King's College London

In July 2024, the NIHSA network held a conference panel on de-centring India from the history of international relations of South Asia during the annual Association of Asian Studies conference, at Gaja Madah University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

The double panel, organised by NIHSA members Dr Swati Chawla (Jindal University) and Dr Bérénice Guyot-Réchard (King’s College London), is called “Taking the Elephant out of the Room: Non-Indo Centric International Histories of South Asia”. The panel aimed to start a conversation on international histories of South Asia that don’t take India as their starting point.

Programme:

The study of South Asia's international pasts once languished far down the agenda of scholars working on the region. A new historiography has come to correct this, bringing to light the complexity of the region's international relations and the dynamism of its internationalisms, and its role as a different locus of international thought and practice. That said, this scholarship has struggled to escape India's gravity pull. The country's size dwarfs all its neighbours, while historical factors, not least independent India's insistence that it is the one and direct heir of the Raj, reinforce India—and in fact, North India- or Delhi-centric—viewpoints. By and large, the international relations of Pakistan and Bangladesh (the world's 6th and 8th most populous countries) remain blackboxes, while smaller countries are too often treated as mere pawns in struggles between great powers. In how these histories have been written, their integration of Sikkim, the Burma-Bangladesh frontier, or the erstwhile princely states into India appears as a foregone conclusion, rather than a historically contingent, often protracted process. Recent histories of Sikkim and the princely states have begun to correct this narrative, but we still have a long way to go. Meanwhile, we often forget that, viewed from Kathmandu or Colombo, fears of hegemony crystallise as much on Delhi as on Beijing. This panel aims to stimulate multi-centric understandings of South Asia's international politics, foregrounding the perspective of countries that are not the Indian "elephant”.

1. Sri Lanka's China Connection: The 1952 Rubber-Rice Pact and the Making of an Independent Ceylonese Foreign Policy (Bérénice Guyot-Réchard)
2. The Making of an Independent Bhutanese Foreign Policy(Swati Chawla)
3. Pakistan’s Foreign Policy and Third World Solidarity (Ali Murtaza)
4. Beyond a Binary: Rethinking South Asia’s International Society from East Pakistan / Bangladesh (Jon Wilson)
5. Nepal and the Making of the International: Inter-contextual Attunement in Treaty Making in Nineteenth Century South Asia (Ajapa Sharma)
6. Making of the Munshikhana: Information, knowledge and diplomacy in 19th-century Nepal (Shubhanga Pandey)
7. The "Shackles" of a 'New' International Order & the (De)Coloniality of Friendship: The Unrecorded History of Nepal-China Relations (1910s-1940s) (Zezhou Yang)