The wisdom of the road

Abstract

The Silk Roads Ethos (SRE; Ling, 2014) animates the idea that India and China must draw from the legacy of historical exchanges for future cooperation. Mainstream scholarship on the subject employs and relies predominantly on a state-centric rivalry-oriented framework to study the issue, in which a standard focus on demographic comparisons, growth rates, GDP, FDI, energy-security complex, and cognate connotations of “hypermasculine war games” demarcate India-China relations in mutually distinct and discrete “boxed” categories (Banerjee and Ling, 2010). It also does not engage with the growing body of historically attuned, critical scholarship that focuses on the nuances of exchange, collaboration, and conflict between India and China. If scholars working on China-India are serious about offering a counter-hegemonic alternative to the current work-manuals, then our research approaches in understanding one another must also employ a counter-hegemonic epistemology. Drawing on insights from two recent collaborative projects, one on hydro-power projects in India and China, and a second, larger project on India-China relations, this article outlines the specific ways in which the wisdom of the SRE carries with it unequivocal empirical and pedagogical possibilities.