I wonder if it has anything to do with people showing unannounced and uninvited on the sub continent historically actually had to land there, i.e. the Portuguese and the British.
That seems like a stretch. It's not a literal translation of the equivalent phrase in any Indian language I speak. And there were nearly zero English speakers in India before Europeans came, so it's not like Indians made up the idiom as the British sailed their ships into the harbor.
Most of them, in fact. I can think of no incursions by sea except for British, Portuguese, and French, none of which were actual 'invasions' at the time so much as merchants wanting to trade (which, of course, did lead directly to the british raj, but that was never the original intention of the EIC).
