Folly of looking at a neighbour with borrowed lenses

Allowing the Chinese firsthand exposure to India’s intellectual currents is irreplaceable for understanding each other better

- Rahul Sagar

July will mark one year since India resumed issuing visas to Chinese nationals.

July will mark one year since India resumed issuing visas to Chinese nationals. This anniversary, part of a wider, hesitant rapprochement, will pass unnoticed by most Indians. It may even arouse some bitterness. But, a glance backward will show why India should not merely preserve contact with China but also deepen it.

It is a common trope in Indian diplomacy to speak of an age-old relationship between China and India. But, as Sinologists from Krishna Prakash Gupta to Rudolph Wagner have pointed out, for much of their history, China and India interacted “silently”. Monks, merchants, scriptures, commodities, and stories crossed the mountains and seas, but there was no sustained, detailed understanding of the other, with the Chinese especially keen to limit the reach and influence of “things from abroad”.

This distance, born of geography and fostered by policy, meant that when China encountered India in the modern era, it had to understand it afresh. But by this point, India had already succumbed to the British, who were beginning to press against China as well. Fatefully, this meant, as Wagner has noted, that contact between China and India was “brokered” by the British, with famed Qing officials like Wei Yuan relying on British sources, such as Hugh Murray’s Encyclopedia of Geography (1834), for their knowledge of modern India. These sources informed the Chinese that Indians were prone to “regular and constant subjection to a foreign yoke” because they were “divided into castes and addicted to abstruse philosophy” and were “strangers to public feeling”. That the Marathas nearly felled the East India Company — such inconvenient facts were passed over silently.