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SAJA South Asia Self-Study Guide

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This guide is intended to help journalists better understand South Asia. This is a work in progress - please send comments, corrections, additions to our editor: saja[at]columbia.edu (subject line="self-study guide"). Last updated: March 11, 2002.

Concept & original text by Bruce C. Robertson | Edited by Anandashankar Mazumdar

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chronology
General Introduction
Introduction to Major Themes and Topics
Method of Study
Themes and Topics
I. Geography, Climate and Eco-Systems
II. Historical Overview
III. Peoples and Languages
IV. Literary Culture
V. Major Religions
VI. Arts: Music, Drama, Cuisine
VII. Colonial History
VIII. Politics Since Independence in 1947
IX. Political Economy
X. Regional Strategic Environment: Dispute Over Kashmir
XI. U.S.-South Asian Relations

 

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

The South Asia Self-Study Guide introduces the reader to this region of rapidly growing strategic, economic, geo-political importance, first by identifying eleven broad themes or topics that both provide essential background to and put into sharp focus the dominant issues, personalities and events in South Asia today. Second, this Self-Study Guide provides a short bibliography of readily available critically acclaimed literature that present the most authoritative crossfire of expert viewpoints on the issues, events and people of the subcontinent, Sri Lanka and Indian Ocean. This reading list is not intended to be representative of the broad sweep of literature on any topic. It provides an introduction to the some of the best currently available studies. For further more general or specialized study the reader may turn to the extensive bibliographies in the books recommended. Third, this Guide provides internet sources to direct the reader to the most up-to-date world reportage and commentary. Because of the unpredictable turnover of internet sites preference is given to search engines which direct the reader to currently available homepages and other more stable sites and links.

The following are among the most important general South Asia search engines:

Familiarity with and appreciation for the diversity of South Asia is a critically important part of preparation for successful, informed and rewarding service abroad.

INTRODUCTION TO MAJOR THEMES AND TOPICS

Identifying the major themes and topics in the study of South Asia is not without problems. Just as there is vigorous diversity of expert opinion on every current issue and its interpretation there is equally vigorous diversity of opinion on what are the major themes and topics and on what are the most reliable sources of information and judgment.

Since this introductory study Guide is designed for journalists, travelers and their families who have little or no personal experience and knowledge of South Asia it takes a general historical approach to the region. Identifying major themes and relevant topics (phrased as study questions) for the study of South Asia prepares the way to examining continuities as well as discontinuities in the ancient and proud civilization of nations which are key players on the world stage today.

This historical approach seeks to encourage students and other observers of South Asia to develop the discipline of a rigorous “critical path analysis” of current events by looking for evolutionary linkages between events, people in the news, groups such as political parties, religious bodies, communal organizations, regional coalitions and their background institutions in their historical-religious-cultural-political-economic and domestic strategic contexts.

The major themes and topics included in this Guide are:

  1. Geography, Climate and Eco-systems
  2. Historical Overview of the Subcontinent, Sri Lanka and Indian Ocean
  3. Peoples and Languages
  4. Literary Culture
  5. Major Religious Traditions
  6. The Arts: Music, Dance, Drama, Cuisine
  7. Colonial History
  8. Politics Since Independence
  9. Political Economy
  10. Regional Strategic Environment
  11. U.S. - South Asian Relations

METHOD OF STUDY

This is an independent study program. The following method of study is recommended. A self-study guide is just that, a program to help you plot your own learning curve. So go at your own pace. Set a comfortable regimen. Demand a lot from yourself. Define weekly goals. Schedule a set time every week for study. Be an active learner. True learning is self-motivated learning. Your success will be in direct proportion to your personal effort. Here are some tips to send you on your way on this fantastic journey of discovery.

First, become acquainted with general reference literature, for example, Francis Robinson’s (ed.) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives (Cambridge, 1989), Gordon Johnson’s (ed.) A Cultural Atlas of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka (Andromedia, 1996) and Ainslee Embree and Stephen Hay’s (eds.) Sources of Indian Tradition, vols. I and II (Columbia, rev. 1995). A. L. Basham’s (ed.) A Cultural History of India (Oxford, 1997) is also an important reference work.

Second, start from the beginning at subsection, A. Books. Pick a book, read it, use the bibliography as a map to guide you to other literature and related topics. Go to B. Internet Sites. Explore, explore, explore the net looking for current reportage and discussion of issues. Move to subsection C. Study Questions. Tackle these questions as you would any worthy challenge. They are your sign posts in a bountiful wilderness of new ideas. They will help you single out key organizing issues in what can often be a bewildering flood of new ideas as you begin to study the vast and complex civilization of South Asia.

Third, an approach with instant gratifications is to get in the habit of reading the major South Asian daily online newspapers and journals like Dawn, Pakistan Today, Herald (Pakistan), The Hindu, Express India, Hindustan Times, India Today (India), Daily Star, The Independent (Bangladesh), The Sunday Times, Daily News (Sri Lanka), Kathmandu Post (Nepal). Browse their archives for interesting articles, book reviews and features. Although these newspapers are not indexed, they are well-maintained and they are “user friendly.” A word of encouragement and advice: Don’t pass up a tangent. Wander off the subject at every opportunity but always get back on track. Learning is a journey of discovery, some would even say self-discovery.

THEMES AND TOPICS

I. Geography, Climate and Eco-Systems

Weather and habitat have always been favorite topics not just of casual conversation but serious discourse in South Asia as any traveler to the region can attest. Monsoons and mountains, the Lu and the heat of the dry season, all are immortalized in ragas (music) and shlokas (verse), and in the colorful metaphors and euphemisms of street speech. Some writers like Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel, 1997) argue that geography, climate and eco-systems are the single most important forces in the shaping of human institutions.

Rammohan Ray listed (“Remarks on the Settlement in India by Europeans” in 1832, The Essential Writings of Raja Rammohan Ray, ed. Bruce C. Robertson, 1998) climate as a significant “obstacle in the way of settlement in India by European.” Arguing in favor of encouraging European settlement in India he wrote to the Select Committee of the House of Commons, “the climate in many parts of India may be found destructive, or at least very pernicious to European constitutions, which might oblige European families who may be in possession of the means to retire to Europe to dispose of their property to disadvantage, or leave to ruin, and that they would impoverish themselves instead of enriching India.” Ray recommended “cool and healthy spots” like the Nilgiris in South India, as places where Europeans could escape the heat and settle down keeping their wealth and industry in India.

Mark Harrison (Climates & Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600-1850, 1999) discusses British attitudes towards the Indian climate and environment. In the eighteenth-century a prevalent East India Company perception was that as India was an extreme hardship tour of duty one had to get in make as much money as quickly as possible and leave before cholera or some other dreaded affliction struck. “In and out while still alive,” “get rich quick,” were the mottos. Rammohan Ray viewed this perception as a significant impediment to Indian development as a modern nation. Ray’s solution to develop recreation centers in the more temperate climate of the hills was soon followed up and became very popular in South Asia. As a child growing up in India “going to the hills” to escape the dry season was an annual pilgrimage for my family. One year it would be Naini Tal in the Kumaon Hills. Other years it would be Mussourie, Ooty, Kodaikanal, Chikalda, or Kashmir. Dane Kennedy’s excellent Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (1996) and Barbara Crossette’s Great Hill Stations of Asia (1999) capture some of the complex subculture that grew up around the hill stations and which exists to this day.

In The Continent of Circe the always controversial Nirad Chaudhuri argued that the geography, climate and eco-systems of the South Asian subcontinent radically altered every foreign invader and culture lured to the region, from the ancient Aryans to the British colonialists. He goes further to say that the entire civilization of the subcontinent -- its religious institutions, sacred literatures, social systems, legal traditions, political institutions, arts, cuisines - has been a process of coping with the harsh natural environment. India’s varied ecosystems have always been a leitmotif in Indian literature ancient as well as contemporary.

Gita Mehta’s River Sutra is a riveting collection of short stories strung together by a common theme like Shusaku Endo’s Deep River (1996) which invokes the Ganga as sacred destination where travelers are reawaken to a primordial awareness. The Narmada River, second perhaps only to the Ganga in sanctity, is the setting for all the stories. The banks of this magnificent river meandering through central India is many things to many people, a place of rest and relaxation, of solace, of spiritual retreat. It is a source of life giving water for vast irrigation systems and now the highly controversial Sardar Sarovar dam project. The Narmada has taken on a larger significance in contemporary India. Booker Prize winner Arundhati Ray (The God of Small Things, 1997) has joined the Narmada Bachao Adolan (Paul Kingsnorth, “Small Things and Big Issues,” The Utne Reader, March, 2001, http://www.utne.com), a local largely tribal movement against the dam, and made it into an international campaign.

In antiquity the Narmada River marked the southern boundary of Aryavarta, the sacred and holy land (punyabhu) of the Vedic age. For this reason alone it is a sacred river. In one of the best and most highly acclaimed works of contemporary fiction Gita Mehta’s stories pair the mythology of sacred rivers with their ecological and spiritual importance to modern Indians in real-time glimpses of rural life today.

Ranchor Prime has explored (Hinduism and Ecology, 1992) classical Hindu teachings on the importance of right balance in the relationship between human society and the natural environment. Prime argues for a contemporary environmentalism based upon classical norms.

Ramachandra Guha’s Unquiet Woods is a contemporary classic of grassroots political and social activism. The chipko, “hugging trees” movement has antecedents in Rajasthan during the eighteenth-century and has spread throughout South Asia, and even in America. Today environmental groups in South Asia are doing what governmental agencies are not doing.

A. Books

  • Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600-1850 (Oxford, 1999)
  • Ramachandra Guha, Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (California, 1989)
  • Gita Mehta, River Sutra (Random House, 1994)

B. Internet Sites

C. Study Questions

  1. What role do mountains, like the Himalayas and Vindhyas, play in the life of religious communities of the subcontinent today? In domestic and regional subcontinental politics?
  2. What role do forests, rivers and oceans, as eco-systems, boundaries and destinations, play in the life of religious communities? In domestic and regional subcontinental politics?
  3. What subcontinental climactic factors influence your daily and seasonal schedules?


II. Historical Overview

The writing of contemporary histories of the subcontinent is a highly controversial enterprise today. Most current histories fall into four schools, “colonialist” or “imperialist,” “orientalist” (some critics would subsume this under colonialist-imperialist), “nationalist,” and “subaltern” (some critics classify this as nationalist). Each group regards the others’ history as propaganda. These criticisms are in some cases justified. Yet all agree that understanding the past is critically important to dealing with the present.

At no time have these often conflicting approaches to history writing been more tested than in the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhumi controversy which continues to this day. On December 2, 1992, in Ayodhya a mosque was torn down by Hindu radicals because it was believed to have been built on the site of a Hindu temple marking the precise spot of the birthplace of the mythical god Ram. Not only is there disagreement on fundamental details (whether there really was a Hindu temple at that very or any spot) and sources of information (whether the Ramayana is in any sense an historical document and whether archeological evidence is trustworthy) but also on their interpretation and present-day significance. The doyen of Indian historians, Sarvepalli Gopal (Anatomy of A Confrontation: The Babri-Ramjanmabhumi Issue (1991) brought together historians from various schools in an attempt to bring balance to the investigation and understanding of a conflict which has cost thousands of lives and created a constitutional crisis. Not everyone is happy with Gopal’s approach nor his conclusion that the entire tragic set of events has been manufactured by the professional myth-makers motivated by political and class-based agendas.

Though not without their own difficulties like the so-called colonial and orientalist histories, the new (post-Independence) indigenous schools of history writing have attempted what is characterized as “ground-up,” micro rather than macro, histories of South Asia which seek, with varying degrees of success, to reevaluate traditional Indian vernacular sources. The subaltern group focus on village life and on regional agrarian culture and reassess the past in light of the interplay of indigenous institutions. A careful selection of representative writers of all these distinctive approaches may give students a better balanced understanding of the broad sweep of civilization than from any one by itself.

W. Norman Brown (Man in the Universe: Continuities in Indian Thought, 1966) discusses what he terms continuities (forces of integration), for example religion, in the broad narrative sweep of the peoples of the subcontinent. As in all civilizations there were also discontinuities, forces of disintegration. In the South Asian subcontinent these polar forces can be seen shaping institutions, the climate of opinion and competing value systems. The Chronology in this Guide may be used as a starting point for the fascinating study of South Asian history. Several formative ages may be pointed out.

The first age is commonly known as “prehistoric” because, ironically, of what we will never know due to the lack of written records. From approximately 3000 to 1500 B.C.E., there was an advanced civilization known for its location, the fertile Indus Valley. This civilization was held together and threatened by the same sets of forces--its alluvial river eco-system, religious institutions and technology. Modern research suggests that this was the eastern edge of a vast inter-related world that stretched to Mesopotamia and perhaps to the Nile valley.

While it is fashionable in some nationalist circles to question the “invasion theory,” there is evidence that around the beginning of the second millennium B.C.E. a nomadic people from Central Asia calling themselves the “worthy ones,” Arya, began migrating into the valley of the Indus river a period of over centuries. They brought with them new ideas, social organization, polity, technology, economics, a language, and a vigorous literary-religious culture. Equally controversial is the notion that they may have challenged the already fragile sedentary world of the Indus Valley peoples. The textual sources are sketchy at best.

The early Vedas, the texts of these immigrant peoples, are the first written record of this age. The Arya poets and writers say very little about the indigenous culture and so the picture of the Indus civilization as a superceded system. Similarly there is silence on any invasions in the archeological evidence unearthed by excavations of the ruins of the great Indus Valley cities of Mohenjo Daro, Chanhu Daro, Harappa and others. These texts, handed down orally through cultic priestly family traditions, became the sacred scripture of these nomads who settled in the land of the five rivers feeding the Indus.

The four Vedas which include their commentaries are held to be revelation (sruti). These are the oldest, most sacred texts of the Hindu tradition, in fact they are the oldest continuously read sacred literature in the world. The society and times reflected in the Vedic literature were subject to the pull and tug of many of the same forces as in the Indus Valley civilization, namely, religion-based institutions, priestly hierarchies, ecosystems, and technology.

In the sixth-century B.C.E., Buddhism and Jainism emerged as alternative views of the world, society, polity, and spirituality. Their founders, Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha or enlightened one), and Vardhamana Mahavira, were charismatic sannyasis (wandering world-renouncers) who rejected brahmanical hierarchical Hinduism teaching new self-help paths of self-discovery that could be followed by anyone irrespective of social standing. Gods, priests, sacrifices, rituals, caste, all were irrelevant to the attainment of liberation from the human condition in these new paths. Thus was born new egalitarian religious options to the highly stratified path of what Brahmanical religion had become.

When in 1954 B.R. Ambedkar, the drafter of the Indian Constitution and leader of the Dalit (formerly known as “untouchables”) movement, renounced his Hindu faith in protest that it had made outcastes of his class publicly announcing his conversion, with fifty-thousand of his fellow dalits, to the egalitarian religion of Buddhism, he and his followers were exercising one of these historic options.

Under Ashoka Maurya (c. 273-237), himself a convert, Buddhism flourished. Ashoka adopted the Buddha’s symbol of the Wheel of the Law as his symbol for good government. The king is the hub which turns the wheel (hence the title Chakravartin, literally, “wheel turner”). The ministers and ministries are the spokes, and the people the rim. Today the Ashokan wheel may be seen at the center of the Indian tricolor flag.

The Mauryan dynasty founded by Ashoka’s grandfather Chandragupta I (c. 322-298) was the first major empire on record in South Asia. Ashoka’s reign has been held up as a golden age by Savarkar (Hindutva, 1926) and Nehru (Discovery of India, 1946) as well as by other nationalist writers. Chandragupta’s minister, Kautilya (also known as Chanakya), wrote the famous treatise on statecraft titled Artha Shastra which has unfortunately been trivialized by comparison with Machiavelli’s The Prince.

The Gupta dynasty (c. 319-540) in the north, also founded by a Chandragupta I (c.319-335) has also been viewed as a golden age of Hindu culture. Two other dynasties, the Chola kingdom of Tanjore (c. 907-1310), and Vijayanagar (1300-1400) in the south were patrons of a massive growth of Hindu culture and domestic economy which has put its stamp not only on the South but upon all India. Not until the great Mughals (1526-1707) was there any comparable flourishing of arts, government and economy. Islam in South Asia developed a unique hybrid culture unlike that anywhere else in the Islamic world as Aziz Ahmed (Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Subcontintent, 1964) has shown. Hindu scholars from Rammohan Ray (1772-1833) to Jadunath Sarkar (India Through the Ages, 1993) have remarked upon the generally peaceful relations and compatibility of Muslims and Hindus in India.

The British Raj (1865-1947) seems to have provided the model for controversial governance (Bhabani Sen Gupta, India: Problems of Governance, 1996, Mushahid Hussain and Akmal Hussain, Pakistan: Problems of Governance, 1993, Rehman Sobhan, Bangladesh: Problems of Governance, 1993, K. M. de Silva, ed., Sri Lanka: Problems of Governance, 1993, Lok Raj Baral, Nepal: Problems of Governance, 1993) in South Asia today. The Raj has been succeeded by other rajs, by license raj (the rule of excessive regulations) being now replaced by that great scourge of public administration and every foreign tourist, babu raj (the enigmatic multi-layered maze of petty bureaucracies that turn routine daily tasks into diplomatic incidents).

A. Books

  • Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia, History, Culture, Political Economy
    (Routledge, 1998)
  • Ainslee Embree, Stephen Hay, eds. Sources of Indian Tradition, vols. I and II (Columbia, 1995)
  • A.L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India (Rupa reprint, 1967)
  • S.A.A. Rizvi, The Wonder That Was India, vol. II (Rupa reprint, 1987)


B. Internet Sites

see also sites above under IB.

C. Study Questions

  1. Who were the Aryans and why are they important in subcontinent history?
  2. Over what geographical area did the Indus Valley civilization extend?
  3. What is the signficance of the Ashokan wheel on the Indian flag?
  4. Which periods (dynastic and cultural) in subcontinental history are the most important in the shaping of civilization according to Bose and Jalal? Do Basham and Rizvi agree?
  5. Were the Muslims colonizers? Were the Aryans colonizers?
  6. How did the British come to power?

III. Peoples and Languages

The subcontinent has always been an enormously rich and colorful patchwork tapestry of peoples and languages reflecting millenniums of continuous interaction between indigenous peoples and institutions and foreign invaders. Modern ethnological, classical and linguistic studies have shown the interconnections between ancient Greece, the Mediterranean region, Africa, and ancient and medieval India. The Sanskrit language is closely related to Greek and Latin within the Indo-European family of languages. The three most important administrative and literary languages of the subcontinent have all been imported, namely, Sanskrit, Persian and English. Rammohan Ray (1772-1833), the great Bengali reformer, praised Sanskrit as the one world language that never needed to borrow words from any other language to convey philosophical and modern scientific ideas. Not only the language but the gods of Vedic India have their counterparts in the pantheons of ancient Greece and Rome. Ethnic and racial interconnections also cross national and cultural boundaries. Language has often been a divisive force in the subcontinent. The peoples of the subcontinent today are as much a mixture of racial and ethnic types as any other peoples anywhere in the world today. Anthropologists and sociologists from M.N. Srinivasan (The Cohesive Role of Sanskritization and Other Essays (Oxford, 1989) to Akbar S. Ahmed have studied the length and breadth of the subcontinent. Srinivasan shows that Hindu caste society has never been a rigid system but rather one that allowed for considerable mobility. Akbar S. Ahmed’s Resistance and Control in Pakistan (Routledge, 1991) stands out as one of the most important studies, indeed a model of field research, of tribal society in South Asia.

More languages (over 300) are spoken in South Asia than in any other region of the world of comparable geographical size. Many of these languages are however only dialects of a “parent” language. It has been said that the languages of adjacent region are dialects but those of more distant regions are distinct languages. So Punjabi and Hindi, spoken in the adjacent states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh would be dialects but Punjabi and Bengali, spoken in the eastern most state of West Bengal, are distinct languages. Punjabis and Bengalis have a difficult time understanding each other if at all. A Hindi speaker especially from the neighboring state of Bihar would have much less difficulty understanding a Bengali speaker from either side of the border with Bangladesh. Urdu and Hindi have been two names for the same language, in other words, with the same grammar, syntax and vocabulary. Practically the only difference (aside from minor pronunciation and syntax changes) has been that Urdu is written in Perso-Arabic script and Hindi in devanagari, the script of the Sanskrit language (“Hindi-Urdu,”Yamuna Kachru, The World’s Major Languages, ed. Bernard Comrie, 1990). The language I spoke as a child in India was Urdu-Hindi.

An anecdote will illustrate the point here. At a local gas station in Baltimore run by Sikhs I spoke to an attendant in what I would describe as bad Hindi. He responded, “Oh, you know Punjabi?” He was the son of the owner. A week later I said the same thing to another attendant. His response was “You speak Urdu?” He was from Pakistan. The next time I repeated the same greeting to a third attendant, an Indian, who replied “How do you know Hindi?” The last attendant I spoke to had no idea what I was saying. He was from Kerala, South India.

After the creation of the independent states of India and Pakistan in 1947 however, changes have been forced on Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, and on Hindi spoken in India. In Pakistan Sanskrit-based words are replaced by Persian-Arabic words in the name of cultural purity. Because of India’s large Muslim minority the change is perhaps less pronounced though the Hindu parivar, religious right, has made this an issue. For example, in Pakistan it is shukriya, “thank you” not dhanyavad, a Sanskrit word. Though shukriya is in the Hindi dictionary dhanyavad is probably more correct among Hindus. In India I was once mildly rebuked for using shukriya. While many view these changes as frivolous expressions of xenophobia a gradual shift is taking place.

In Pakistan, Urdu is the native language only of the minority Mohajirs or Muslim immigrants from India who settled in Karachi and in Sindh during Partition. Balochi is spoken in Baluchistan in the south and Pukhto, the language of the Pukhtun tribe, Dari, and Punjabi are spoken in the north. Sindhi is also a major language of Pakistan. Language in Sri Lanka also marks the major ethnic divides. Tamils speak Tamil and Sinhalese speak Singhala.

Language has been one of the barriers between north and south India. The northern languages--Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Oriya, Assamese, Nepali--all belong to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. South Indian languages-Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu--belong to the Dravidian family of languages (“Tamil and the Dravidian Languages,” Sanford B. Steever, The World’s Major Languages). This explains why the Malayali gas station attendant in Baltimore could not understand what I said in Hindi when the others from the north pretended to understand me.

The one language that is understood throughout the subcontinent is English. While this has been galling to nationalists there are those who contend that English has long been a language of the subcontinent. This fact has been one of the biggest selling points for India as a friendly environment for Americans and Europeans to do business. The controversy surrounding the use of the English language in India will go on and so will the use of this primary language of international business and contemporary world culture.

A. Books

  • K. Zvelebi, “Dravidian Languages,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (Macropaedia), 15th edition
  • George Cardona and R. E. Emmerick, “Indo-Aryan Languages,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (Macropaedia), 15th edition
  • N. Krishnaswamy, The Politics of Indian’s English: Linguistic Colonialism and the Expanding English Empire (Oxford, 1998)
  • Francis Robinson, ed., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives (Cambridge, 1989)
  • Akbar S. Ahmed, Resistance and Control in Pakistan (Routledge, 1991)
  • M.N. Srinivasan, The Cohesive Role of Sanskritization and Other Essays (Oxford, 1989)

B. Internet Sites

C. Study Questions

  1. How are the romance languages related to modern north subcontinental languages?
  2. Is English a language of modern India?
  3. What are the major language groups?
  4. Are Hindi and Urdu separate languages?
  5. Who are the Dravidians?
  6. Where are the Aryans today?

IV. Literary Culture

Salman Rushdie wrote in the June 23, 1997, issue of the New Yorker that the most important writing in the English language in the world today was coming out of the South Asian subcontinent. The oldest continuously read sacred texts in the world are the Vedas. Literary culture has been both a dominating force in the shaping of subcontinental civilization and an inexhaustible living chronicle. The Sanskrit language is the door to a one of the most extraordinary world literatures. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s famous remark that the whole of Indian literature was not worth a single shelf of European classics should be remembered in the context of Rammohan Ray‘s earlier reference to Sanskrit literature as unrivalled even in the West as a repository of the world’s greatest ideas. National pride in arts and letters in the South Asian subcontinent can never be underestimated. Modern South Asian and South Asian American writers like Nayantara Sahgal, Anita Desai, Gita Mehta, Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherji, Bapsi Sidhwa, Khushwant Singh, Arundhati Roy, R. K. Narayan, and others are almost household names for many around the world.

Ainslee Embree and Stephen Hay’s two-volume classic Sources of Indian Tradition provides the beginner with an invaluable survey, complete with samples of primary texts in translation, of the inestimably rich literature of South Asia.

A. Books

  • A.L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India (Rupa reprint, 1967)
  • Ainslee Embree, Stephen Hay, eds. Sources of Indian Tradition, vols. I and II (Columbia, 1995)
  • Salman Rushdie, Elizabeth West, eds. Mirrorwork, 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947- 1997 (Henry Holt, 1997)
  • Muneeza Shamsie, ed., A Dragonfly in the Sun: An Anthology of Pakistani Writing in English (OUP Karachi, 1997)

B. Internet Sites

C. Study Questions

  1. What are the following works? Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Artha Shastra, Laws of Manu,
  2. Who are Vatsyayana, Kalidas, Kautilya, Mirabai, Kabir and Rammohan Ray?
  3. What Indian author provoked a fatwa condemning him and a price on his head, and why?
  4. What South Indian author won the Booker Prize in 1998? For what book?
  5. What Indian-American author won the 2000 Pulitzer prize for her first work of fiction? What was the title of the book?

V. Major Religions

All the major world religions -- Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Sikhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism (Parsis), Christianity, and Islam -- are active in the South Asian subcontinent today. Religion is a dominating force in every aspect of the public and private lives of the people of South Asia and continues to be perhaps the major source of division in the region today. Attempts to understand the politics, social systems and customs, economy, culture and international relations of South Asian nations without reference to the religious context are doomed to failure. Religious festivals occur with such frequency that it is often bewildering to business visitors because every festival means a business holiday. The literature on South Asian religions is copious, and like the religions themselves, is subject to endless impromptu interpretations and divisive controversy. Students should familiarize themselves with the following introductions to the great religions, taking the time to read from their scriptures.

South Asia has bequeathed two great religions to the world--Hinduism and Buddhism. Indic intellectual-religious culture is to Asia what Hellenic culture is to western civilization. It would be difficult to exaggerate the ancient impact of Hellenism and Indicism upon the shaping of the modern world. Buddhism was Indic intellectual-religious culture for export. The Hindu tradition is for home consumption.

Today there are Hindu mandirs (temples) in every major U.S. urban center, twelve in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area alone. Mosques are in every major city. Islam is the fastest growing religion in America. Gurudwaras (Sikh temples), Shambala and other Buddhist centers can be found everywhere. Today, there are ample opportunities to become acquainted with the general teachings of all these great traditions of spirituality without ever leaving your neighborhood. Internet chat rooms like that of http://www.beliefnet.com offer opportunities to enter into dialogue with communicant members of every religious community.

A. Books

  • Roberto Calasso, Ka, Stories of the Mind and Gods of India, 1998
  • Donald Lopez, ed., Religions of India In Practice (Princeton, 1995)
  • Akbar S. Ahmed, Islam Today, A Short Introduction to the Muslim World, (I.B.Taurus, 1998)
  • Bernard Lewis, ed., The World of Islam (Thames and Hudson, 1976)
  • Heinz Bechert, Richard Gombrich, eds., The World of Buddhism (Thames and Hudson, 1991)
  • W. Owen Cole and Piari Singh Sambhi, The Sikhs: Their Religion, Beliefs and Practices (Routledge, 1978)
  • Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin, Zoroastrianism (Harper, 1966)
  • Wendy Doniger, Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism (Chicago, 1988)

B. Internet Sources

C. Study Questions

  1. In the Hindu tradition what do the following sets of terms signify? Dharma, karma, samsara, moksa - Brahmana, Ksatriya, Vaishya, Sudra - brahmacarya, grihastha, vanaprastha, samnyasi - Brahma,Vishnu, Shiva
  2. Who was the Buddha? What are the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path? What is the Pali Canon? What are the two main schools of Buddhism?
  3. What are the Five Pillars of Islam? Who was Muhammad?
  4. Who are the ten gurus of the Sikhs? What are the 5 Ks? What is the Adi Granth?

VI. Arts: Music, Dance, Drama, Cuisine

In the Artha Shastra, literally, “Treatise on Means,” Kautilya, the mentor of Chandragupta (c. 321 B.C.E.) the founder of the Mauryan Empire, sets forth the Hindu ideal of the full life, well-lived. It included practicing all the arts. The great Mughals were patrons of the arts. In the broad realms of music, dance, architecture, dress, cuisine and the arts in general there has been a remarkable synthesis of two commonly perceived as intrinsically adversarial civilizations. The age-old traditions of skilled craftsmanship is one of the most enduring and endearing aspects of South Asian civilization.

The Festival of India celebration at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. during the summer of 1995 introduced South Asian arts and crafts to a broader spectrum of the American people than ever before. Tourism is a flourishing industry in this region. Travelers are attracted by the magnificent architectural wonders such as the Taj Mahal, and Mughal ghost city of Fatehpur Sikri, the vast temple complexes of Khujaraho, Puri, and Madurai, the Ellora and Ajanta caves, the great Rajput fortresses and palaces, and the vibrantly colorful regional cultures, to name just a few examples.

“Music, dance, and drama are all integral parts of South Asian culture and society,” writes Alison Arnold, editor of South Asia, The Indian Subcontinent (The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 5, 2000), the most comprehensive survey of subcontinental music, dance and drama available today. Arnold goes on to explain that these traditions have been transmitted orally within families, social groups and artistic lineages and provide continuity with the past. South Asian musical traditions are furthermore part of our global cultural heritage influencing the culture of every continent, and for this reason alone deserve our serious study.

The music traditions of South Asia have been popularized around the world by great virtuosos like Ali Akbar Khan, Vilayat Khan, and Ravi Shankar. Even the major schools of dance--Bharatnatyam, Kathak, Manipuri, Odissi, Kuchipudi, Mohini Attam, and Kathakali--while not yet household terms, are becoming known outside of the region through cultural exchange programs. Fine carpets from India, Kashmir and Pakistan are readily available today, as well as many other crafts.

No discussion of modern South Asian civilization can omit mention of Bollywood, the world’s largest film industry headquartered in Mumbai. Bollywood (the nickname for the Indian film industry) films are the primary vehicle for the export of Indian culture throughout the Middle East and Asia. Ashish Rajadhyaksa and Paul Willemen have edited the impressive Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (new revised edition, 1999). Especially noteworthy is Rajadhyaksa’s introductory essay arguing that the grand onward march of history has evolved new modes of production of Indian films, that Indian films are somehow the standard bearer of India’s cultural leadership in the world. One could arrive at the impression that the rest of India is trying to follow the lead of its film industry that in India life does imitate art. In the United States we hope that the world reflected in Hollywood films is not the real America.

Perhaps one of the best indexes of the growing familiarity with South Asian arts in America is the increasing numbers of critically reviewed restaurants springing up all over America. Four and five-star South Asian restaurants are common in every major city, according to Zagat Survey. Nothing written on the subject of South Asian arts can, however, prepare one for the first-hand, personal encounter with great art, food, music, literature, dance and craftsmanship.

A. Books

  • J.C.C. Harle, J. Harle, The Art and Architecture of the Indian Subcontinent (Yale, 1992)
  • A.L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India (Rupa reprint, 1967)
  • S.A.A. Rizvi, The Wonder That Was India, II (Rupa reprint, 1987)

B. Internet Sites

C. Study Questions

  1. It is sometimes said that north Indians and Pakistanis have more culturally in common than do north Indians and south Indians. Is this true?
  2. In what ways are the artistic traditions of South Asia a force of continuity, that is for breaking down barriers between religious, ethnic, racial and social communities?

VII. Colonial History

The Raj has been vilified and extolled. Few topics raise more heated discussion in South Asia or the university world or inspire less clarity of argument.

K. N. Panikkar (Culture, Ideology, Hegemony: Intellectuals and Social Consciousness in Colonial India, 1995) argues that the European presence in South Asia confronted the proud, sophisticated and ancient civilization of the subcontinent with institutions and exercises of power which it had not the resources to resist. A literal handful of foreigners managed to wield irresistible force over hundreds of millions of indigenous people. The shock waves of wounded pride for the people of this ancient and sophisticated civilization are felt even today in the fraternal conflict between its two largest subdivisions, India and Pakistan and in the endless often rancorous debate about colonialism. For Panikkar there is a perpetrator, a victim and an inexorable historical process that renders the entire drama predictable a posteriori.

This was not so for Raja Rammohan Ray (Bruce Carlisle Robertson, ed., The Essential Writings of Raja Rammohan Ray, 1998). Rammohan Ray offers an invaluable but largely forgotten view of the dawn of what came to be called colonialism because it provides the context for understanding the evolution of the institutions of the British presence in South Asia.

Raja Rammohan Ray was an eyewitness to the rise of British power. Born in 1772, eight years after the Battle of Baksar (1764), when as the spoils of conquest (in true Mughal fashion) having defeated the last Mughal army, the British East India Company was handed the Diwani (revenue collection) over Bengal. He died in 1833, the year the Company was metamorphosized, with all the liabilities that made it a failed business corporation, into de facto sarkar (governing body) over the entire area of its former commercial operations centered on Bengal, Bombay and Madras. Mughal Diwani entailed not only revenue collection but public administration which included responsibility for maintaining law and order. The East India Company Charter of 1833 only put the stamp of approval in London on a state of affairs which had evolved naturally by default on the subcontinent.

Rammohan Ray lived during the period in which the Company gradually assumed, by natural processes of default, the role of de facto sarkar. The British became dejure sarkar, that is, the Raj (making official institutions which had already begun to take shape by the end of Rammohan Ray’s lifetime) only after the Great Revolt of 1857, nearly twenty-five years after the Raja’s death.

Yet living in these times Rammohan Ray like many others of his generation viewed this unfolding process not just as the lesser of two evils but as preferable to the alternative they could envision, namely a complete breakdown of law, order and commerce. There was a sense of genuine though guarded optimism about British governance among his contemporaries. No study of colonialism, indeed, of modern India, is complete without careful study of Rammohan Ray’s writings.

The subcontinent looked different to Rammohan Ray in the first third of the nineteenth-century than it does to Panikkar, writing at the end of the twentieth-century. He was the son of a high-caste Brahmin family that had abandoned its priestly social role by becoming middle-level zamindars under the Mughals. The Great Revolt of 1857 had not yet happened, nor the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, nor any of the other flashpoints of confrontation between the British and the people they ruled which have become paradigmatic in collective public memory. The world looked very different to Rammohan Ray than it did to Veer Savarkar, Subhas Chandra Bose, Gangadhar Tilak, Sir Sayyed Ahmed Khan, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and other leaders of the Quit India movement. There was room in Rammohan Ray’s world for positive change.

But Rammohan Ray had premonitions of what was coming and recommended corrective course adjustments. Watching the unfolding drama of the beginning entrenchment of British institutions of governance he became an outspoken critic. Rammohan Ray wrote from experience as a munshi, Indian “civil servant” in East India Company service. He saw problems all around.

First, he voiced strong reservations as to the quality of local British administrators he witnessed in action in the judicial and revenue administrations. With notable exceptions they were not, in his judgment, the crème de la crème of the British labor pool. His prescient and historic Memorial to the King in Council (1824) protesting the revocation of freedom of the Indian press by the Governor-General John Adam warned that His Majesty’s officials in India had something to hide and now he feared they could get away with anything since they were now safe from public scrutiny. All was not lost however since India needed His Majesty’s benevolent rule. Restoration of the freedom of the press would restore not only his but the confidence of every Indian about the future of enlightened British rule. While the choice of British personnel in India did not reflect well on His Majesty’s hands-on approach to rule he was not himself, in Rammohan Ray’s eyes, yet guilty of misrule. He needed only to keep his officials on a tighter rein. What was true of British officials in India was also true of Christian missionaries in Bengal. The good works of the group far outweighed the misdeeds and indiscretions of the few.

The greater problem Rammohan Ray saw was the low quality of indigenous leadership in his own society. He charged brahmans as a class and the elites as a cross-cultural economic, political group with responsibility for the breakdown of traditional Hindu values and institutions of governance. Bengali brahmans, the guardians of Vedic tradition, were primarily guilty of selling out Hindu culture for personal gain. A brahman himself, he charged brahmans with the ultimate disqualifying failure, namely, ignorance of shastra, the sacred literature. Putative religious leaders, they were guilty of obscurantism which kept the people ignorant even of their own sacred traditions, of fraudulent use of sacred ceremonies to further suppress and exploit the poor, and even of criminal responsibility for the murder of widows in the name of sati, the dowry and polygamy systems, and other abuses of women and the defenseless--children (born and unborn), the aged and other wards of society. Modern-day brahmans had forfeited all legitimate claim to the guardianship of sacred society, Rammohan Ray argued. Rammohan Ray was a scandal, a pariah, the target of death threats in Calcutta, the seat of power of the British de facto sarkar.

The sharp edge of his sword was also drawn against his fellow elites, the so-called bhadralok. Their complicity in the evils of brahmanism made them co-conspirators against sacred Hindu tradition. The rancor of the bhadralok attack upon Rammohan Ray softened his own criticism of the British sarkar. While many British officials in high places were willingly misled to their own advantage, it was his own countrymen who “greased the slide” and who equally profited from what was in their case treachery, Rammohan wrote.

The angry ostracization of Rammohan Ray by fellow brahmans and the bhadralok was the beginning of modern Hindu radicalism. The Dharma Sabha (1828) formed by anti-Rammohan Ray forces in Calcutta was the forerunner and model of the Jan Sangh, and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) today.

In a series of pamphlets and written statements to the Select Committee of the House of Commons Rammohan Ray outlined the reforms needed to bring British rule in India up to the standard of their own ideals and of their own practice of governance in England. These writings are critical to understanding the evolution of colonialism in the South Asian subcontinent. While quoting Rammohan Ray’s writings extensively Panikkar is guilty of anachronism, of reading back into the writings of the Father of Modern India assumptions from a later time. The great constitutionalist Dr. Ambedkar’s public rejection of Hindu tradition would have been sympathetically understood by Raja Rammohan Ray.

A. Books

  • Lawrence James, Raj, The Making and Unmaking of British India (St. Martins, 2000)
  • Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial Narratives Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in the Language of Colonialism (Routledge, 1996)
  • Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game, The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (Kodansha, 1990)
  • Bruce Carlisle Robertson, ed., The Essential Writings of Raja Rammohan Ray (Oxford, 1998)

B. Internet Sites

C. Study Questions

  1. What is colonialism?
  2. In what ways did it help shape the subcontinent?
  3. What were the negatives? Positives?

VIII. Politics Since Independence in 1947

Independence brought many changes to South Asia. Parliamentary democracy modeled after the British colonial form was established with varying degrees of success. In India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh it has been successful unlike in Pakistan. In Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives constitutional monarchies and theocracies struggle with growing popular demand for more democratic institutions. The communal strife of colonial times has continued, largely unabated.

In From Raj to Rajiv (first published under the title India: Forty Years of Independence, 1988) Mark Tully and Zareer Masani chronicle the evolution of Indian politics under the Nehru dynasty, with the brief but significant interlude of P.M. Lal Bahadur Shastri.

A. Books

  • Mark Tully and Zareer Masani, From Raj to Rajiv (Penguin, 1988)
  • Mark Tully, No Full Stops in India (Penguin, 1991)
  • Thomas Hansen, The Saffron Wave, Democracy and Hindu Nationalism In Modern India (Princeton, 1999)
  • Dominique Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight (Vikas)
  • V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization (Penguin, 1977)

B. Internet Sites

C. Study Questions

  1. How is parliamentary democracy as distinct from the presidential form?
  2. What are the major political parties in India? In Pakistan? Bangladesh? Sri Lanka and Nepal?

IX. Political Economy

South Asia has not always been an economically underdeveloped region relative to other regions according to K. N. Chaudhuri (Asia Before Europe, Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750, 1990). Alberuni’s(c.1020) account of the Chola empire describes vast irrigation systems, a rich mental culture and thriving economy.

Independent India has been torn between two legacies--Jawaharlal Nehru’s state control economics and Mahatma Gandhi’s swadeshi (boycott anything not homemade) economics (V.A. Pai Panandiker, “The Present Indian Economic Situation,” The Divine Peacock, Understanding Contemporary India, ed. K. Satchidananda Murty, 1994). Both were a response to colonial-control economics. Nehru’s socialist ideals took “us to a dead end, and the dream soured,” wrote Gurcharan Das, former CEO of Proctor & Gamble India (India Unbound, 2000). “Jawaharlal Nehru and his planners attempted an industrial revolution through the agency of the state. They did not trust private entrepreneurs, so they made the state the entrepreneur. Not surprisingly, they failed, and India is still paying a huge price for their follies.”

Privatization even of Maruti, a state-run automobile manufacturing company, is in the news today. But Gandhi’s economics have been more difficult to shake even though his satyagraha politics has long been out of fashion. The swadeshi card has been played by radical Hindu groups who are threatened by the idea of a free-market economy and open competition. Liberalization has been a hard fought battle with conservative Hindu groups.

In South Asia only the Indian economy has enjoyed significant growth and that only within the last ten years of liberalization. This has been the subject of numerous studies. In Bangladesh there have been developments in the economic sector which have attracted world attention, among them Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen bank micro-lending program. Yet most economists, including the Noble Prize winner Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati, see room for substantial development.

Amartya Sen argues (Development as Freedom, 1999) that true individual freedom means living as full “social persons, exercising our own volitions and interacting with-and influencing-the world in which we live.” “The usefulness of wealth lies in the things that it allows us to do-the substantive freedoms it helps us to achieve.”

A free society is one in which the “unfreedoms” of poverty, undernutrition, famine, lack of health care, lack of sanitation and clean water, lack of functional education, over population, unemployment, economic and social security, inequality and premature morbidity are removed. There can be no political liberty and civil, human rights until these substantive freedoms are available for all members of society.

“Development,” according to Sen, “consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency.” Since development and freedom go hand in hand it is the primary function of governments, in fact their raison d’etre, to ensure and safeguard the “intrinsic importance of human freedom.” Responsible governments do this by creating environments in which economic and political freedoms reinforce one another, in which social opportunities for education and healthcare compliment individual opportunities for full economic and political participation while fostering creative initiative taking.

Critics have taken Sen to task for not arguing for development within the context of a completely open, market-driven economy. Sen’s response is to draw attention to the distinction between the “process aspect” and the “opportunity aspect” of freedom. Process must work from the ground up creating opportunity for everyone including those outside traditional economic, social, political systems. In other words, the agencies of new development cannot simply be transposed onto existing social, economic and political hierarchies and their institutions but must form new twentieth-century structures to build a truly free twenty-first century society.

Jagdish Bhagwati, another great Indian economist, argues (India In Transition, Freeing the Economy, 1993, The Wind of the Hundred Days: How Washington Mismanaged Globalization, 2001) that trade barriers like India’s have been public confessions of domestic market failure. Bhagwati’s “principle of targets and instruments,” that specific economic policies must address specific goals, is articulated in terms reminiscent of the classic Mundaka Upanishad (3,1) two birds metaphor for human conflict. One bird represents the individual ego the other the transcendant self, (the atman). These two birds represent different ways of knowing. One seeks instant gratification, the other liberation from suffering. Bhagwati argues that policies that seek to maximize GDP and protect the environment or promote free trade and a global social agenda or protect domestic companies and encourage foreign investment at the same time attempt to hit two birds with one stone and usually miss both (Jeffrey Frankel, “The Crusade for Free Trade: Evaluating Clinton’s International Economic Policy,” Foreign Affairs, March/April, 2001). For both Bhagwati and the Mundaka Upanishad the error is one of vision, of working at cross-purposes.

Eshwaran and Kotwal (Why Poverty Persists in India: A Framework for Understanding the Indian Economy, 1994) agree. Neither license raj nor grand development schemes have created a strong Indian economy. The poor are still poor. They argue that industrialization, new technology, foreign investment and all the five-year plans have done nothing for the vast majority of people. They urge the necessity of development that recognizes agriculture sector as the largest employer and the largest supplier of essential goods and services. Agriculture puts people to work and feeds the nation. Since agriculture has always driven the Indian economy (Chaudhuri) the central goal of any economic development program must be to selectively apply the best new technology to maximize yields and cooperation between rural farmers and distribution systems on the one hand and mid-sized businesses on the other. They argue for re-invention of some of the traditional economic institutions that Chaudhuri describes.While critically important in the twentieth-century world economy multi-national corporations, big business, are not the panacea for India’s economic woes. Technology that creates large scale unemployment, poverty, homelessness and consequent social unrest is not development. Eshwaran and Kotwal reject a one-size-fits-all, standard industrialized world template economic plan in favor of smart, culturally, socially, environmentally appropriate economic development.

A. Books

  • K.N.Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe, Economy and Civilization of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1756 (Cambridge, 1990)
  • Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Cambridge, 2000)
  • Mukesh Eswaran, Ashok Kotwal, Why Poverty Persists in India (Oxford, 1994)
  • Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor, Micro-lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (Perseus Books, 1999)
  • Jagdish Bhagwati, India in Transition: Freeing the Economy (Clarendon, 1993)


B. Internet Sites

C. Study Questions

  1. What will it take to end poverty in India, according to Eswaran and Kotwal?
  2. How does Amartya Sen link community and national economic development with personal freedoms?

X. Regional Strategic Environment: Dispute Over Kashmir

Since India and Pakistan have become regional nuclear powers the strategic environment has reached a new level of volatility. This is of great concern not only to the United States but to the world. The dispute over Kashmir has the potential of blowing up into a nuclear confrontation that could draw the world into the conflict. Neither country has signed Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty though there are signs of new willingness to do so on the part of both nations. SAARC has attempted to mediate between the two regional adversaries. The current U.S. administration has stated its policies will no longer be limited by the CTBT. Bruce C. Robertson, ed., A Brief Overview of the Dispute Over Kashmir (FSI, 2000) provides the most complete available case history of the major point of conflict between India and Pakistan today.

A. Books

  • Raja Menon, A Nuclear Strategy For India (Sage, 2000)
  • Stephen Cohen, India: Emerging Power (Brookings, 2000)

B. Internet Sites

C. Study Questions

  1. Why is Kashmir important to Pakistan? To India?
  2. What is SAARC?

XI. U.S.-South Asian Relations

Relations between the United States and post-Independence South Asian nations have largely been a footnote to Cold War international relations. Since the end of the Cold War, particularly since India and Pakistan have become regional nuclear powers, good relations with both nations has become vital to United States interests. The March 2000 visit of President Clinton to South Asia and the return visit of the Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee to the US has underscored how important India is in the world today. On the other hand, Pakistan has isolated itself from the world community because of its political and economic instability.

Raja Rammohan Ray (1772-1833), the early nineteenth-century Indian reformer, defined India’s relationship to the young United States of America in one of the modern world’s greatest declarations of democratic ideals, an open letter in 1824 to King George IV of England protesting the revocation of the fundamental human right of freedom of speech.

“Your Majesty is well aware, that a Free Press has never yet caused a revolution in any part of the world, because, while men can easily represent the grievances arising from the conduct of the local authorities to the supreme Government, and thus get them redressed, the grounds of discontent that excite revolution are removed….” (Bruce Carlisle Robertson, ed., The Essential Writings of Raja Rammohan Ray, 1999)

Despotic governments, Rammohan Ray argued, “naturally desire the suppression of any freedom of expression” which will expose them to public scrutiny and accountability. He cited two models of governance from North America that His Majesty would have no trouble understanding, the United States and Canada, one negative, the other positive. “As a people become enlightened, they will discover that by a unity of effort, the many may easily shake off the yoke of the few, and thus become emancipated from the restraints of power altogether….” The American Colonists revolted because, as the lessons of history teach, “the resistance of a people advanced in knowledge has ever been -- not against the existence -- but the abuses of the Governing power.” Canada did not join the American Revolutionaries because “their rights and privileges had been secured to them, their complaints listened to, and their grievances redressed by the British government.”

His Majesty had a clear choice. He could either give his Indian subjects no option but to “shake off the yoke…and…become emancipated from the restraints” of British power as the Americans, former British subjects, did or follow the example of a happy, contented Canada. In these eloquent, prescient words Rammohan Ray held up the United States of America as the model that India would follow if the King did not learn from the bitter lessons of his father, George III.

In an 1832 letter to Prince Talleyrand, French Foreign Minister, Rammohan Ray again addressed the theme of conflict resolution this time between nations governed by the rule of law. He proposed a Congress of Nations where disputes between “…two civilized countries with constitutional Governments, might be settled amicably and justly to the satisfaction of both and profound peace and friendly feelings might be preserved between them from generation to generation.” In Rammohan Ray’s mind was the thought that such a Congress might have been able to resolve the disputes that led to the American Revolution and might yet be instrumental in remedying the abuses of British governance in India. The founding of the United States of American was, for Rammohan Ray, the inevitable consequence of British misrule and unless drastic changes took place the American lesson would repeat itself in India.

According to Rammohan Ray, India and the United States shared a common British colonial experience and as civilized, enlightened peoples with a deep-rooted sense of identity, they were destined to follow similar paths toward independence.

The history of U.S. relations with the Indian subcontinent begins in our own colonial period. Elihu Yale, an East India Company official, founded his namesake university with the fortune he amassed in India. Lord Cornwallis has the unenviable legacy of being a dismal failure on at least two continents. After instituting in 1793 a ruinous tax administration (the infamous Permanent Settlement) which impoverished the entire eastern region of India known then as Bengal he surrendered to General George Washington at Yorktown, Virginia, effectively losing the Revolutionary War.

Flourishing trade between New England and Bombay, Madras and Calcutta was one of the major causes of the collapse of the East India Company as a commercial monopoly in the subcontinent. In the early nineteenth-century, the fast Baltimore Clipper became the symbol of burgeoning American sea power. Americans were the revolutionaries changing the world order, feared and vilified by many. “Citizen,” the word for the American, had the unsettling connotation of “radical revolutionary” in the eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries that “comrade” had for many in the twentieth-century before the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

During the Civil War it was Indian and Egyptian cotton that supplied the North during its naval blockade of the South. In a famous 1824 letter to King George III Raja Rammohan Ray, the great Bengali reformer who is known as the Father of Modern India, wondered why the British had not learnt their lesson in America. He warned that if British injustices in India did not stop Indians would revolt like the American colonialists.

Dennis Kux (India and the United States: Estranged Democracies 1941 -1991, 1992) has traced the evolution of U. S. relations with the subcontinent from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to President George Bush. Kux attempts to answer the central question “Why have …(the U. S. and India), both democracies, so often found themselves at odds with each other in the international arena? What lies behind their difficulties in gettng along politically?” While his answer may appear simplistic to many it identifies two not insignificant sources of irritation. “In arming and aligning itself with Pakistan, the entity born of the traumatic partition of British India, the United States linked arms with the country which independent India considered it principal security threat. For the United States, the decisive problem has been India’s attitude toward the Soviet Union.”

Since the end of the Cold War U.S. relations with Pakistan have become strained and since the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, estranged. The Pakistani perception has been that the United States “uses” its friends and abandons them when they are no longer needed.

From the U.S. perspective relations with both nations have been significantly influenced by a combination of three factors. The first is an unspoken attitude of “preachy” anachronistic post-colonial “hegemonizing”of all more politically and economically successful nations especially the United States. Secondly, their inability to solve their own domestic problems and the isolationism that this reinforces has not made their “preachiness” easier to accept. Third, their escalating fraternal strife has undermined their credibility as would-be world leaders. If they cannot work things out between themselves how can they be trusted as responsible members of the nuclear club? There are positive signs of change in both India and Pakistan, however. The United States is looking for a break through in the Kashmir deadlock. If this happens a ripple effect of better relations will hopefully develop.

A. Books

  • Richard Haas, A New U.S. Policy Toward India and Pakistan (Council of Foreign Relations, 1997
  • Dennis Kux, India and the United States, Estranged Democracies 1941 to 1991
    (National Defence University Press, 1992)

B. Internet Sites

C. Study Questions

  1. What domestic (economic, political, cultural, South Asian-American community) and global strategic concerns have an impact on the shaping of US policy towards India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and the Maldives?
  2. What domestic, regional and global concerns have an impact on the shaping of the policy of these South Asian nations toward the US?