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.
The consequences were profound. Works like Wei’s Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms (1842) went on to shape the worldview of Qing officials who made pioneering expeditions to British India in the latter part of the 19th century. These officials came expecting a “negative example”— and so they found one. Consider what the litterateur Wu Guangpei, who accompanied an official Qing mission in 1881, had to say in his Diary of My Southward Journey. Having interacted principally with British officials during his stay, Wu came away believing, the Chinese historian Lin Chengjie observes, that Indians accepted their subjugation “with equanimity, as if nothing has happened.” Ironically, this was precisely the period in which associational life in India was gathering steam, most notably in the form of the Indian National Congress.
A still more striking example is provided by the celebrated Chinese scholar Kang Youwei, whose writings on India have recently been translated by Kamal Sheel and Ranjana Sheel. Influenced by the Chinese edition of Robert MacKenzie’s The 19th Century, Kang came expecting to find a “subdued” people. He too found what he had been expecting to find. Having witnessed the humiliations being heaped on natives in George Curzon’s time, he declared in a famous letter, Discussing India (1902), sent to his protege, Liang Qichao, that India was a “dead country”, adding that he was “confident that the Indians have no way to restore their country in more than 1,000 years”. Ironically, this comment was made at the very moment when radicalism was about to break the surface in British India.
Not every Chinese visitor was at the mercy of mediators. Take, for example, Lu Ying, a Qing-era official sent to study India’s tea sector in 1905. As the Chinese scholar Zhang Ke has pointed out, a Chinese compatriot living in Calcutta introduced Lu to Bengali elites from whom he obtained a nuanced understanding of contemporary events, especially Indians’ increasingly outspoken opposition to British racism and their resurgent pride in their past. Reflecting on the encounter in his Journal of the Journey to India and Ceylon, Lu could ask the obvious question: “How could a people civilised for thousands of years, numbering three hundred million, be forever relegated to the realm of slavery?” India will, he concluded, “surely achieve independence in the future”.
The lesson this century-old contrast imparts is that firsthand exposure to intellectual currents is irreplaceable. Where will the Chinese draw their impressions of India from if they cannot visit the country? They will, in all likelihood, rely on western sources. And what will these sources teach them? Consider, for instance, the recent report in The New York Times entitled “India’s Hindu Right Has a New Hero”. This “new” hero is Shivaji, whose statues apparently mark the “dismantling” of the “secular and democratic principles India was founded on”. One such statue, the Times ominously adds, now stands by Pangong Tso, “sword out, as if ready to attack”.
Let us recall what the Times will not. As it happens, one of the very first instances in modern times when the Chinese came to see Indians as comrades was at a commemoration — for Shivaji. The key figure in this story was the Chinese revolutionary Zhang Binglin. Reporting on the commemoration, which was organised by Indian students in Tokyo in 1907, Zhang explained in the influential revolutionary journal Minbao that, like the founder of the Ming Dynasty, a peasant who rose to overthrow Mongol rule, Shivaji symbolised “defiance” against foreign oppression. Moved by the “unyielding spirit” of the Indians he encountered in Tokyo, Zhang went on, as B. R. Deepak has noted, to make the Chinese aware of “Indian unrest”. Among those affected was his compatriot in Tokyo, the litterateur Su Manshu, who wrote A Record of Seclusion on Sal Beach (1908), an evocative short story depicting Indians “rising up”, like “the great King Shivaji” once had, against the “bandits” from Britain. Su’s work, Gal Gvili observes, presented a telling “alternative to the popular late Qing depiction of India as stagnant and at fault for its own demise”.
With this history in mind, what does it mean for Shivaji to have travelled from Tokyo to Pangong Tso? This is a discussion worth having. But where? In Singapore or London, where delegations measure out their words? On X, where algorithms prioritise controversy? The forces that animate India’s slow-motion transformation are elusive. They are found in the recesses of civil society where ideas collide, interests are articulated, and identities are reworked. It is to spaces such as these that the Chinese must be invited back so that they can observe for themselves the unfolding of our history. This includes witnessing up close the flowering of a defensive religious nationalism where statues that point outward speak inward. Let there be no illusions: Contact does not guarantee sympathy or compromise. But without it, others will set the terms of engagement.
Rahul Sagar is a Global Network associate professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. His latest book is The Birth of Indian Liberalism. The views expressed are personal
