'It’s time India got over the Great Wall complex'

China, the Asian equivalent of the Joneses with whom India is constantly measured against, remains an inscrutable entity for us, observed author Amitav Ghosh in his keynote address on Day 2 of the Times LitFest.
In a prelude to his talk on ‘China and the making of modern India’ Ghosh — whose Ibis Trilogy recounts the India-China opium trade — tracked back to the early 1800s, when opium was India’s chief export to that country.
This Ghosh did with an evocative PowerPoint presentation, where he shared photographs, maps, trade tallies and paintings that recreated the opium journey — from the Baltimore-made schooners that revolutionised the trade, to pictures of the foreigners’ enclave outside the walled city of Guangzhou. “Half of London was built on money from the opium trade,” he reckoned, as were the fortunes of Roosevelt, Coolidge and the foundations of America’s Ivy League Brown University.
Not just fortunes, but cities too were built. Singapore, he pointed out, owes its development to its role as a conduit for the opium between Bombay, Calcutta and Canton.
“Indians know little about the Opium Wars. While China has museums devoted to them, there’s little mention of the part India played. They formed the second most populous contingent in Guangzhou, from the Parsi opium merchants, to sepoys who fought for East India Company, and even Indian chowkidars, lascars in Canton,” Ghosh said. But that’s as far as the omissions go.
China has considerable literature on India. The same can’t be said for us. “What’s written about China in India is confi ned to strategic and business affairs, with little scholarship on China,” commented Ghosh. To this, his interlocutor Tansen Sen, Professor of Ancient History at New York University Shanghai, added: “We must step up efforts to build Chinese studies in India; there are few Chinese history courses.” News from China is limited to a handful of Indian journalists reporting government propaganda, or at best on goings-on in Beijing. China has around 17 journalists in India who report daily for the Chinese press. More should be done to know how ordinary Chinese perceive India, Sen said.
Ghosh agreed India had done little to intellectually engage with China. This could be imputed to the fact that China scarcely fi gures in our intellectual and cultural discourse. “Our educational outlook is Eurocentric,” he lamented, “We don’t look enough at Southeast Asia.”
He mentioned the 18th century Chinese emperor Qianlong, during whose reign Nepal was a protectorate. In the early modern period, Nepali interlocutors helped mediate between Indians and Chinese, he said. Naga sadhus too were used as conduits. But this was between the British and the Chinese. Facts no Indian textbook mentions.