India, China, and the World: A Connected History by Tansen Sen (review)

India, China, and the World: A Connected History by Tansen Sen, director of the Center for Global Asia and professor of history at New York University (NYU) Shanghai, is a critical and non-judgemental yet stimulating analysis of the relationship between India and China during the ancient, modern, and contemporary periods. It is thoroughly and scintillatingly argumentative, for in relying on the theoretical framework of circulatory connections between India and China and the world, he has challenged the nation-state's forced narratives of civilizational dialogue, geo-civilizational paradigm, and the more recent notion of Chindia, which according to him has diverted attention away from the contentious issues between the two on the one hand and made use of selective historical sources to glorify their past connections on the other. The book could be regarded as a sequel to his earlier works, especially Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600–1400 (2003) and further develops the line of argument on the basis of interpretations and conclusions drawn in this book.

It was perhaps coincidence that the book was launched roughly at the time when India and China came dangerously close to another armed conflict during the Doklam faceoff that lasted for 73 days and further vindicated the author's narrative that beneath the selective interpretation of historical sources to build a civilizational state narrative of the relationship lies a dangerous nation-state nationalistic agenda. He takes a long-term view of the relationship rather than adopting a linear and event-based approach to interpret the circulation of ideas and objects and argues that the pre-twentieth century interactions between the two should not be construed within the framework of modern nation-states. Methodologically based on a mass of primary Chinese and non-Chinese sources, archival documents across the world, as well as secondary sources, this is a fascinating ground-breaking study. The author's mastery in classical and modern Chinese gives him a unique advantage akin to adding wings to a tiger enabling him to put the circulation of ideas, peoples, and objects between India and China and beyond into a kaleidoscopic perspective, thus making it a compelling study.

The book is well-structured into five chapters, each chapter divided into sections and sub sections, which is helpful as it provides the reader a guideline of events mostly within a chronological setting but with extremely diverse themes which the author has intelligently interwoven with his main argument and theoretical framework. The first two chapters and the first section of the third chapter essentially compliment and are built on his earlier research Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade, where he argues that the Buddhist connections were multi-directional and multi-locational circulatory interactions that resulted in the dissemination of geographical, philosophical, and technological knowledge not only between India and China but also across the Eurasian and African landmasses and the Indian Ocean world. The knowledge that was transferred got intermingled as it travelled from one node of connection to another, albeit there remained misperceptions regarding the geographical locations of various polities inside tianzhu (ancient Chinese name for India) or in South Asia and their connections with tianzhu as such in the minds of the Chinese (p. 71).

Equally stimulating and refreshing is the construct of "The Imperial Connections" in chapter 3. Here again, he challenges the notion of Zheng He as a peace-loving imperial envoy; Sen argues that even though China did not launch large scale occupation of foreign territories, it did intervene in local disputes and exert influence over strategic maritime choke points as demonstrated by Zheng He's voyages in the Indian Ocean (pp. 206–207). Early discourses on India by Qing visitors such as Huang Maocai, Ma Jianzhong, Wu Guangpei, and Kang Youwei perhaps were instrumental in building the present mainstream Chinese perceptions about colonial India, all of whom except Huang portrayed India as a failed state and...