LESSONS FROM THE PAST

India must take a leaf out of China's cultural diplomacy and strengthen research on Beijing. The 'trade and nothing else' paradigm does not augur well for India's rise

- B.R. DEEPAK

The interconnected history of India and China and the circulatory movement of ideas, people, technologies and commodities are well recorded in the textual as well as oral traditions of both countries. Its footprints could be found throughout the geographical landscapes of present-day India, China and beyond, whether it was the birth of Chinese Buddhism or the dissemination of ancient India's astronomy, literature, music and languages into China, or technologies such as sugar making, paper manufacturing and silk production coming from China to India and other countries.

All of it enriched knowledge systems across the world. The translation industry in China, for example, had people from India and many Central Asian polities supporting it, along with hundreds of Chinese scholar monks. Even today, there are 35,000 Sanskrit words in the Chinese language. The Dai, a minority nationality in the Yunnan province, had its own version of the Ramayana.

It was during the colonial period that contemporary images of India and China found their foundations. As Qing China (1636-1912) became apprehensive of the threat from British India, it sent officials to study the decline of the Indian civilisation and the intentions of the British in the Himalayan states. Qing officials such as Huang Maocai, Ma Jianzhong, Wu Guangpei and Kang Youwei lamented the decline of Indian civilisation. Indians were called “people of a lost century” and “no more than slaves”. Lu Xun, one of the greatest modern Chinese writers, despised Rabindranath Tagore as a “poisonous datura” and Indian people as “inferior slaves”. In his opinion, colonised India had become a defeated country and, therefore, it was impossible for it to produce great writers and works any longer.