China–India Studies: Emergence, Development, and State of the Field

Abstract

This essay traces the development of China–India studies from the mid-nineteenth century to the present in order to take stock of the field, which has witnessed a surge in publication over the past two decades. The assessment presented here weaves the main shifts in China–India political relations with the emergence of various strands of China–India scholarship, since the two aspects often intersect. The major lacuna in the field, this essay argues, is a framework needed to analyze the complex connections and the pertinent comparisons between China and India. It contends that research on China–India topics should ideally attempt to combine comparative and connective frameworks with analyses that transcend geographic, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries to address this lacuna.

Introduction: Methods in China-India Studies

“…A deeper reckoning with the long intellectual history of studying China and India together could offer one trajectory toward articulating the contemporary relevance of the pairing. Far predating the transnational turn, China-India academic research finds its intellectual roots in mid-nineteenth-century colonial epistemologies, and subsequently in early-twentieth-century anticolonial discourses (Sen 2021). Over the course of the twentieth century, intellectual engagements with the practice of thinking about China and India together have shared a desire to decenter political and conceptual frames of dominance and to disrupt hierarchical structures of power.…”

“…Already in the second century, in a work credited to a person known as Mouzi 眸子, the sophistication of Indian society was being articulated and compared to that of China (Keenan 1994). Similarly, 1 A detailed overview of the development of the field of China-India studies appears in Sen (2021). For a bibliography of important publications on China-India topics, see https://cga.shanghai.nyu.edu/database/china-india/china-india-bibliography/ (accessed 5 May 2022).…”

“… 1 A detailed overview of the development of the field of China-India studies appears in Sen (2021). For a bibliography of important publications on China-India topics, see (accessed 5 May 2022).…”

China in medieval Indian imagination: “China”-inspired images in medieval South Asia

“…Just as Chinese pilgrims brought certain images and the stories associated with famous and miraculous Buddhist images back to China, some local cults in China also traveled to the subcontinent, and they probably provided connective threads for later imagination of China as the Buddha land after the demise of Buddhist institutions in India. Attending to the two problems identified in this section, the following discussion explores relatively well-known examples of material culture and art historical evidence of cultural interactions between India and China through an interactive, comparative, and connective framework (Sen 2021) to challenge the diffusionist model of knowledge transfer between India and China.…”

Three plays and a shared socio-spiritual horizon in the modern Buddhist revivals in India and China

“… 11 van der Veer 2014, p. 4. For a general overview of the field of China–India comparisons, see Sen 2021.…”