Our Collective Futures, an Asian Future

In the year 630, a young monk from the Tang capital of Chang'an slipped past imperial border guards and walked west. Xuanzang crossed the Taklamakan by night, nearly died of thirst in the desert, was robbed in the mountain passes, and arrived, after years of walking, at the gates of Nalanda in what is now Bihar. He stayed for years. He studied Sanskrit grammar, logic, and Yogacara philosophy under the abbot Shilabhadra, debated with scholars from across the known world, and then carried more than six hundred manuscripts back to China on the backs of horses. He spent the rest of his life translating them. When he died, a million people are said to have attended his funeral.

I return to Xuanzang often, because his journey holds a truth that the current architecture of global power works very hard to make us forget. The relationship between India and China is among the oldest sustained dialogues in human history. For close to two thousand years, before either country had a border in the modern sense, monks, merchants, physicians, grammarians, and astronomers moved between the Gangetic plains and the Yellow River valley, carrying texts, medicines, mathematics, silk, sugar, and above all, ideas. Faxian came before Xuanzang, in the fifth century, and wrote of the monasteries of Pataliputra with the wonder of a scholar who had found a library at the end of the world. Kumarajiva travelled the other way, from Kucha through the Gansu corridor, and his Chinese renderings of the Madhyamaka texts remain among the most read philosophical translations ever produced. Bodhidharma, a monk from the southern Pallava lands, crossed the seas and seeded what became Chan, and later Zen. The sugar-making technologies of Bengal travelled to Tang China; Chinese silk and paper travelled back. Indian astronomers served in the Tang court. The word for China in Sanskrit, Cina, and the Chinese rendering of India, Tianzhu and later Yindu, are themselves artifacts of this long conversation.

This was globalization before the gunboat. It moved through monasteries and caravanserais rather than through conquest. It was imperfect and it was unequal in places, as all human exchange is, but its animating grammar was translation, the patient labour of making one world intelligible to another. Nalanda, where Xuanzang studied, embodied that grammar. At its height it housed thousands of students from Korea, Japan, Tibet, Sumatra, Persia, and China, sustained by village endowments, organized around debate. It was burned in the twelfth century, and with it went one of humanity's great experiments in dialogic knowledge production. The ruins at Rajgir are quiet now. The question they pose is not quiet at all: what would it mean to build our collective futures on that foundation, rather than on the foundations laid by Western colonialism?

I ask this as someone formed in the leftist traditions of Bengal, in Kharagpur and Kolkata, where the dream of Asian solidarity was never an abstraction. It lived in the memory of Rabindranath Tagore sailing to Shanghai in 1924, telling his Chinese audiences that the peoples of Asia had a civilizational gift to offer a world being consumed by the machinery of nationalism and greed. It lived in Cheena Bhavana, the hall of Chinese studies Tagore built at Santiniketan with the scholar Tan Yun-shan, one of the first institutional spaces anywhere dedicated to India-China dialogue. It lived in the story of Dwarkanath Kotnis, the young doctor from Solapur who joined the Indian medical mission to China in 1938, treated wounded soldiers of the resistance against Japanese occupation through the years of war, married a Chinese nurse, and died there at twenty-nine. China has never forgotten him. Statues of Kotnis stand in Shijiazhuang. This is what solidarity looks like when it is lived in the body.

The culture-centered approach that has organized my scholarship for over two decades begins from a simple premise: transformative communication emerges from the voices of communities at the margins, in dialogue, negotiating the structures that constrain their lives. The concepts at its heart, voice, mutuality, dialogue, the co-creation of meaning across difference, are concepts I learned as much from the philosophical traditions of India and China as from any Western seminar room. The Upanishadic samvada, the dialogue through which knowledge unfolds between teacher and student. The Buddhist sangha as a deliberative community. The Confucian insistence that harmony is produced through difference, captured in the Analects in the distinction between he, harmony, and tong, mere uniformity. The Daoist suspicion of domination as a way of organizing the world. The Nyaya traditions of debate that structured Nalanda's pedagogy. These are indigenous Asian theories of communication, millennia old, and they converge on an understanding of order as something built through listening rather than imposed through force.

Set that inheritance against the order we actually live in. The order built by Western colonialism extracted an estimated tens of trillions of dollars from India alone, deindustrialized two of the world's great manufacturing economies, forced opium grown in Bengal onto China at gunpoint, and then wrote a historiography in which Asia appears as the passive recipient of European dynamism. In 1820, India and China together accounted for close to half of global economic output. Two centuries of colonialism and imperialism reduced them to poverty, and the ideological infrastructure of that reduction, the civilizational hierarchies, the racialized narratives of Asian despotism and stagnation, still organizes how the West narrates the rise of Asia today. Every step India or China takes toward economic sovereignty is framed as a threat. Every institution they build outside the Bretton Woods architecture is framed as a challenge to the rules-based order, an order whose rules were written in London and Washington while most of humanity was in chains.

The registers that emerged from the anticolonial struggles of the twentieth century offer a different vocabulary. When Nehru and Zhou Enlai articulated Panchsheel in 1954, the five principles of peaceful coexistence, mutual respect for sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference, equality and mutual benefit, they were drawing on this deep well. When the newly decolonized nations gathered at Bandung in 1955, Asia and Africa speaking to each other without Europe in the room for the first time in centuries, they were reactivating the grammar of the old trade routes, dialogue among equals, exchange without conquest. That project was interrupted. The 1962 war between India and China wounded it deeply, and I do not romanticize the decades of mistrust, the border tensions, the lives lost at Galwan, the hardening of nationalisms on both sides, including the Hindutva nationalism in India that manufactures the Chinese threat as one more enemy image in its politics of hate. Honesty about these wounds is a precondition for dialogue, and dialogue is precisely what the Panchsheel tradition demands: sustained, difficult, face-to-face negotiation rather than the outsourcing of Asian futures to the strategic doctrines of Washington think tanks.

Because that is the choice now on the table. The United States is openly organizing the Indo-Pacific as a theatre of confrontation, building military alliances whose purpose is the containment of China, and courting India as a junior partner in that project. A section of India's elite finds this flattering. It should find it familiar. The role being offered to India is the role the colonial powers always offered to intermediary elites, a seat near the table in exchange for service in someone else's war. An Asian century organized around an arms race between its two largest nations would be a gift to the military-industrial complexes of the West and a catastrophe for the billions of ordinary people, farmers, workers, fisherfolk, students, whose futures depend on the two countries turning toward each other.

Turning toward each other means something concrete. It means India and China leading the construction of a world order anchored in redistribution rather than accumulation, in the socialist commitments that both countries' freedom struggles carried, however unevenly those commitments have been honoured since. Between them, the two countries have lifted more human beings out of absolute poverty in the past half century than the rest of the world combined, and they did so through strong public investment, land reform, and developmental states, through pathways the Washington Consensus insisted were impossible. It means pooling that experience in the service of the Global South, in climate finance, in public health infrastructure, in food sovereignty, in technology transfer freed from the intellectual property regimes that let pharmaceutical monopolies price medicine beyond the reach of the poor. It means standing together, as both countries largely have, against the wars of aggression and the sanctions regimes through which the West continues to discipline the darker nations. It means building universities in the lineage of Nalanda, spaces where the philosophical traditions of Asia are resources for theorizing the present rather than museum pieces, and where students from Jakarta and Colombo and Nairobi and Suva sit in the seminar rooms as Xuanzang once sat.

None of this requires either country to dissolve its distinctiveness. The old dialogue never did. Buddhism became Chinese as it crossed the mountains; Chan is unimaginable without the Daoist soil it grew in. That is the point. Mutuality is the recognition that we are transformed by encounter and enriched by difference, the he of the Analects, the samvada of the Upanishads. A world order built on that recognition would treat the diversity of civilizations as its foundation rather than as a problem to be managed by a single hegemon.

Xuanzang walked for years through deserts and mountain passes because he believed there was knowledge on the other side worth the risk of dying for. The infrastructure of that journey, the monasteries that fed him, the translators who taught him, the kings and villagers of many faiths who sheltered him, was built by ordinary people across Asia over centuries, in the conviction that wisdom belongs to whoever will walk toward it. That infrastructure is our common inheritance. The empires that interrupted it are young by comparison, and they are failing. The oldest conversation in the world is waiting to be resumed.