Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
unity and stability in the subcontinent well into the modern era. As Mackinder said in one
of his lectures: “In the British Empire there is but one land frontier on which warlike pre-
paration must ever be ready. It is the Northwest Frontier of India.”
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India's advantages and disadvantages as it seeks great power status in the early twenty-
first century inhere still in this geography. As the late historian Burton Stein notes, a map
of India through the medieval era would have extended into parts of Central Asia and
Iran, while at the same time showing only a tenuous link between the Indus valley in the
ents a triumphant culmination of the relationship between the Inner Asian steppe-land and
the floodplains of the Chinese heartland, India was for millennia heavily influenced by its
higher-altitude shadow zones, which, unlike in the case of China, it has yet to dominate, so
that India remains the lesser power.
The ties between subcontinental India and southeastern Afghanistan are obvious because
of their contiguity, yet those between India and the Central Asian steppe-land and between
India and the Iranian plateau are equally profound. India and Iran have shared the predic-
ament of being on the receiving end of Mongol onslaughts from Central Asia, even as the
dynamism of Iranian culture, abetted by invasions since the time of the Achaemenids (sixth
India's sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mughal emperors “became the embodiment of
Persian culture,” notes the late historian K. M. Panikkar, “and celebrated Nauroz [Persian
while, Urdu, the official language of Pakistan—the state occupying the Indian Subcontin-
ent's northwestern quadrant—draws heavily on Persian (as well as Arabic) and is written
the Greater Middle East. Here is where we can really understand William McNeill's point
about the mixing and melding of civilizations.
And so the key to understanding India is the realization that while as a subcontinent India
makes eminent geographical sense, its natural boundaries are, nevertheless, quite weak in
places. The result has been various states throughout history that do not conform to our spa-
tial idea of India, and in fact lie astride it. In fact, the present Indian state still does not con-
form to the borders of the subcontinent, and that is the heart of its dilemma: for Pakistan,
Bangladesh, and to a lesser extent Nepal also lie within the subcontinent, and pose signific-
ant security threats to India, robbing India of vital political energy that it would otherwise
harness for power projection throughout much of Eurasia.
It is not that human settlement from early antiquity forward doesn't adhere to subcon-
tinental geography; rather, it is that India's geography is itself subtle, particularly in the
northwest, telling a different story than the map reveals at first glance. At first glance, the
relief map shows a brown layer of mountains and tableland neatly marking off the cool
