A neo-Curzonian policy would seek to diminish the national borders of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma not through conquest, but through the revival of commercial cooperation with these countries, abetted by the development of roads and regional energy pipelines. Burma, especially, will likely be a zone of contention between India and China. China’s deepening transport and commercial links with Burma have compelled democratic India, starting in the late 1990s, to bid for development projects there, train Burmese troops, and do less complaining about the plight of Burmese dissidents, despite the odious nature of the military regime there. If Burma were ever to liberalize and truly open its borders, geography and historical ties might favor India over China (notwithstanding local hostility toward the Indian merchant community early in the twentieth century).
“Greater connectivity” with India’s neighbors, declared Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh, can transform “each sub-region of the Subcontinent” into a web of “mutual dependencies for mutual benefit.” Translation: India’s economy is so much larger than any nearby state that a soft hegemony would be the natural consequence of greater economic cooperation. Asserting political primacy would not only be unnecessary, it would be counterproductive as well.
The difficulty with this vision is that it requires a society secure enough in its own domestic situation so it can dynamically focus outward. But that only partially describes India. While the American media have focused on the country’s high-tech “Bangalore” phenomenon, the more immediate reality is of a tumultuous third world society where a third of the population live on a dollar a day. As noted in Chapter Seven, India is beset with political violence between the government and various disaffected groups and castes, as well as by periodic eruptions of Islamic terrorism. Its eight northeastern states are home to no fewer than fifteen insurgencies manned by local tribes seeking self-rule. The country simply lacks the internal stability to open its borders to its neighbors in return for greater influence in its near abroad.
Take relations with Muslim Bangladesh, surrounded on three sides by India. People and goods could get from one part of India to the other most easily by passing through Bangladesh. This would aid economic development in India’s unstable northeast, as well as earn Bangladesh significant transit fees. In fact, a natural gas pipeline will be built bringing gas from Burma across Bangladesh to India. Because Bangladesh’s political system is in ruins, its only hope is through greater economic involvement with India. But that is precisely what people in Kolkata fear. Whereas an older generation that includes refugees from the 1947 partition harbors nostalgia for a lost hinterland, many others—especially the younger generation—see Bangladesh the way many Americans see Mexico: as a place you should literally erect a wall around. “Keep all those radical mullahs locked up on the other side of the border,” one prominent Kolkata journalist told me. With more than ten million Bangladeshis living in India as economic refugees, Indians do not want more. There is also a certain historical comfort with the current border near Kolkata; as for many decades stretching deep into the nineteenth century, the Hindu elite in Calcutta and West Bengal looked down on the Muslim peasantry in East Bengal. By contrast, in the Punjab, there is an ecumenicalism of sorts toward fellow Punjabis living over India’s western border in Pakistan. In general, though, India is still struggling with the borders of partition.
A Greater India that projects its economic dynamism eastward into Southeast Asia, northward into China, and westward into the Middle East must do so first in its own subcontinental backyard. And that will take stores of courage and broad-mindedness that India presently lacks.
But beyond Greater India as a land power, there is the larger Indian Ocean littoral to consider. Curzon was focused on land power because in his day British control of the seas was taken for granted. But India, as we have seen, must now consider its role on the seas and the lands on the other side of them. India, writes Raja Mohan, is discarding the sentimentalism and third worldism with which it once considered eastern and southern Africa. Now it views Africa in terms of strategy and raw materials. The Indian navy currently patrols southern Africa’s Mozambique Channel, from where coal is transported to India’s increasingly energy-hungry, billion-plus population. When one considers that the Indian navy has occasionally escorted U.S. warships through the Malacca Strait, the picture is completed of a rising power, ever present from one end of the world’s third largest ocean to the other.
Of course, it is still the U.S. Navy that dominates the Indian Ocean. But because India’s navy is a significant presence in the region, yet obviously no match for America’s, neo-Curzonians require a de facto military alliance with the U.S. The word “de facto” is crucial. As I heard again and again in Kolkata, and in New Delhi, just as India was nonaligned during the Cold War, it must remain so in the future. Although it needs to tilt toward the United States to project its own power, it cannot afford to transparently alienate China, with which it will both compete for influence and do abundant trade.
Ultimately, more than any particular strategic vision, it may be the very fact of India’s mass democracy that will align it with the United States as well as gradually draw surrounding nations into its orbit, as these nations struggle to replicate India’s own noncoercive, yet modestly effective governing authority. And that is something that the paternalistic Lord Curzon, who never thought in terms of Indian self-government, could not have imagined.
Yet, to be sure, Curzon will be a guiding spirit behind India’s foreign policy in the Indian Ocean and beyond. The strategic requirements of imperialism in his day are those of Indian nationalism in ours.
“Nationalism is a false god. It is unaesthetic,” said the Bengali poet, short story writer, novelist, and artist Rabindranath Tagore, who in 1913 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.* The statement is highlighted among the exhibits at the poet’s rambling family home in north Kolkata. With its connecting courtyards softened by ranks of potted plants, and with the walls echoing the haunting sound of his poems put to music and adorned with iconic, modernistic paintings, the Tagore mansion has a small-scale, almost magical human quality to it that stands in opposition to the towering cold dimensions of Government House where Curzon worked.
Certainly there is a mystical quality to the long and white-bearded Tagore, yet to define him as a mystic—the messiah from the East, according to some—is to diminish him, by hinting that there is something windy and undisciplined about his work.6 The Harvard scholar Amartya Sen notes that to see Tagore, as many in the West have, as some sort of “sermonizing spiritual guru” is to take an astonishingly narrow view of him.7 In fact, what may give Tagore’s art a mystical quality is its studied yet natural universalism, anchored in a specific Indian and Bengali soil. Just as Curzon is the ultimate pragmatist for an age of Asia-centric, multi-polar balance-of-power politics, Tagore’s lifelong quest to get beyond nationalism establishes him as among the most relevant writers for an age of globalization even though he has been dead for almost seven decades.
Indeed, to express a deep regard for the work of Tagore is akin to expressing a deep regard for the work of the late Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin: it is a way of declaring the free and sanctified individual as the sovereign force in history. Tagore’s poems, more than ninety short stories, and novels are the artistic equivalent of Berlin’s humanistic philosophy. Tagore’s output was that of a colossus. Human tears flow throughout his hypnotic stories like the monsoon rains. Like Berlin, he is never preachy; there is “no theory or philosophy” herein.8 His writings over the course of a lifetime are dominated by poignant tales of individual longing, often in an idyllic rural setting, that leave the heart uneasy: the young man who did not fulfill his ambition and yearns for the love of a woman he once could have had; the skeleton in a medical school that once belonged to a beautiful woman with hopes and dreams all her own; the poor clerk who spends the evenings in Sealdah station to save the cost of light; the ungainly teenage boy in Calcutta who
gets critically ill and misses his mother in the countryside; the peddler who befriends a little girl because she reminds him of his own daughter back in Afghanistan; the nine-year-old child bride who takes refuge from her loneliness by writing in an exercise book; the woman who falls in love with a vagrant boy who shows up at her doorstep; a coughing naked boy in the cold who is slapped hard by his mother and thus, in Tagore’s vision, bears all the pain in the universe.
The stories go on, each one replete with compassion. Tagore’s humanism shines through by the totality of his concentration on small, seemingly insignificant individuals, whose hopes and dreams and fears fill an entire world. There is nothing grandiose about his work; rather, it is always defined by intimacy. A Bengali writer to the core, Tagore writes often of monsoons (“The Padma began to swallow up gardens, villages and fields in great hungry gulps”) and of ghats, the steps leading down to a river where people bathe, wash, and gossip, which also, in ways both concrete and symbolic in his literature, are places of arrivals and departures.9
Besides a comparison to Berlin, Tagore bears comparison to Leo Tolstoy for his mystical aspect and interest in education in a rural setting. Like Tagore, Tolstoy was the son of a landed noble family and, dissatisfied with formal education, established a school at Yasnaya Polyana just as Tagore did at Santiniketan in West Bengal, north of Calcutta. Both men were members of the gentry who glorified peasants while being somewhat less sympathetic to the rising middle class in the cities.
Above all, Tagore, as Amartya Sen suggests, because of the manner in which he harmonizes Hindu, Islamic, Persian, and British (that is, Western) culture, stands as a counterpoint to those who see the contemporary world as a “clash of civilizations.”10 In a poem in his collection Gitanjali (“Song Offerings”), Tagore declares that he seeks a world
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow
Domestic walls …11
Tagore’s “narrow domestic walls” stand for a close-minded nationalism. Though he was a lover of Japanese culture, his words about Japan are inscribed on the wall of his Calcutta home:
Japan had vanquished China in naval battle, but it should have realized it was barbaric and unaesthetic to display the relics of that victory all over the country like harsh thorns. Man is often compelled by circumstances to undertake cruel deeds but true humanity is to forget them. What remains eternal with man for which he builds temples and monasteries it is surely not violence.
Herein is the essential Tagore. War may be necessary but it is so pitiful that no monuments should be built to it. War, military glory, and the like are worse than wrong; they are, like nationalism, “unaesthetic.” Beauty, that is to say, is moral and universal. And anything that is not moral and universal cannot be beautiful.
Tagore was truly a visionary in the sense that his lifetime (1861–1941) corresponded with the age of nationalism, even as he went beyond it and saw a larger solidarity group above the state, that of humanity. He was not opposed to nationalism or patriotism, only to nationalism or patriotism as the highest good. He understood the yearning that led to patriotism, just as Saint Augustine understood the yearning that led to tribalism, which in the late classical age served to unite large groups of people peacefully. But both men knew these longings as stepping-stones to larger unions.
Tagore was the ultimate syncretist, a constant blender of cultures and peoples in his work and thoughts. There is no beautiful Bengali landscape in his view, only the glorious “Earth.”12 As such, he was an inveterate traveler and pilgrim, writes the Harvard scholar Sugata Bose: to Iran, Iraq, Southeast Asia, Japan, and so on. Like Curzon, Tagore thought of a greater India. But whereas Curzon and latter-day Indian nationalists have had a monolithic political and strategic vision, Tagore had an inter-woven cultural one, seeing, for example, the “lineaments of a universal brotherhood of Sufi poets bridging the Arabian Sea.”13 Tagore’s mental map of Asia was a seamless tapestry of overlapping nationalities and cultures in which, for instance, a greater India dissolved into a greater Persia and into greater Malay and Balinese cultures, in the same way that Hinduism and Islam dissolved into each other in the rural eastern Bengal that he knew so well. There were no borders in Tagore’s worldview, only transition zones. He would smile knowingly at discussions about a future Kurdistan, Sunnistan, Pashtunistan, Greater Azerbaijan, and other variations to the current cartography of the Near East, for Tagore thought of the world in terms of a holistic, multidimensional map. For him, a place like Kurdistan has always existed, layered atop Turkey, Iraq, and Iran rather than in contradiction to those states. This is why Tagore could talk about having a “blood relationship” as an Indo-Aryan with the Iranians, without coming across as racist or ethnocentric.14 Blood relationships are easily acknowledged if one’s worldview celebrates all blood relationships, as well as cultural and spiritual ones, as he did.
Nevertheless, Tagore was not a globalist, if that means giving up one’s national or ethnic identity. He grasped intuitively that to appreciate other cultures one had to be strongly rooted in one’s own. He understood that the “universal” could be implanted only in many rich and vibrant localisms. He was, in other words, a perfectly enlightened man for the early twenty-first century who, as Sugata Bose suggests, encapsulated the spirit of the Indian Ocean world.
In a “poem-painting” signed “Baghdad May 24, 1932,” during a trip to Iraq, Tagore writes:
The night is over:
In the room's dark corner
Snuff out the smoke-black light.
In the eastern sky
On this festive day
The lamp of the world shines bright.
May all who proceed
Along the same road
Perceive each other aright.15
The irony is that for the neo-Curzonian vision to succeed, Tagore’s must also, for it is only by getting beyond the narrowing perspective of nationhood that India can gain the trust of its neighbors, in order to organically expand its own sphere of influence. Politics must follow geography and culture in this regard. As Raja Mohan put it to me in conversation, “Kolkata will always be Lhasa’s closest outlet to the sea. The goal, then, is make that geographical fact linking Tibet and India a reality, through thinking big enough to overcome borders.” Realpolitik with a conscience is what India, and the West, too, require, for in the broader competition with China, the power with the most benign and cosmopolitan vision will ultimately have the upper hand.
* Tagore is an anglicized form of Thakur, an honorific meaning “Lord,” used to address an Indian Brahmin or male deity.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SRI LANKA
THE NEW GEOPOLITICS
I stood in a vast wasteland of upturned soil stretching miles to the horizon, as long convoys of trucks moved earth uphill on switchback trails from one part of the construction site to another, with Chinese foremen in hard hats directing the operation in the terrific heat and dust. A deep, man-made canyon with a flat and yawning valley floor was emerging; as well as two jetties, one of which was ten football fields in length. This massive dredging project—literally the creation of a new coastline farther inland—would soon be the inner harbor of the Hambantota seaport, near Sri Lanka’s southern extremity, a point close to the world’s main shipping lanes where more than thirty thousand vessels per year transport fuel and raw materials from the Middle East to East Asia.
By 2023, Hambantota is projected to have a liquefied natural gas refinery, aviation fuel storage facilities, and three separate docks giving the seaport a transshipment capacity, as well as dry docks for ship repair and construction, not to mention bunkering and refueling facilities.1
It was a fifteen-year construction project about which the Sri Lankans were both proud and sensitive: proud that their country could eventually move beyond being a byword for ethnic conflict to emerge as a strategic node of global maritime commerce; sensitive because it was not they, but the Chinese,
who were both building and financing the seaport. Thus, access to the site was strictly regulated. To see the enormity of the project I had to trespass into a secure area and ended up under arrest. I was detained in the Hambantota police station for seven hours until charges were dropped.*
Like Gwadar in Pakistan, the Hambantota region constitutes a stunning seascape of thundering surf, poised to be a twenty-first-century place-name. This would be in keeping with the town’s situation in antiquity, when as part of the Kingdom of Ruhuna it formed a branch of the maritime silk route. The present-day town of twenty thousand constitutes only a few streets of bustling storefronts, with wooden fishing boats stacked four abreast at the little harbor, as well as jammed onto the beach in low tide. (In many cases, the boats are owned by Muslims of Malay origin).†
The beachfront hotel where I stayed had a truly deserted, edge-of-the-earth feel with only two other guests. It had been reconstructed on the ruins of the hotel destroyed during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which had also destroyed all the boats on the beach before new ones were built with aid from the international community. The tsunami killed 35,000 people in Sri Lanka and made 400,000 homeless. Indeed, Hambantota constitutes a visual shorthand for the Indian Ocean during the current phase of history, a victim of the tsunami and a beneficiary of China’s rise as a great power.
Before the start of the seaport project, Hambantota had been a backwater of Sri Lanka, known only for the time at the beginning of the twentieth century when the great English man of letters Leonard Woolf had been an assistant government agent here. Woolf, later the husband of Virginia Woolf and the director of the famous Hogarth Press, used his time in Hambantota to gather material for a brilliant novel about the cruelties of rural life in this corner of Ceylon, The Village in the Jungle, published in 1913. In fact, just behind the town there still lurks the dry-zone, scraggily palm forest with its putty red soil reminiscent of the book.
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