India and China have coexisted as neighbours for millennia, together representing more than a third of humanity and roughly a quarter of the global economy. Yet as both nations have grown more powerful, they appear to have grown more distant from each other, with China in particular showing little curiosity about its southwestern neighbour. Kanti Bajpai’s 2021 book, “India Versus China,” explores this widening gulf through the accounts of Indian travellers who journeyed through China across different decades.
The book draws heavily on Vikram Seth, who in 1981, as a Stanford doctoral student, travelled from Xinjiang to Tibet on his way home to India. Seth later turned the journey into “From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet.” The China he encountered was poor, closed, and only beginning to emerge from the trauma of Maoism, yet his interactions with ordinary Chinese people often carried unexpected warmth and curiosity. Local musicians played songs from Raj Kapoor’s “Awara,” and conversations about the 1962 war were often more conciliatory than Seth anticipated, with some Chinese he met describing the conflict as a failure of governments rather than peoples. One former soldier who had served on the border recalled the sheer confusion of the confrontation, describing days when neither side was certain exactly where the line lay. Seth’s account nonetheless closed on a sober note, observing that despite their shared border, the two countries had had strikingly little real contact throughout history.
Two decades later, researcher Anurag Viswanath travelled extensively through China while studying its economic reforms and poverty alleviation efforts. Her book, “Finding India in China: Travels to the Lesser Known,” found a country transformed economically but still largely indifferent to India, particularly in poorer provinces like Gansu, which she likened to Bihar, where attitudes toward India ranged from indifference to open prejudice.
— Daily Archives, Opinion Desk