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Amid growing interest in studying China and India together, this special issue, “Methods in China-India Studies,” seeks to open a conversation on the relevance, approaches, and stakes of China-India research. Why should we pair China and India together, how can we best do so, and to what ends? In this introduction to the issue, the editors first discuss the rationales commonly evoked as justification for studying China and India together. The first section articulates shared intellectual commitments as lending a coherence to China-India studies, and as providing a common ground and point of departure for scholars across disciplinary boundaries. The second section outlines a history of the China-India pairing from the first century CE to the end of the twentieth century, with a focus on how a range of historical actors paired China and India under shifting political circumstances and with differing objectives. This section also offers an assessment of the methodological approaches recent scholarship has extended to studying each of these periods. As a whole, this introduction reflects on the unique challenges and opportunities of conducting China-India research, and outlines some of the contributions the China and India conceptual pairing can make to other fields of study.

This article studies China-India cultural diplomacy in the context of the socialist Chinese literary sphere. Decentering “dialogue” as an easy metaphor for transnationalism, I propose ellipses – the mark of silences, tensions, the unsaid – as a conceptual frame that makes visible those literary ties that frustrate the logic and aims of cultural diplomacy. I offer as a case study the Hindi poet Dinkar’s travelogue recording his visit to China in 1957. The travelogue brings together two concurrent Cold War phenomena that have so far been studied as separate: the Chinese political campaigns of 1957, and the 1950s era of China-India cultural diplomacy. Recording the Anti-Rightist Campaign in a Hindi idiom, Dinkar’s literary practice crafts the realm of ellipses as generating new China-India literary ties, obscured by the official banner of cultural diplomacy.

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