LAUSR

I t is very important for large and populous neighbours such as India and China to have a better understanding of one another’s history, culture and value systems. Perhaps no two peoples in the world are as similar as Indians and Chinese in terms of the agrarian foundations of our societies and many of our traditions with roots in Hindu-Buddhist rituals and philosophy, and even the undue importance attached in the past to the male child. At the same time, we are also dissimilar: we use our hands to ingest food, they use chopsticks; we use the slow flame to cook whereas they use a high flame; we are direct in speech and given to individualism whereas they are indirect and place group interests above that of the individual; the concept of ‘loss of face’ in China is much stronger than that of ‘izzat’ in India. We are a democracy. China has a centralised system that could not be more different. And how we achieved nationhood is also very different. It goes without saying that good fences make good neighbours. The fact is that India and China have yet to build good fences between them. We have co-existed for millennia, amicably for the most part, except for the differences that surfaced in the 20th century. India and China still have a long way to go to understand one another better, partly because both countries are changing so rapidly. Other variables in the mix are the narratives built up by the media and armchair specialists in India and in China’s case, the Chinese Communist Party line, which unfortunately determines the bandwidth in which even academics operate. The theme has been divided into three distinct timeframes in which perception of one another has evolved. The first covers our historical ties from the earliest links to the middle of the 20th century. The second spans the period from the birth of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 until the end of the last century. The third features the current period from the beginning of this century to the present. The millennial ties between India and China revolve around the birth of Buddhism in India and its spread to neighbouring countries, including China, particularly during the Maurya and the Gupta dynasties. Much of what we know of the time is through the lens of the great travellers who went across boundaries that were yet only notional.