The First Millennium

The pairing of China and India is not new. The spread of Buddhism from various parts of South Asia to sites in the present-day People's Republic of China (PRC) around the first century CE necessitated thinking of China and India together. The spread of Buddhism, which led to the transmission of several aspects of Indic traditions to China – including languages, ideas of renunciation and reincarnation, and literary genres – triggered multifaceted discourses, debates, and the comparative examination of these two culturally, socially, and politically distinct and diverse regions. This early pairing of China and India was sometimes part of polemical and sectarian debates and at other times the result of inquisitiveness about a foreign land that the followers of Buddhism in China considered sacred. Already in the second century, in a work credited to a person known as Mouzi 眸子, the sophistication of Indian society was being articulated and compared to that of China (Keenan Reference Keenan1994). Similarly, a sixth-century compilation of debates between Daoists and Buddhists, known as Xiaodao lun 笑道論 (Laughing at the Dao), highlighted the cultural sophistication of India with reference to its aim to legitimize and establish the practice of Buddhism in China. The Daoists put forward a counter argument stating that Laozi, the founder of their tradition, had in fact traveled to India and taught the Buddha (Kohn Reference Kohn1995). Such comparisons and associated imaginary connections to the land of the Buddha were common in China throughout most of the first millennium CE. Within this context, the writings of the Chinese monk Yijing 義淨 (636-713), who traveled to India in the seventh century, stand out.

Yijing was one of three famous Chinese Buddhist monks who visited India and returned to write accounts of what they had witnessed there.Footnote ² Compared to the earlier writings of Faxian 法顯 (337-c. 422) and Xuanzang 玄奘 (600?-664),Footnote ³ Yijing's two works, Nanhai jigui neifa zhuan 南海寄歸內法傳 (A Record of the Inner Law Sent Home from the Southern Seas) and Da Tang Xiyu qiufa gaoseng zhuan 大唐西域求法高僧傳 (Biographies of Eminent Monks who went to the Western Regions in Search of the Law), portray the diversity of Buddhist practices in China and India from a comparative perspective and reveal the complex connections between the two regions that included sites, polities, and Buddhist communities in Southeast Asia and Korea (Sen Reference Sen and Saussy2018). Yijing provides a comparative analysis of Buddhist practices in China and India to explain the reasons for the differences in the application of monastic rules in China. Sometimes he advocates reforming the practices in China in order to follow the Indian tradition, but at other times he acknowledges that the Indian precedents cannot be applied in China and recommends modifications. For instance, Yijing observed that, when having meals, monks in India sat on chairs with their feet on the ground. In China, however, he notes that initially the monks sat squatting on their heels when eating. Later, they started sitting cross-legged at mealtimes. Based on this comparative observation, Yijing suggested that, since the Buddha sat with his feet on the ground, the correct way for the Chinese clergy was also to adopt this Indian practice (Li Reference Li2000, p. 23; Sen Reference Sen and Saussy2018, p. 361). However, when discussing the example of cleansing one's body or robes before offering salutations, Yijing makes an exception for the Chinese monks and says that, since they lived “in a cold country, it is rather difficult for them to behave in accordance with the teachings, even though they wish to do so” (Li Reference Li2000, p. 87; Sen Reference Sen and Saussy2018, p. 362). Yijing's works also point out the complexities of intra-regional connections by highlighting the importance of Southeast Asia as a place for learning Sanskrit and the travels of Korean monks to India through China. Indeed, Yijing may have been one of the first persons to pair China and India employing a framework that offered both comparative and connective perspectives.

The pairing of China and India during this Buddhist phase manifested itself in several other ways: in artistic representations, translation activities, astral science, fiction writing, etc. Such pairings differed from Yijing's more focused and limited discussion of monastic practices. Moreover, the efforts to understand and pair the two regions were not limited to people from India and China. The followers of Buddhism in Japan, for instance, were not able to visit the sacred land in India before the seventeenth century. Instead, their knowledge about the region primarily came from Buddhist texts written or translated in China. Records of Xuanzang's visit to India played a significant part in enhancing knowledge about the region and also triggered imaginations of the sacred place. This resulted in the emergence of pictorial representations of India and Xuanzang's travels in a fourteenth-century scroll known as Genjō Sanzō-e 玄奘三蔵絵 (Illustrated Life of Xuanzang). The scroll includes several illustrations of episodes associated with Xuanzang's stay in India (Saunders Reference Saunders2012). Maps of the “Five Regions of India” (Gotenjiku zu 五天竺図, Figure 1), also appeared during this period, with the earliest one preserved in Hōryū-ji temple in Nara, Japan. At the other end of the Buddhist world, almost at the same time, in Illkanate Iran, paintings depicting the life of the Buddha (Figure 2) appeared in an illustrated edition of Rashīd al-Dīn's Jami al-Tavarihk (World History) and in the sixteenth-century work Majma al-tavarikh (Chronicles) by Hagiz-i Abru. The images are based on the biography of the Buddha that Rashīd al-Dīn composed from the information provided by a Kashmiri and two Chinese informants (Jahn Reference Jahn1965; Canby Reference Canby1993). These examples from Japan and Iran illustrate how the pairing of China and India in the larger context of the spread of Buddhism was undertaken by people from outside these two regions using distinct sources and for varied purposes.

Figure 1.

Gotenjiku zu 五天竺図, Map of the Five Regions of India, Horyu-ji temple, Nara.

Figure 2.

Persian rendition of the assault of Mara from the biography of the Buddha (fourteenth century). Wikimedia, Creative Commons. Public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buddha_offers_fruit_to_the_devil_-_from_Jami_al-Tawarikh.jpg

The millennium-long interactions between China and India fostered through Buddhism therefore indicate complex circulations of people, ideas, and objects, as well as the contributions and involvement of people from several different regions. Indeed, there were multiple overlapping factors in the spread and establishment of Buddhism in China, which involved intricate processes of understanding, misunderstanding, adaptation, reinterpretation, imagination, connection, disconnection, propagation, prosecution, patronage, and rivalries. The diversities of China and India and the manifold overlapping factors that fostered connections and provoked comparisons during the first millennium CE suggest the employment of a multidisciplinary approach, which could adequately address the issue of the agency of objects (Latour Reference Latour2005), the subtleties of mobility (Adey et al. Reference Adey, Bissell, Hannam, Merriman and Sheller2013), the intricacies of connected histories (Subrahmanyam Reference Subrahmanyam1997), the “art of convergent comparison” (Duara Reference Duara2015), and so forth. In other words, the study of Buddhist connections between China and India cannot be constrained by geographical and disciplinary boundaries or nation-state framings, nor by neglecting several other parallel and connected processes, such as economic, political, and social conditions and transformations.

Two books have attempted to address these intertwined issues and made methodological interventions in their examinations of the Buddhist connections between China and India. Liu Xinru's (Reference Liu1988) Ancient India and Ancient China covers these connections from the initial spread of Buddhism in the first century to the seventh century. This work established a new paradigm for analyzing such connections by placing the spread of Buddhist ideas and objects in the broader contexts of commercial interactions and urbanization. Additionally, Liu used theories and concepts from the fields of economic anthropology and urban studies to frame her study. Tansen Sen's ([2003] Reference Sen2016) Buddhism, Diplomacy, Trade examined subsequent China-India connections from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries. Like Liu, he also emphasized the entwined nature of religious and commercial exchanges between the two regions. Furthermore, he explained the disconnections in Buddhist contacts that, according to Sen, took place in the ninth-tenth centuries, when China emerged as one of the “central realms” of the Buddhist world and no longer depended on the transmission of doctrines nor yearned after sacred sites located in India. After the tenth century, China-India interactions were dominated by commercial exchanges. Sen used the world system framework devised by scholars such as Janet Abu-Lughod (Reference Abu-Lughod1989) to study this post-Buddhist phase, and demonstrated the importance of analyzing China-India interactions within the larger Afroeurasian context.Footnote ⁴

Beyond these studies, which focused on the connective aspect, scholars have also conducted comparison on various issues related to the practice and teaching of Buddhism in China and India.Footnote ⁵ Comparative studies on non-Buddhist issues are rare and often methodologically challenging. One such example is the edited volume by Kaushik Roy and Peter Lorge (Reference Roy and Peter2015) entitled Chinese and Indian Warfare, which attempts to explain several military episodes and strategies in pre-twentieth-century China and India by juxtaposing chosen examples. The method of juxtaposition here entails one contributor writing on one region and another on the other. This is a convenient but potentially problematic academic exercise, especially when authors do not read each other's contributions before offering their analyses of the rationale for or outcome of the pairing.

The Second Millennium

The pairing of China and India during the second half of the second millennium, when connections between Asia, Africa, and Europe became more intensive and the actors, circumstances, and sites involved diversified immensely, also requires crossing geographical and disciplinary boundaries. The writings of Marco Polo (1254-1324) and Ibn Battuta (1304-1369), the voyages of Zheng He 鄭和 (taking place between 1405 and 1433), the European colonial expansion, and the circulation of multiple commodities ranging from opium to silver are indicative of the vast geographical span and the diversity of issues that anyone attempting to pair China and India must consider. Indeed, the connections between China and India during this “imperial phase” (Sen Reference Sen2017) were part of multiregional trade and smuggling, local and global conflicts over access to production sites, and the circulation of indentured labor to plantation sites across several regions of the world. Issues of territorial expansion, explorations of and disputes over border-making, independence movements, and anti-colonial alliances entangled China and India in many ways. Some of these connections and entanglements resulted in comparative musings, provoked interest in obtaining new information and knowledge about each other, and led to negotiations about commercial exchanges and territorial concerns often involving multiple parties.

All these aspects make this period extremely complex to study and the pairing of China and India within an effective framework challenging to accomplish. The pairing often cannot be constrained within any single academic discipline, whether economic and colonial history, international relations, or migration studies. Moreover, the plethora of relevant sources written in many different languages now dispersed in archives and libraries in multiple countries makes research into this all the more difficult. Given the diversity of topics and sources, some scholars have considered the China-India pairing through a single issue but within a broader conceptual and/or geographical framework. Mathew Mosca's (Reference Mosca2013) From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy is an excellent example of such a study. Mosca offers an in-depth analysis of Chinese sources to explain how Qing China's perception, engagement, and policy regarding British India changed between 1644 and 1860. Focusing on the frontier regions of Tibet and Xinjiang, Mosca outlines various cartographic projects, discourses on geographical knowledge, and the development of “strategic thought” about India in Qing China. Despite focusing on a specific topic and region, the issues discussed in the book pertain to the wider facets of British colonial expansion, the circulation of knowledge, and the later process of border-making between the PRC and the Republic of India (ROI). Another outstanding work on this period is Andrew B. Liu's (Reference Liu2020) Tea War. Liu's is a comparative study of the complicated ecosystems of the tea industry in China and India that integrates the topics of connections and competitions within a broader analytical framework of capitalist political economy. The use of local sources written in multiple languages, Liu's archival research, and the analysis presented in his book constitute a significant contribution to the method of pairing of China and India that could be applicable to any period of study.

The aforementioned volume, What China and India Once Were (2018), focuses on a similar period (termed here the “early modern period” i.e. roughly between 1500 and 1800), but attempts a different methodological experiment. Rather than the combined approach of the studies discussed above, the editors Sheldon Pollock and Benjamin A. Elman frame their volume as an exploration of how to conduct comparison while temporarily bracketing away the “densely woven fabric” of China and India's “connected history” (Pollock and Elman Reference Pollock and Elman2018, p. 11). The editors begin from the widely-accepted premise that the method of comparison is problematic given its imbrication with colonial epistemology, which treats non-Western objects of study as “deviant and even deficient” from the imposed “European ‘standard’” (p. 12). But instead of turning to “connected history” as “a corrective or even replacement for comparative study,” the editors propose the method of “cosmopolitan comparison,” defined as “the direct comparison of non-Western entities” without the mediating presence of a European norm (p. 12). “Cosmopolitan comparison,” the editors write, “requires that we actively try to bracket the Western objects – painting, poems, power formations, whatever – that have functioned as the standards, in order to gain as undistorted a view as possible of the non-Western objects of comparison” (p. 14). The volume therefore takes China and India as “comparative partners,” the pairing of which makes visible each as “radically” and “equally” different from the other (p. 17). Such an understanding of the past, the editors argue, can help academic and mainstream readers alike make better sense of China and India's present positions on the global stage.

While the methodological formulation of “cosmopolitan comparison” recovers comparison to some extent from its disrepute, particularly in historiographical scholarship, the volume as a whole nonetheless remains mired in the challenges of practically implementing such comparison. In terms of its organization, the volume includes essays that also employ the above-mentioned method of juxtaposition, but instead of having separate chapters on China and India, each chapter features two scholars as co-authors working collaboratively. This approach is certainly an improvement to the alternative model of juxtaposing two separate chapters on one specific issue that make no attempt to relate to each other. But the volume's underlying assumption that comparison and connection can be delinked ultimately proves problematic for studying China and India, given how fundamentally both ways of knowing contributed to the very formation of all aspects of society discussed here, from art and literature to religion and science. The volume's orientation toward both scholarly audiences and “the general educated reader” further weakens its potential to intervene in public discourse on China and India, for the absence of footnoting and a comprehensive bibliography erases the possibility of pointing interested readers toward more fuller accounts of China and India's pasts.

The Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The period after the Opium Wars (1839-1842; 1856-1860) witnessed a rapid expansion of China-India interactions, leading to an increased movement of people, goods, discourses on border-making, and diplomatic exchanges. Many of these aspects continued to feature in the contacts between an independent India and a communist China during the 1950s and even later. The first half of the twentieth century was particularly important for the pairing of China and India for multiple reasons. First, the period saw the emergence of a formal field of study that paired China and India. In 1927, Alexander von Staël-Holstein (1877-1937) set up a “Sino-Indian Institute” at the former Austrian embassy in the Legation Quarter in present-day Beijing. Staël-Holtein also established a “Sino-Indian” research cluster and a publication series with funding from the Harvard-Yenching Institute. The scholars involved with this cluster were mostly interested in the linguistic analysis and translation of Chinese Buddhist texts. Some, such as Sylvain Lévi (1863-1935), went on to train the next generation of scholars who similarly pursued research on the Buddhist connections between China and India (Sen Reference Sen2021).

Second, the idea of pan-Asianism, originally developed by the Japanese scholar Okakura Kakuzō (1863-1913), led to the pairing of China and India in several ways. In Japan, the pairing seems to have resulted in efforts to combine the histories of China and India to promote the idea of “Asian” or “Eastern” history. The “basis of this plan,” as has been noted (Matsuda Reference Matsuda1957, p. 2), was the “reconsideration of Japanese culture” itself. Additionally, in Okakura's “Asia as one” formulation, the pre-colonial cultural linkages between Japan, China, and India, fostered primarily through Buddhism, could be rejuvenated to create a pan-Asian identity and counter the dominance of Europe and the European conceptualization of the world. While several Chinese and Indian intellectuals initially supported this idea, its appropriation by the Japanese military, in the form of the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” propaganda scheme, resulted in a modification of pan-Asian discourse with the emphasis now placed squarely on China and India. A key figure in this modified conceptualization was the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), whose visit to China in 1924 not only triggered various cultural exchanges between China and India but also writings on each other by scholars, novelists, and poets, as well as artistic productions showing the mutual influences of those based in the two countries.

In a third development, the two strands of pairing China and India mentioned above merged in the efforts of Indian intellectuals belonging to the Greater India Society, established in Calcutta in 1926. Inspired by Lévi, the members of the Society promoted the nationalist idea of an expansive Indian civilization across Asia attained through what they considered to be the “spiritual conquest” of East and Southeast Asia. Within this context of the “pan-Asiatic expansion” of Indian culture, scholars such as Kalidas Nag (Reference Nag1926) and P.C. Bagchi promoted the idea of a thousand years of cultural contacts between China and India, with the latter exerting a profound influence on the former. Bagchi's (Reference Bagchi1927) initial essay on the topic, published as part of the Greater India Society Bulletin series in 1927, was subsequently expanded in book form in 1944 and reprinted several times starting in 1950. Titled India and China: A Thousand Years of Sino-Indian Cultural Contact, Bagchi's (Reference Bagchi1944; Reference Bagchi1950) book became one of the first and most widely read narratives of the longue-durée interactions between the two regions.

Such pairings of China and India invoking longue-durée cultural interactions also took place in China (see, for example, Jin Reference Kemu1957), often in the context of a renewed call for Asianism, the idealization of a forthcoming “Asian century,” and the promotion of “Afro-Asian solidarity” that emerged after decolonization in the late 1940s. Such pairings of China and India in a superficially constructed narrative of a thousand years of Buddhism-inspired “friendly” interactions and in the hope of continued affable relations in the contemporary period became a common trope in civil-society discourses, government propaganda publications, and academic writings. At the same time, however, analytical studies comparing models of political and economic development in the ROI and the PRC, as well as critical examinations of the interactions between these two new states, also started appearing in the 1950s. A major watershed in the paring of China and India came in the late 1950s, with an initial establishment of diplomatic relations between the newly-established nation-states followed by a rapid deterioration of bilateral relations and the 1962 war. From then on, writings pertaining to the border dispute, international relations, and speculations about future armed conflicts have dominated studies that pair China and India.

In recent years, several studies have started to reexamine the post-Opium War period. Peter van der Veer's (Reference Van der Veer2014) The Modern Spirit of Asia uses comparative analysis to examine the issues of modernity, spirituality, and secularity in China and India during the early twentieth century. In a second book, The Value of Comparison (2016), van der Veer makes the following case for comparison from the disciplinary perspective of anthropology:

Van der Veer's call for recovering comparison and making it explicit resonates with the volume Pollock and Elman would later publish, but van der Veer's approach to grappling with the centrality of the West in comparative methods differs from that of the edited volume. He writes,

Unlike Pollock and Elman, whose “cosmopolitan comparison” strives for “direct comparison of non-Western entities,” van der Veer's approach allows for a more flexible treatment of the West given its formative role in China and India in the modern period, an issue “cosmopolitan comparison” sidesteps since the volume focuses on the period prior to “the coming of Western modernity” (Pollock and Elman Reference Pollock and Elman2018, p. 8). Temporal focus aside, the differing treatments of the problem of Eurocentrism also points to the divergent approaches to comparison taken up in both books. For van der Veer, comparison is “in the first place a question not of the right research design […] the ‘what’ and ‘how’ to compare” (as it is for Pollock and Elman), but rather “of an awareness of the conceptual difficulties in entering ‘other’ life worlds” (van der Veer Reference Van der Veer2016, p. 11). Van der Veer's comparative method pursues a “fragmentary approach,” in which “intensive study of a fragment is used to gain perspective on a larger whole,” and “allows us to ask questions about [that] larger whole” (pp. 9-11). Although most closely aligned with the priorities of anthropology, this “fragmentary approach” may hold insights for how to conduct comparison in other disciplinary contexts.

Similarly focused on the post-Opium Wars decades and extending into the mid-twentieth century, an edited volume entitled Beyond Pan-Asianism (2021) discusses the issue of pan-Asianism and the problems of using it as a framework to study this “period of vicissitudes.” By employing a variety of archival sources and “examining a wider cast of characters beyond the usual categories of political leaders and intellectual elites” (Sen and Tsui Reference Sen and Tsui2021, p. 9), the volume attempts to reconceptualize China-India connections and proposes alternative methods of pairing China and India by decentering the nation state, transcending the frameworks of pan-Asianism and of the so-called “Asia as method” (Chen Reference Chen2010), and questioning accepted norms of periodization based on political changes. The collection also demonstrates the ways in which some of the shortcomings of edited volumes could be addressed through prolonged collaborative research and interdisciplinary analysis.

Recent scholarship has focused on the late 1940s and 1950s period of exchange and collaboration between China and India conducted under the banner of cultural diplomacy. Research on the travels of cultural delegates, texts, materials, and knowledge across the Himalayas and against the backdrop of the early Cold War world has grown in part alongside the rise of Global South studies and its interest in discourses of the Third World, and in part from a desire to decenter the 1962 war, which often occupies center-stage in narratives of twentieth-century China-India relations (Ghosh Reference Ghosh2017). Particularly in the context of literary studies, attention to the lively interactions between writers, the new routes of publication and circulation, and the vibrant translation projects of the 1950s has proved vital for deepening our understanding of China-India literary connections beyond the sphere of Buddhism and that of Tagore's influence, two topics that previously dominated the field (Jia Reference Jia2019). As attention to discourses of solidarity grows, Adhira Mangalagiri has cautioned against too easy a valorization of state-sanctioned forms of “brotherhood” or “friendship” readily visible in records of China-India cultural diplomacy and, more broadly, in instances of South-South cultural exchange (Mangalagiri Reference Mangalagiri2019; Reference Mangalagiri2021a). China and India's engagements with ideas of the Third World (including China's more recent cultural engagements in Africa) may suggest at first glance a certain relation of horizontality, given the desire of South-South literary exchange to decenter the earlier mediating presence of colonial powers. However, Mangalagiri's scholarship calls for methodological vigilance to the frames of dominance that continue to organize such South-South exchange, including to the nation-states’ (often invisible) interventions in and packaging of those forms of “culture” deemed suitable for diplomacy (Mangalagiri Reference Mangalagiri2021b). This critical turn in 1950s China-India research mirrors a resonant development in Global South studies, in which an initial wave of scholarship “focused on discourses of solidarity made possible by the ‘mutual recognition’ of peoples’ shared conditions at the margins of global capital” while a newer “second wave […] works to complicate these dynamics of recognition” (Armillas-Tiseyra and Mahler Reference Armillas-Tiseyra and Mahler2021, p. 477). Attending to the unequal structures of power that made 1950s China-India cultural exchange possible can therefore compellingly extend this new direction in Global South studies.

The war of 1962 transformed the pairing of China and India in several ways. During the initial decades following the war, the armed conflict, territorial disputes, status of Tibet, and political relations between the two countries dominated academic and media discourse. Much of this writing has been one-sided and often influenced by the positions taken by the two states. In the late 1980s and 1990s, seemingly in response to the tense political relationship between China and India, scholars in the two countries revived some of the pan-Asian-style musings of the Buddhist connections with the aim of reestablishing cultural interactions mainly out of a nostalgia for the past. The framework of “civilizational” dialogue employed in these works adds little to understanding the complexities of earlier interactions but consists rather of reflections on how nostalgia also plays a role in the pairing of China and India. After about seven decades following the war of 1962, studies of the China-India border conflict have now become repetitive and speculative.Footnote ⁶ With each military flare-up on the border during the past few years, these ineffective analyses are rehashed and published in different forums. Such discourse remains popular primarily because of the commercial value that non-university presses, news outlets, and social media platforms attach to the topic. Identifying and analyzing new sources, investigating the impact of the war and border dispute on non-state actors, and examining the contacts that have continued among members of civil-society, despite the tensions between the two nations, rarely feature in publications.

The lack of access to new archival sources in China and India is usually cited as one of the reasons studies of the 1962 war and the border dispute have become repetitive. However, the fact that this hurdle can be overcome is evident from Bérénice Guyot-Réchard's (Reference Guyot-Réchard2017) Shadow States, which, using local archival sources, examines the anxieties and responses of various tribal groups living in the disputed border regions of northeast India to the conflict between the two nation states. Similarly, Sulmaan Wasif Khan's (Reference Khan2015) Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy, which focuses on the Tibetan frontier, employs documents from the now-restricted archives of the Foreign Ministry of the People's Republic of China. Also noteworthy is David G. Atwill's (Reference Atwill2018) Islamic Shangri-La, which describes the experiences of a group of Tibetan Muslims known as Khache and their search for an identity and homeland as relations between China and India deteriorated. A forthcoming study on Hindi literary engagements with ideas of China in the wake of war further demonstrates how 1962 may be better understood less as an abrupt end to China-India relations and more as a historical moment that generated new forms of imaginative engagement and transnational political being in the shadow of antagonistic bilateral relations (Mangalagiri Reference Mangalagiri2022).

The economic reforms instituted in China and India during the last quarter of the twentieth century brought some reprieve from the excessive focus on the border issue. Comparative studies of economic policies, developmental strategies, urban growth and disparities, and environmental concerns rapidly emerged as new arenas of research in the 2000s. However, some of these studies also illustrate the shortcoming of identifying proper variables for comparison and an absence of discussion on appropriate methodological tools pertaining to the pairing of China and India. This includes explaining, in the first place, the rationale for comparing China and India. Here, recent works by Selina Ho (Reference Ho2019), Mark Frazier (Reference Frazier2019), and Xuefei Ren (Reference Ren2020) have made significant contributions to methods of pairing China and India in a comparative perspective. All three have pointed out that comparisons of contemporary China and India cannot be framed within or explained through distinct types of regime, as in an authoritarian China and a democratic India. Perhaps the most important contribution to expand on this issue is Prasenjit Duara and Elizabeth J. Perry's (Reference Duara and Perry2018) edited volume Beyond Regimes. The editors propose the idea of “convergent comparison,” which, according to them, could investigate the parallels, both temporal and spatial, of China and India “at various critical junctures and at various levels of the political system, outside as well as inside the territorial confines of the nation-state” (Duara and Perry Reference Duara and Perry2018, p. 23). Duara and Perry also propose a new way of periodizing the pairing of China and India after the Second World War into three “temporalities”: “struggles of state- and nation-building,” “logic of citizenship and rights,” and “responses to globalization and neoliberalism.”

Two forthcoming books on twentieth-century literature continue this attempt to conceptualize the comparative and connective pairings of China-India. These two studies propose a rethinking of the pairing within wider frames of south-south relations and transnationalism, respectively. Imagining India in Modern China: Literary Decolonization and the Imperial Unconscious, 1895-1962 (Gvili Reference Gvili2022) examines the contours of a Chinese Global South imaginary, particularly a vision of a China-India solidarity that formed in the late Qing, reached a climax in the 1950s, and declined in the aftermath of the 1962 Sino-Indian war. Gal Gvili explores the Chinese turn to Indian literature, philosophy, and religions to envisage modern literature as an anticolonial project that often entailed a rejection of the West and the promotion of various ideals of the “East,” with China and India as its central axes. Given that most Chinese intellectuals access Indian ideas and texts via English-language translations and Orientalist scholarship, Gvili interrogates the promise of a south-south camaraderie and a decolonizing literary imagination that nevertheless remains intimately tied to colonial epistemologies and biases. The book studies the hopes, possibilities, and limitations of the “south-south” paradigm, which Gvili reframes as “south-north-south” in light of the shadow of English that loomed so substantially over the relationship. Attention to the mediation of relay or indirect translation, Gvili suggests, can open a window through which to interrogate the framework of the Global South and its tropes of friendship and solidarity.

While writers have often paired China and India together in expressions of solidarity, Adhira Mangalagiri's book approaches the China-India pairing from the opposite perspective. States of Disconnect: The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century (Mangalagiri Reference Mangalagiri2022) discusses Chinese and Hindi literatures (1900s-1960s) that engage in China-India thought, but that do so while calling into question the desirability or stability of the pairing. The book focuses on literary expressions of violence, silence, and distance between China and India, articulated against proclamations of China-India unity. Such texts index what Mangalagiri terms “disconnect,” defined not as simply the antonym of connection, but rather as a specific crisis of transnationalism perceptible in moments when one's ability to apprehend the transnational becomes severed or interrupted, or is rendered absent. The book develops critical strategies for apprehending disconnect, which have so far remained beyond the methodological frames of connectivity, mobility, and affinity that conventionally shape comparative literature. Texts of disconnect may appear antithetical to the forging of transnational relation, but when read as meditations on distinctly literary concerns, Mangalagiri shows how these literatures can in fact offer possibilities for building ethical relationships with national others when none seem readily at hand. Dwelling in the seeming ends of the China-India comparative unit, the book conceptualizes three reading practices – friction, ellipsis, and contingency – for an ethics of comparison that opposes both the hyper-connectivity of globalized paradigms and the insularity of the narrow nationalisms that are currently on the rise.

As the above discussion demonstrates, ways of pairing China and India varied with time, need, and circumstances. Sometimes such pairings were part of a polemical discourse, while at other times they stemmed from curiosity or even informed the self-reflection of those living in a third region. Academic scholarship on the pairing began in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and now this field of China-India studies has become a veritable publication industry unto itself. However, the question of how to pair China and India – and the interrogation of earlier framings, themes, and alternative periodizations – has only begun to be addressed recently. The essays in this issue are part of this undertaking, which attempts to reconceptualize and reformulate the pairing of China and India. They contribute to ongoing discussions of the methodologies needed to examine China and India through interconnected histories, differences and disentanglements, as well as shared challenges and diverse responses from multiple disciplinary perspectives.