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May 07, 2021 14:09 IST
With research and anecdotes, two books steer clear of a reductive framing of relations between old neighbours and embrace the complexities
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With research and anecdotes, two books steer clear of a reductive framing of relations between old neighbours and embrace the complexities
The framing of the long history of India’s interactions with China tends to usually veer between two extremes. The centuries of exchanges, from trade along the Silk Road and Buddhism’s journey to China to maritime interactions, are sometimes invoked to suggest some idealised, pan-Asian, harmonious, and shared civilisational past.
On the other end of the spectrum, more recent interactions, from the early 20th century policing of Chinese streets by policemen from British India, an episode that remains deeply etched in Chinese consciousness, to the difficulties in relations between the two new states that came into being in 1947 and 1949, are seen as ev
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In April 1924 Rabindranath Tagore arrived in Shanghai for a lecture tour of China. Soon after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, Tagore had become an international literary celebrity, lecturing to packed audiences from Japan to Argentina. His message that modern civilization, built upon the cult of money and power, was inherently destructive, and needed to be tempered by the spiritual wisdom of the East had a receptive audience among many people in the West who had been forced by World War I to question their faith in science and progress. But when, traveling in the East, he exhorted Asians not to abandon their traditional culture, he was often heckled and booed.