India, China: The past and future

Sheldon Pollock, the well-known scholar of Sanskrit, and Benjamin Elman, who is an expert on China, have edited an ambitious volume that seeks to analyse the recent histories of India and China

The past 500 years and more have been the history of the spread of European dominance across the world. In our own century, this dominance has incorporated the later extensions of the European order to North America and Australia, thus becoming the modern “West".

It should come as no surprise that non-European cultures and thought systems were subjected to interpretations and analysis through intellectual categories developed in the West. These formed the prism through which the non-West was evaluated and its “backwardness” exposed and compared to the modernity of the West, its mastery over science and philosophical thought. Sheldon Pollock, the well-known, if controversial, scholar of Sanskrit, and Benjamin Elman, who is an expert on China, have edited this ambitious volume, which seeks to analyse the recent histories of India and China without the distorting prism of Western scholarly disciplines. 

This, the editors hope, would also enable India and China to be compared on their own terms, rather than through the medium of a third interlocutor who would inevitably bring her own assumptions and even prejudices to such comparative exercise. The volume has brought together an impressive cast of scholars on India and China, respectively, although they are all from US universities except for one who is from Oxford. There is no doubt that the contributions reflect deep scholarship and valuable insights into what are complex societies and cultures that operate at multiple layers. However, one would have liked to hear more voices from within the scholarly fraternity of the two countries themselves. This would have added value and greater authenticity to the contents.

The rationale for putting this volume together is obvious. We are at an inflexion point in history where Western dominance is being challenged by a cluster of emerging powers, with India and China leading the pack. The editors point out that in a very real sense, India and China are re-occupying the place they held through much of their history as the two of the most populous, prosperous and advanced civilisations in the world. How these countries view their own respective histories, evaluate their unique cultures, their literary traditions and philosophical systems would form a template through which they would attempt to shape the emerging world order. Therefore, such a study is invaluable in discovering, however uncertain this may be, directions in which the current phase of rapid change may take us. Such an exercise would also enable us to look for the ways in which these two civilisational states would interact with one another and the world. The authors have been more successful in setting out how India and China view themselves and the world around them. There is much less on how they view each other.

The volume has three parts covering the organisation of state and political ideologies and institutions, on how language and writing have influenced politics, and the knowledge systems and the place occupied by ideas about the Cosmos and its links with mathematical concepts and astronomy as they evolved in the two countries. There are two fascinating chapters, one on the role of religion and the other on the different aesthetic sensibilities prevailing in the two countries. The contents of these substantive contributions are ably summarised in the Introduction by the editors, while there is an Afterword in the form of a conversation between two noted scholars on how successful the exercise has been, given the pervasive perpetuation of Western intellectual categories and conceptual frameworks in virtually any intellectual inquiry. There is also the issue of how India and China have responded to Western dominance, assimilating and using what they have learnt to construct their own modernity. 

What the volume conveys is that despite their proximity and phases of dense interaction in history, India and China are more different than they are similar. In China, there was a diversity of spoken languages but uniformity of the written script and this was an important centralising impulse. In India, spoken Sanskrit was the same as a courtly and literary language wherever it was used but it could be written in different scripts. The emergence of local languages with their own scripts created a diversity of literary forms and idioms not seen in China. Record-keeping and maintaining archives was almost an obsession in China. In India, history has been mostly a distraction. China had a tradition of meritocracy because of the examination-based civil service, which persisted through dynastic changes. In India, the distribution of positions within the state system was confined mostly to caste-based hierarchies and kinship networks, thus perpetuating economic and social inequalities that remain stubbornly entrenched in an ostensibly egalitarian democracy. In China, religion was harnessed by the state possibly to advance its interests but certainly to prevent it from threatening political power. In India, the state, in its different incarnations, proved to be remarkably accommodative of different religious persuasions, of which there was a bewildering variety. 

What is striking in both countries is immense diversity but China has a certain preference for strong central authority while India’s strength may lie in managing diversity. Which represents a better template for managing the future remains unanswered.

The reviewer is a former foreign secretary and currently senior fellow, CPR

What China and India Once Were

The Pasts That May Shape the Global Future

Sheldon Pollock and Benjamin Elman (Eds)

Penguin

384 pages; Rs 999