Ties That Bind Ever More Weakly
As China rises steadily to global influence and India steps into a future as a great power in Asia, the question of what binds these ancient civilizations takes on increasing salience. Tansen Sen, historian at NYU Shanghai and director of the Center on Global Asia, explores the longue durée of Sino-indian connections, from Buddhism’s spread in the first millennium to today’s Belt and Road Initiative.
In pursuit of connection points, Sen introduces a rich variety of third parties who mediated the relationship over the ages, such as the late-18thcentury Panchen Lama in Tibet, who offered to mediate between British India and the Manchu Qing Dynasty. On recent times, Sen traces the failed efforts by Delhi and Beijing to forge a common destiny, from the pan-asian visions of early 20th-century intellectuals such as Liang Qichao and Rabindranath Tagore to the post-war “peaceful co-existence” creed of leaders Jawaharlal Nehru and Zhou Enlai. Yet Sen stresses that the centrifugal forces of disconnection — or outright discord, as in the 1962 border war — have long outweighed the centripetal bonds of linkage. Sen suggests deep skepticism for the recent discourse of “Chindia,” with its invented past of geocivilizational brotherhood. If this book is any guide, India-china relations will be shaped profoundly by the Asian and global context in which they intersect.
The question of what binds these ancient civilizations takes on increasing salience.