Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
INDIA'S GEOGRAPHICAL DILEMMA
As the United States and China become great power rivals, the direction in which India
tilts could determine the course of geopolitics in Eurasia in the twenty-first century. India,
in other words, looms as the ultimate pivot state. It is, according to Spykman, a Rimland
power writ large. Mahan noted that India, located in the center of the Indian Ocean littoral,
is critical for the seaward penetration of both the Middle East and China. But even as the
Indian political class understands at a very intimate level America's own historical and geo-
graphical situation, the American political class has no such understanding of India's. Yet
if Americans do not come to grasp India's highly unstable geopolitics, especially as it con-
cerns Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China, they will badly mishandle the relationship. India's
history and geography since early antiquity constitute the genetic code for how the world
looks from New Delhi. I begin by placing the Indian Subcontinent in the context of Eurasia
in general.
With Russia dominating the landmass of Eurasia, even as it is sparsely populated, the four
great centers of population on the super-continent are on its peripheries: Europe, India,
Southeast Asia, and China. Chinese and European civilizations, as the geographer James
Fairgrieve wrote in 1917, grew outward in organic fashion from the nurseries of the Wei
River valley and the Mediterranean. 1 Southeast Asia's civilizational development was more
elaborate: with Pyu and Mon peoples, followed by Burmans, Khmers, Siamese, Vietnamese,
Malays, and others—in turn, influenced by southward migrations from China—coagulating
along river valleys like the Irrawaddy and Mekong, as well as on islands like Java and Su-
matra. India is another case entirely. Like China, India is possessed of geographical logic,
framed as it is by the Arabian Sea to the west and southwest, by the Bay of Bengal to the
east and southeast, by the mountainous Burmese jungles to the east, and by the Himalayas
and the knot of the Karakoram and Hindu Kush to the north and northwest. India, also like
China, is internally vast. But to a lesser extent than China, India lacks a singular nursery of
demographic organization like the Wei valley and lower Yellow River, from which a polity
could expand outward in all directions.
Even the Ganges River valley did not provide enough of a platform for the expansion
of a unitary Indian state unto the subcontinent's deep, peninsular south: for the subcon-
tinent's various river systems besides the Ganges—Brahmaputra, Narmada, Tungabhadra,
Kaveri, Godavari, and so on—further divide it. The Kaveri Delta, for example, is the core
of Dravidian life, much as the Ganges is of that of the Hindi-speaking peoples. 2 Moreover,
India has (along with Southeast Asia) the hottest climate and most abundant and luxuriant
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