A Southern Grammar of Peace
Amid the upheavals of this moment, the frontiers where China, India, and Pakistan meet still hold a buried vocabulary for connection. The work is to recover it from below.
Every evening at the Wagah border, just before the sun goes down, two crowds gather to scream at each other across a painted line. On the Indian side at Attari, on the Pakistani side at Wagah, soldiers in fanned cockscomb headgear march toward a pair of iron gates, kick their boots higher than their heads, and lower their national flags in a choreography of furious symmetry. The crowds roar. Loudspeakers push the chants of one nation into the ears of the other. Then the gates clang shut and everyone goes home to dinner, cooked and eaten in the same Punjabi that is spoken on both sides of the wire.
I have watched that ceremony. I have also watched the faces in the stands. What the spectacle performs is hatred. What it cannot hide is recognition. The people shouting across the line eat the same wheat, sing the same Bulleh Shah, lay their dead in the same red soil. The line is barely seventy-eight years old. Cyril Radcliffe, a British barrister who had never set foot in the subcontinent, drew it in five weeks in the summer of 1947, working from old maps and census tables in a sealed room in Delhi, and the blood that followed his pencil ran into the millions.
This is the inheritance we are taught to call permanent. The Radcliffe Line cut Punjab and Bengal in half. The McMahon Line, sketched by another British hand at Simla in 1914, became the pretext for the war China and India fought in 1962. The Durand Line still runs like a scar between Pashtun and Pashtun. We are trained to treat these as facts of geography. They are artifacts of empire, the cartographic residue of the machinery that ruled straight edges across Africa and the Pacific and called the result a map. And the language handed to us for managing them is imperial as well: deterrence, balance of power, strategic depth, the soft power that Joseph Nye theorized for a Washington that wanted to project itself onto the planet. These are the registers of states that imagine diplomacy as influence, culture as a lever, and the people on the other side as a surface to be moved.
I came to this question from a different kind of road. I grew up in Kharagpur, a railway town in West Bengal with a platform once counted among the longest on earth, built by the colonial railway to haul coal and labor. Close by ran the road the British called the Grand Trunk Road, and the English name is the youngest thing about it.
The corridor is older than the idea of any of the nations that now claim a stretch of it. In the Mauryan world it carried the name Uttarapatha, the northern route, and it ran across the Gangetic plain to bind the eastern kingdoms of Bengal and Magadha to Taxila in the northwest and onward, through the mountain passes, to Bactria and the markets of Central Asia. When Megasthenes came as the Greek envoy to Chandragupta Maurya's court at Pataliputra, near present-day Patna, more than three centuries before the common era, he described a royal road of over a thousand miles, measured and marked at intervals by the empire that maintained it, running from the northwestern frontier to the capital. Ashoka lined such roads with banyan trees for shade, sank wells for travellers and their animals, and raised rest houses along the way, an infrastructure of care laid across the subcontinent. In the sixteenth century Sher Shah Suri rebuilt the artery as the Sadak-e-Azam, the Great Road, running from Sonargaon in Bengal to the Khyber, and the Mughals kept it with their caravanserais and their milestones. The British metalled it, renamed it, and bent it to the moving of troops and revenue. Kipling called it a river of life. For more than two thousand years the road was a single thread, carrying traders and pilgrims and poets, and armies too, and it ran clean through every territory that the partitions of the twentieth century would later cut apart.
It is along that road, and the millennia of crossing it carried, that I want to propose something the field of public diplomacy has mostly refused to imagine. A culture-centered public diplomacy.
Conventional public diplomacy is a project of the state talking to the publics of other states, and it puts culture to work in the service of national interest. It brands the nation. It exports the festival, the film, the cuisine, the yoga, as soft assets in a competition for prestige. Even at its most benign it keeps the subaltern offstage and the state at the centre, and it leaves the structures that produce communicative inequality entirely intact. A culture-centered public diplomacy inverts that arrangement. It locates the labour of peace in the everyday relationships of ordinary people across hardened borders, in the voice infrastructures they build for themselves, in claims to communication sovereignty that no foreign ministry authored. It asks how peoples severed by colonial lines can speak to one another in registers the cartographers never learned, rather than how a state might better project itself.
The materials for such a grammar are already here, scattered through the very borderlands we are told are zones of permanent enmity.
The strategic analyst C. Raja Mohan has written of soft borders and cooperative frontiers, of a territorial diplomacy in which the line stops being a wall and becomes a membrane, permeable to trade, kinship, pilgrimage, and the water that never recognized it in the first place. The idea is heretical to the security state and obvious to anyone who has lived in a borderland. In 2010 two of the largest media houses in South Asia, the Times of India and Pakistan's Jang Group, launched Aman ki Asha, a desire for peace, a sustained campaign of cross-border journalism, concerts, and people-to-people contact. Scholars who have studied it, and the citizens on both sides whose testimony fills the research, describe something the security establishments of both countries find inconvenient. Asked directly, ordinary Indians and Pakistanis overwhelmingly want to visit one another, trade with one another, mourn and marry across the line. Undivided hearts, one study calls them.
Nowhere is the stake clearer than in water. The Indus rises in Tibet, runs down through Ladakh, and feeds the lives of some 240 million people in Pakistan. For sixty-five years the Indus Waters Treaty, signed by Nehru and Ayub Khan in 1960, survived three wars and held the river as a fragile commons. Researchers of hydro-diplomacy long pointed to it as the most promising site of environmental peacebuilding in the region, proof that even bitter antagonists could cooperate around a shared ecology. Then, in April 2025, after a massacre of tourists at Pahalgam, India held the treaty in abeyance and began to treat the river as a weapon. India's home minister has since said it will never be restored. An international tribunal has ruled the suspension unlawful; India has called the tribunal illegal and walked away. The treaty that endured every war has been broken in what passes for peace. This is structural violence in its purest form, the conversion of a shared lifeline into an instrument of punishment, and it tells us exactly what the absence of a culture-centered diplomacy costs.
The slower work, the building of confidence one measure at a time, the bus routes and prisoner releases and cricket tours and reopened consulates, has been mapped carefully by scholars of the India-Pakistan relationship. These measures are modest. They are also the actual texture of peace, the infrastructure on which trust gets laid down grain by grain.
Between the two giants the same possibility flickers. China and India have spent the past year in a cautious thaw, disengaging troops along the Himalayan line, resuming the high-level visits frozen since the deadly clash in the Galwan valley in 2020, reopening the pilgrim route to Mount Kailash. The researchers who once mapped Sino-Indian climate cooperation at Copenhagen, or argued for recasting the relationship as a development partnership rather than a rivalry, were reaching for this register before the present détente made it briefly fashionable again. The trouble is that this thaw is tactical, managed from the top, driven by trade calculations and the unpredictability of Washington. It is a peace of foreign ministries, and it can be switched off as fast as it was switched on. That fragility is itself the argument for a diplomacy rooted lower down, in the relationships of people rather than the convenience of states.
Here I have to be honest about the seductions of the route. It is fashionable now to reinvoke the ancient Silk Road, the maritime highways of monsoon and spice that once bound the Indian Ocean into a single conversation. But the loudest reinvocations belong to power. China's Belt and Road, and its Maritime Silk Road, lay submarine cable and deep-water port across the same old geographies, and when Sri Lanka could not service the debt on Hambantota, the port passed to Chinese control on a ninety-nine-year lease. That is racial capitalism wearing the costume of civilizational revival, the trade route reinscribed as a circuit of extraction. India's Hindutva does something parallel when it dreams of an Akhand Bharat, or when the prime minister sets vasudhaiva kutumbakam, the world is one family, on the letterhead of a G20 he hosts as a coronation. The Sanskrit is ancient. The politics is empire in saffron. A culture-centered reinvocation of the route has nothing to do with either. It does not run from the capital outward. It runs along the ground, through the Sufi shrine that draws devotees from both Punjabs, through the Buddhist circuit that still ties Bodh Gaya to the monasteries of the plateau, through the fishermen who read the same monsoon across a maritime boundary drawn in an office.
We have done this before, in our own idiom. In 1954 India and China signed the Panchsheel, the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, a vocabulary of mutual respect drawn from a shared Buddhist and anticolonial inheritance. The slogan of the hour was Hindi-Chini bhai bhai, India and China are brothers. The war of 1962 made a bitter joke of it, and the realists have sneered ever since. The sneer mistakes a betrayal for a refutation. The Bandung Conference of 1955, where the newly decolonized nations of Asia and Africa gathered to imagine a world that did not run through the old metropoles, was a southern people theorizing peace in a southern register, building solidarity against empire out of their own histories rather than importing the balance-of-power calculus of the powers that had ruled them. That grammar was buried. It was never disproven. It can be exhumed.
To reimagine diplomacy from the Global South is to refuse the colonial border and the colonial vocabulary for crossing it in the same breath. It is to treat the frontier as a place of meeting rather than a wall, to centre the voices that empire and racial capital and settler colonialism and Hindutva and the security state alike would keep silent, to build peace through mutuality rather than purchase it as influence. The peoples on either side of these lines were a single conversation long before the lines existed. They remain one beneath the shouting at Wagah, in the testimony of the citizens who want to cross, in the river itself.
India can hold a treaty in abeyance. It can call the river a weapon and the tribunal illegal. The Indus, rising in Tibet and running through India into Pakistan, has not heard the announcement. It never will.
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