under the Shan States, serving as a complex administrative unit that vacillated between British protection and sovereign independence. Prior to the 19th century, these tribes were loosely governed under Burmese suzerainty as an autonomous territory. While the annexation of Lower Burma between 1824 and 1852 left the Karenni largely unaffected, Burmese supremacy began to wane. By 1852, the region faced increasing British interference, rendering Karenni independence precarious. Caught between two rival powers, the Karenni leaders sought protectorate status from the British; however, the British—having already exhausted significant resources on Lower Burma—were reluctant to establish a new protectorate in the heart of the Indochinese peninsula. Consequently, between 1852 and 1875, the Karenni remained in a state of geopolitical ambiguity, caught between British influence and Burmese expansion.

In 1875, within the newly founded capital of Mandalay, the British administrator Sir Thomas Douglas Forsyth signed a treaty with King Mindon of the Konbaung Dynasty. This agreement formally recognised the Karenni States as independent from both Burma and Britain. This sovereign status created persistent friction between the Konbaungs and the British. It was not until 1892—after both Upper and Lower Burma had been incorporated into British India—that the British reclassified the Karenni States as "feudatory states," a status distinct from the Indian Princely States. A British agent was stationed in Loikaw, and the states of Bawlake, Kantarawaddy, and Kyebogyi agreed to accept a British stipend.

In the early 20th century, administration shifted again as the Karenni States were placed under the Federated Shan States. While legal documents had previously been drafted through the Legislative Council of India due to the region's proximity to Calcutta, the relocation of the capital to Delhi caused a shift in administrative priority. During the early 1900s, the Delhi government was increasingly preoccupied with the Indian independence movement, which largely excluded Burmese politics. Paradoxically, while Burma had been administered as part of British India for strategic reasons, it had historically functioned as a separate entity.

The eventual separation of Burma from India in 1937 drew criticism from Indian leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru. At the 1936 Faizpur session of the Indian National Congress, Nehru denounced the move as a "divide and rule" tactic intended to weaken the independence movements in both regions. Despite the separation, the status of the Karenni States remained unchanged until the chaos of World War II. While the Japanese occupied Burma and Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army marched along the Karenni periphery in 1942, the region itself remained largely sidelined during the conflict.

Following the war, as British India was partitioned into India and Pakistan, Aung San—the architect of Burmese independence—began campaigning for the integration of the Karenni into a unified Burma. Much like the integration of Princely States occurring simultaneously in India and Pakistan, the Karenni States were eventually absorbed. Following Burma's independence in 1948, these territories became a constituent unit of the new Union of Burma.

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)

The Two Banaras of Akbar - Atak and Katak

Several hundred cities across the world have been founded by adding the prefix “New” to an existing name, in various languages. Yet some cities possess a far more unusual, almost biblical pattern of etymology. The Greek emperor Alexander the Great established several settlements and attached the name Alexandria to them, of which one survives to this day in Egypt. Rome, another immensely influential city, held such symbolic power over rulers of the past that when a new Roman capital was established at the tip of the Bosphorus, it was called Roma Constantinopolitana, which gradually simplified to Constantinople and eventually became Istanbul. In a similar manner, a rare and largely unknown phenomenon unfolded on the Indian subcontinent in the 17th century, linked to one of the holiest and oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world — Varanasi.

The holy city of Varanasi has had many names over time, the most popular — and still occasionally used — being Banaras, or as the British spelled it, Benares. Another ancient name was Kashi, which provides a useful starting point here. Cities such as Uttarkashi, Kashipur, Kashipura, Kashigarh, and Kashigaon all originate from the root word “Kashi,” reflecting not merely a place name but a supreme spiritual identity. Its influence remains so profound that it continues to appear in personal names such as Kashibai, Kashiram, and Kashinath. By the 17th century, however, the word Banaras gained prominence and was used in a similar fashion for two cities situated at opposite ends of the subcontinent. One lay near Peshawar along the Indus River, known in the colonial era as Campbellpur and today as Attock, while the other stood at the mouths of the Mahanadi on the ancient Kalinga coast — the city of Cuttack. The figure connecting these two cities through the name Banaras was the Mughal emperor Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar.

Cuttack, or Katak as it is natively spelled, was already a well-established town long before the Mughals arrived on the subcontinent. In the 13th century, when Anangabhima III of the Eastern Ganga Empire shifted his capital from Kalinganagara to this new city, it was named Abhinaba-Baranasi-Katak, which translates to “New Varanasi Capital.” In effect, the medieval city at India’s eastern coast was consciously envisioned as a “New Varanasi.” Even when the name later evolved into Bidanasi Katak, its roots still traced back to Varanasi, Baranasi, or Banaras. By the time the Mughals consolidated power, they were well aware of this association, and Akbar is known to have referred to the town as Katak-Banaras.

Turning to the other city, Attock — or Atak — it was established by Akbar in the 16th century as a strategic frontier settlement. The word “Atak” derives from the idea of a barricade or blockade, reflecting its position at the northern boundary of the Mughal Empire. The attachment of Banaras or Varanasi to Atak appears to have stemmed from Akbar’s vision of it as a “divine frontier,” giving rise to the name Atak-Banaras. This symbolic pairing effectively marked the empire’s extreme frontiers, and since the eastern limit already carried a historical association with Banaras, extending the same suffix to the northern boundary created a conceptual symmetry.

Over time, however, the Banaras suffix disappeared from both cities. Atak was renamed Campbellpur in 1908 and later restored and standardized as Attock in 1978. Meanwhile, Katak was anglicized in the early 19th century to Cuttack, a name that has endured. Yet unlike Attock, a small town named Varanasi still exists roughly 337 kilometers south of Cuttack in Odisha’s Gajapati district.

Below is a recreated portion of a map originally sketched by Daniel Lizars in 1818. Notably, it depicts Attock and Banaras as two adjacent settlements at the northernmost edge of the Lahore province, situated near the confluence of the Kabul and Indus rivers close to Peshawar.

Lake Chimay Myth: The Lake That Never Existed

The phase between the 1200s and the mid-1800s saw Mediterranean seafaring Europeans, followed by Renaissance and early-modern cartographers from France, England, Holland, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Italian kingdoms, begin mapping what they considered the 'unexplored' regions of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Australia. In the process, they introduced several inaccuracies and errors: California was shown as an island, an imaginary southern continent was marked as Terra Australis Incognita, and the Japanese islands were depicted as distorted, oversized landmasses. One such enduring error was Lake Chimay—an imaginary lake placed around today’s Assam region, in the valley of China’s Yunnan province. It was believed that several rivers of northeast India, northern Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Yunnan originated from a single water body called Lake Chimay. First appearing in 1554, the lake continued to be reproduced on maps until the early 19th century, when it was finally understood to be nothing more than a cartographic myth.

Yunnan province borders the northern reaches of Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam and lies roughly 200 kilometres from India’s closest village in Arunachal Pradesh. Rivers such as the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Dharla, Mekong, Red River, Chao Phraya, along with several others in the Upper Assam valley and Myanmar’s Kachin State, all flow through this broader region. For centuries, it was believed that this vast imagined lake was the source of all these rivers. The first cartographer to map it was Giacomo Gastaldi in 1554—an Italian cartographer who worked with Ptolemaic traditions and relied heavily on accounts from European and Asian travellers. The practice continued, with successive maps reproducing this fictitious lake and adding towns and river names that appear almost comical in today’s context. A map dated 1705 by Guillaume de L’Isle marks rivers named Laquia, Caipoumo, Casa, and Asa. While it is difficult to identify these precisely today, the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Dharla, and Chao Phraya were believed to originate from this lake. The Brahmaputra, or Tsangpo, rises from the Angsi Glacier near Lake Mansarovar and Mount Kailash in Tibet; the Irrawaddy originates in Myanmar’s Kachin State and drains into the Andaman Sea; the Dharla flows from the foothills of Sikkim and joins the Brahmaputra in northern Bangladesh as the Jamuna; and the Chao Phraya flows from Nakhon Sawan in Thailand and empties into the Gulf of Thailand. European cartographers had not traversed or mapped the Himalayas or the regions east of them and therefore made this erroneous assumption. In reality, none of these river sources are even remotely close to one another, making the eventual collapse of the Lake Chimay myth inevitable.

The reality behind Lake Chimay began to emerge through 17th-century Jesuit missionaries during their journeys to spread Christian teachings in China and Macau. In 1685, when Aurangzeb ruled Mughal India, the Kangxi Emperor (Shengzu of Qing) ruled Qing China, and King Narai ruled Ayutthaya in present-day Thailand, a French Jesuit missionary, Father Guy Tachard, discovered that the size and position of Siam were not as European cartographers had assumed. Mapmakers had placed Siam about 24 degrees too far east—a displacement of nearly 2,500 kilometres. When Tachard reached Siam, he realised that Asia was significantly smaller than it appeared on European maps. This revelation made it impossible to reconcile the supposed position of Lake Chimay, and although Tachard did not explicitly deny the lake’s existence, it no longer fit within his geographical understanding. Earlier Jesuits, such as Martino Martini and others, had already noted multiple variations in the lake’s supposed outlets and argued that rivers like the Red River and the Chao Phraya had different sources. Such observations began to sow doubt among Europeans about the lake’s existence and accuracy, though it continued to appear on maps with conflicting information about the rivers flowing from it.

Guillaume de L’Isle was among the first to seriously question the authenticity of Lake Chimay in the early 1700s, though he continued to depict it on his maps. By the 1730s, however, Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville—another French cartographer—accurately mapped Tibet, Yunnan, and the entire river system of the region, leaving no place for Lake Chimay. By the early 19th century, the lake had disappeared entirely from European maps. The mythical lake had a long and curious life—imagined by Europeans and ultimately dismissed by them. Below is a recreation of Guillaume de L’Isle’s 1705 map depicting Lake Chimay.