There is much that India needs to do if its Project Mausam is to serve as the blueprint of the Act East policy, much as the history of China’s Maritime Silk Road underpins its Belt and Road Initiative strategy. The Indian Ocean must not remain Indian only in name but must serve as the natural maritime expression of India’s national interest. India can employ the “neo-Curzonian” potential of contemporary Indian foreign policy which is premised on a logic of centrality in India’s dealings with major powers in seeking access and leverage from East Africa to Pacific Asia by building links with neighboring regions.
It is commonplace that China’s and India’s shares of world income were comparable to Europe’s as late as in 1700. The advent of colonialism and the emergence of the United States of America disrupted the balance of economic power in the eighteenth century. That balance was restored partially by the vigorous entry of China and India into the global economy in the last two decades of the twentieth century. There were hopes that the restoration of Asia’s largest nations to their erstwhile place on the map of economic geography would herald an era in which Asia would redeem its place in history and renew its claim to the onward flow of global time.
However, bilateral disputes, inherited from colonialism and exacerbated by the Manichean binaries of the Cold War, prevented the arrival of anything like a Chinindian bloc in global relations. Instead, Beijing and New Delhi followed their separate paths. The best indication of their parting of ways lies in Asia itself. China’s reluctance to treat India as a peer power and India’s countervailing refusal to be hemmed in by China as a secondary, South Asian power have renewed the struggle for supremacy in Asia. It is a contest in which the United States seeks to engage India (and Japan and Australia, among others) to counterbalance China’s revanchist claims on Asia, which are being all but realized in the de facto incorporation of the South and East China seas into China’s sovereign orbit. Sinic Asia is in the making. Indic Asia awaits.
A destination could take the form of Project Mausam, which offers India an opportunity to recreate its pre-colonial links with the Indian Ocean even as China builds on its imperial connections with its geographical hinterland to underline its arrival as a world power. According to India’s Ministry of Culture, the project focuses on “monsoon patterns, cultural routes and maritime landscapes” as “key processes and phenomena that link different parts of the Indian Ocean littoral as well as those that connect the coastal centres to their hinterlands.” The project seeks to recreate the passage of the monsoon winds that “led to the spread of shared knowledge systems, traditions, technologies and ideas along maritime routes” in the Indian Ocean.[1] The project, which involves diplomatic outreach to Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand to India’s east, and to Iran, Jordan, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to its west, places special emphasis on the need to recreate for contemporary times the relevance of two transnational extensions of Indian history: the routes followed by the Cholas in Southeast Asia, and the spread of Buddhism through land and sea routes in South and Southeast Asia. The idea behind the project is to showcase a Transnational Mixed Route (including Natural and Cultural Heritage) on the World Heritage List.
This ambitious project, inaugurated in 2014, is seen, quite rightly, as a response to China’s Maritime Silk Road project, a part of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which was initiated in 2013. Described as “one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever conceived,” the vast combination of development and investment initiatives envisaged in the BRI was devised originally “to link East Asia and Europe through physical infrastructure,” but, in the decade since then, “the project has expanded to Africa, Oceania, and Latin America, significantly broadening China’s economic and political influence.[2]
At the heart of the current Chinese project lies the legacy of Admiral Zheng He’s seven great voyages from 1405 to 1433 CE, when the largest ships that existed in the world then traveled to Southeast Asia and India, sailed across the Indian Ocean to Arabia, and arrived in East Africa. That material expression of Chinese naval power and its consequent political influence represented an iconic reaffirmation of the cosmological structure of world affairs in which China’s role as the Middle Kingdom between Heaven and Earth legitimated a tributary system in which countries could enjoy security and prosperity once they had acknowledged China’s supreme agency in the ordering of secular affairs. The Sinic order is essentially hierarchic: It affords other civilizations a place in its pacifying structures only so long as they abide by China’s unquestioned position at the apex of divinely-mandated global affairs. The Sinic order is vertical.
By contrast, the Indic order is horizontal. It is formulated in the notion of the mandala, which demarcates the power of kings in terms of circles that form around them. One result of this conceptual Indic self-perception is recognized by G. Coedes in his The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, where he writes that Indians “nowhere engaged in military conquest and annexation in the name of a state or mother country.” The Indic kingdoms that emerged in the region enjoyed only ties of tradition with Indian dynasties; there was no political dependence.[3] Nevertheless, the historian and strategist Kavalam Madhava Panikkar’s A Survey of Indian History emphasizes the maritime reach of India by drawing a distinction between the oceanic and coastal varieties of Indian sea-consciousness. “The only Indian State which had a proper appreciation of sea power was the Chola empire” because it possessed naval self-consciousness that made possible an “oceanic policy,” not just a coastal awareness of the economic and military importance of the waves washing ashore.”[4] That oceanic policy led to the establishment of bases in Nicobar and the assertion of territorial authority over the coastal areas of Malaya. The Cholas’ punitive expedition against the Srivijaya kingdom, which led to the capture and temporary occupation of Kadaram (modern Kedah) in 1025, represented the zenith of Indian naval credibility in what is Southeast Asia today. However, a hundred years of war with the Javanese Sailendra kings broke the back of the Chola state and resulted in the naval ascendancy of the Sailendras in the Bay of Bengal in the thirteenth century. The rise of the empire of Java decimated Sailendra power in turn, and the Arabs presided over the navigation of Indian waters by the fifteenth century.[5]
The point that this historical excursion seeks to make is that Project Mausam must draw on India’s non-imperial credentials even as the BRI in general, and the Maritime Silk Road in particular, contend with China’s imperial lineage in Southeast Asia. The project would do well to realize the legacy of Panikkar, who drew on the vision of Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India from 1898 to 1905, while abjuring the underpinning imperial and colonial rationale of the British Raj. Curzon had written in 1909:
It is obvious, indeed, that the master of India, must, under modern conditions, be the greatest power in the Asiatic continent, and therefore, it may be added, in the world. The central position of India, its magnificent resources, its teeming multitude of men, its great trading harbours, its reserve military strength, supplying an army always in a high state of efficiency and capable of being hurled at a moment’s notice upon any point either of Asia or Africa—all these are assets of precious value. On the West, India must exercise a predominant influence over the destinies of Persia and Afghanistan; on the north, it can veto any rival in Tibet, on the north-east and east it can exert great pressure upon China, and it is one of the guardians of the autonomous existence of Siam. On the high seas it commands the routes to Australia and to the China Seas.[6]
Curzon had given his grasp of the geographical centrality of Indian maritime power a strategic edge. Panikkar recognized that edge as an opportunity as the British Empire receded, opening the way for India to play an independent role in the autonomous ordering of Asian affairs.
The idea of geography as history lends itself to what Raja Mohan and Parag Khanna term the “neo-Curzonian” potential of contemporary Indian foreign policy. Raja Mohan writes that a neo-Curzonian policy is premised on a logic of centrality in India’s dealings with major powers in “seeking access and leverage from East Africa to Pacific Asia” that involves building links with neighboring regions to “circumvent buffer states,” for example. Independent India has retained enough of a “military surplus” to be a “security provider” in its neighborhood.[7]
There is much that India needs to do if Project Mausam is to serve as the blueprint of the Act East policy, much as the history of China’s Maritime Silk Road underpins its BRI strategy. The Indian Ocean must not remain Indian only in name but must serve as the natural maritime expression of India’s national interest.
Asad Latif is an editorial writer for The Straits Times, Singapore. He is the Co-General Editor of the 50-volume Singapore Chronicles series, and the author of several books, including Between Rising Powers: China, Singapore and India (2007), Three Sides in Search of a Triangle: Singapore-America-India Relations (2008), India in the Making of Singapore (2008), and Lim Kim San: A Builder of Singapore (2009). He graduated with Honours in English from Presidency College in Kolkata, was a Chevening Scholar in History at Cambridge, and was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard. He served on the editorial committee of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs and was a member of the president’s committee of the Cambridge Union Society, the university debating club.
[1] “Project Mausam,” Ministry of Culture, Government of India. https://indiaculture.gov.in/project-mausam
[2] James McBride, Noah Berman, and Andrew Chatzky, “China’s Massive Belt and Road Initiative,” Council on Foreign Relations, 2023. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-massive-belt-and-road-initiative
[3] George Coedes, in Walter F. Vella (ed.), The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, tr. Susan Brown Cowing (Honolulu, HI: University Press of Hawaii, 1968), 34.
[4] K. M. Panikkar, A Survey of Indian History, third edition (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1956), 185. It is important here to strike a cautionary note regarding historically-loaded and questionable terms such as “Farther India,” “Further India,” “Greater India,” or “Hindu Colonies in the Far East.” Such enunciations reflect the political insecurities of former Indian historians “struggling under the stigma of their own colonial subjection (who) tried to compensate for this by establishing the fact that even India was strong enough to establish colonies in ancient times”: H. Kulke and D. Rothermund, cited in Benudhar Patra, “Kalinga in South East Asia,” Orissa Reference Annual 2004, p. 157. The early underpinnings of India’s and China’s contemporary engagements with Southeast Asia are fleshed out in Asad-ul Iqbal Latif, Between Rising Powers: China, Singapore and India (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007).
[5] Ibid.
[6] Cited in C. Raja Mohan, “Securing India’s Rise,” in Ashley J. Tellis and C. Raja Mohan, The
Strategic Rationale for Deeper U.S.-Indian Economic Ties: American and Indian Perspectives (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2015), 58-59, https://carnegieendowment.org/files/US_India_TellisMohan_Final.pdf
[7] C. Raja Mohan, “India as a Security Provider: Reconsidering the Raj Legacy,” ISAS, Working Paper 146, 2012, p. 12, https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/140943/ISAS_Working_Paper_146_-_India_as_a_Security_Provider_19032012182222.pdf. This section of the essay is taken from Asad-ul Iqbal Latif, “Revisiting Panikkar’s Maritime India: A Southeast Asian View,” in Vijay Sakhuja and Pragya Pandey (ed.) K.M. Panikkar and the Growth of a Maritime Consciousness in India (New Delhi: Vij Books and the Indian Council of World Affairs, New Delhi, 2022), 67-84.
Coedes, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. Edited by Walter F. Vella. Translated by Susan Brown Cowing. Honolulu, HI: University Press of Hawaii, 1968.
Kulke H. and D. Rothermund. Cited in Benudhar Patra. “Kalinga in South East Asia.” Orissa Reference Annual 2004.
Latif, Asad-ul Iqbal. Between Rising Powers: China, Singapore and India. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007.
____. “Revisiting Panikkar’s Maritime India: A Southeast Asian View.” In K.M. Panikkar and the Growth of a Maritime Consciousness in India. Edited by Vijay Sakhuja and Pragya Pandey. New Delhi: Vij Books and the Indian Council of World Affairs, New Delhi, 2022.
McBride, James, Noah Berman, and Andrew Chatzky. “China’s Massive Belt and Road Initiative.” Council on Foreign Relations, 2023. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-massive-belt-and-road-initiative
Mohan, C. Raja. “India as a Security Provider: Reconsidering the Raj Legacy.” ISAS, Working Paper 146, 2012. https://shorturl.at/bgsAE
____. “Securing India’s Rise.” In The Strategic Rationale for Deeper U.S.-Indian Economic Ties: American and Indian Perspectives. Edited by Ashley J. Tellis and C. Raja Mohan. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2015.
Panikkar, K.M. A Survey of Indian History, third edition (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1956).
“Project Mausam,” Ministry of Culture, Government of India. https://indiaculture.gov.in/project-mausam
