Fifteen years ago, in his seminal book India, Emerging Power , US India expert Stephen Cohen sought to dispel the myth that “India is always destined to be ‘emerging’ but never actually arriving”. Cohen argued for a greater appreciation of India’s strengths and predicted that “the future favours India”.

India’s self-construction and self-validation has always stemmed from assessments of itself in relation to others, and equally, has been based on how others see India. As the popularity of Cohen’s book showed, the US is a major point of reference. But is it time for India to relinquish this US fixation?

If global trends are anything to go by, for India to successfully chart its rise going forward in a multipolar world, it needs to take into account a diverse range of views about itself. Competing Visions of India in World Politics: India’s Rise Beyond the West (Palgrave) is a volume of essays that aims to take a step in this direction.

The book captures a range of important non-western evaluations of India’s growing international influence. And in doing this, it gives a fillip to a counter-movement of sorts that advances an alternative set of reflections on India's global role to those put forth by mainstream, US-centric narratives within the field of international relations.

In conversation with BusinessLine , the volume’s editor, Kate Sullivan, speaks about why this book is important and what it does differently. Sullivan is a lecturer in Modern Indian Studies at the University of Oxford’s School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies. She teaches international relations as part of Oxford’s flagship MSc in Contemporary India, and her research centres on India’s rise and India’s foreign and nuclear policies.

India’s rise has been the subject of numerous books and analyses. What does this book do differently?

I think Professor Kanti Bajpai, perhaps the best-known expert on India’s international relations, phrased it beautifully in his endorsement for the book: we simply do not know enough about how the world, and particularly the non-western world, sees India.

India’s rise has been the subject of a number of studies from the perspective of the US in particular, but — in the English language at least — it is very difficult to tell whether other important countries are viewing or responding to India’s rise in the same way.

Knowing how India is viewed in the eyes of ‘others’, outside the West, is important for two sets of reasons: First, and in relation to India, we know that in today’s world, important countries beyond the traditional core group of powerful, western states are playing an ever greater role in world politics — countries such as China, Brazil, South Africa, Japan, Mexico, Iran and South Korea. So what India’s rise means to them will be increasingly important.

We also see that India’s global reach is expanding: witness India’s development cooperation across Africa, for example. This means that Indian policymakers need to constantly gauge India’s reception in multiple places.

Second, the work of international relations scholars in the West has not been particularly good at viewing international politics and history from different vantage points. What we have is a discipline that has largely looked at the world from the perspective of only a handful of powerful countries. We need to build on the few accounts of world politics that are more global in focus.

The book focuses on a number of different countries and the ways in which they understand India. But the choice of issues across the chapters varies, so how does the book compare these perspectives?

Each author in the volume views India from his or her own country or region by focusing on a distinctive issue.

For example, there’s the Chinese view of a nuclear India, the Japanese view of India’s stance on climate change, and Brazilian views of India’s role in negotiations on world trade.

For this reason, the chapters do not sit neatly in comparison with each other, but this does not mean that they don’t tell comparable stories about India at a broader level. The same themes arise again and again throughout the book — themes such as the dominance of the US in world politics; the ways in which countries build their own mental hierarchies of the world; the shared experiences of exclusion or oppression at the hands of powerful Western countries; the hopes for a fairer, more equitable world; the continued salience of third world solidarity.

The reason for allowing the authors free choice on issue area was that they, as country or regional experts, were best equipped to decide on the most meaningful way of framing India from their individual country perspectives.

The aim was to draw out the diversity of ways in which India is received and appraised in different places. India’s position in the global nuclear order matters rather a lot to China, for example, but it is likely to be less important to South Korea. And Iran and South Africa both have long and complex histories of political, social or cultural interaction with India that shape their own perspectives.

In what way are these views ‘competing’, then, if each one centres on a different subject?

The term ‘competing visions’ primarily underscores the way in which the book as a whole offers a serious alternative to the US views of India and the world with which we are all familiar.

Do the ways in which states assess each other vary from government to government or according to which government is in power?

The book was wrapped up before the Modi government came to power, so it doesn’t reflect on how other countries see India’s new leadership or what they make of Mr Modi’s foreign policy.

The chapters are all historically informed, however, so what we have in the book is a bank of national and regional responses to India that have evolved over time and will likely continue to inform those countries’ perspectives of India into the future.

Why is this volume important?

This book is not only a book about India’s place in world. To understand how a given country sees India, you absolutely have to look into the historical, political, social and cultural forces that shape each country’s perspective. Only this way can you appreciate how different the world looks in different places.

Making new efforts to understand such diversity is essential at this pivotal moment in India’s diplomatic history, when India's relations with a host of new major players are intensifying.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW