Piracy, we have always been told is as old as oceanic trade and yet it is one of those phenomena that is very difficult to track, and to write about. We come across romantic and fictive depictions of pirates as brave outlaws whose daring and bravado impressed chroniclers persuading them to read more into their actions. Renowned Historian and Author Dr. Lakshmi Subramanian looks into the corpus, to identify the principal shifts in our understanding of Indian Ocean piracy and to suggest new ways of looking at the phenomenon while working with a complex and fragmented archive.