Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
designs on Afghanistan, but it does mean that New Delhi cares profoundly about who rules
Afghanistan, and wishes to ensure that those who do rule there are friendly to India.
The British, unlike previous rulers of India, constituted a sea power much more than a land
power. It was from the sea, as evinced by the Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta presidencies
that were to become the focal points of their rule, that the British were able to conquer In-
dia. Consequently, it was the British who, following more than two millennia of invasions
and migrations from the west and northwest, restored to India as a political fact the basic
truth of its geography: that it is indeed a subcontinent. A 1901 map of India wonderfully
demonstrates this: showing a plethora of British-built rail lines ranging in arterial fashion
over the whole of the subcontinent—from the Afghan border to the Palk Strait near Ceylon
in the deep south, and from Karachi in present-day Pakistan in the west to Chittagong in
present-day Bangladesh in the east. Technology had allowed for the subcontinent's vast in-
ternal space to be finally united under one polity, rather than divided among several, or
administered under some weak imperial alliance system.
True, the Mughals (along with, to a lesser extent, the Maratha Confederacy in the early
modern era) were the precursors to this achievement, with their ability to ably administer
much of the subcontinent. But Mughal rule, as brilliant as it was, had signified yet another
Muslim invasion from the northwest, one that to this day is denigrated by Hindu national-
ists. Yet Great Britain, the sea power, was a neutral in the historical drama between Hin-
dus and Muslims: a drama whose basis lay in geography; with the bulk of India's Muslims
living both in the northwest, from where invasions had nearly always come, and in East
Bengal—the agriculturally rich, eastern terminus of the Gangetic plain, where Islam spread
with a thirteenth-century Turkic-Mongol invasion and the clearing of the forest.
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The British may have united the Indian Subcontinent with modern bureaucracy and a rail
system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but by the hastened, tumultu-
ous manner of their leaving in 1947, they helped redivide it in a way that was both more
profound and more formalized than any previous imperial sundering. For in the past, the
places where, for example, the Indo-Greeks met the Gupta Empire, or where the Mughal
Empire met the Maratha Confederacy, did not signify—as such borders do today—barbed
wire and minefields and different passports and war-by-media, which all belong to a later
phase of technology. The divide now is a hardened legal and partly civilizational one, and
became thus less because of geography than because of the decisions of men.
In short, from the historical perspective of India, Pakistan constitutes much more than
even a nuclear-armed adversary, a state sponsor of terrorism, and a large, conventional
army breathing down its neck on the border. Pakistan, lying to India's northwest, where
the mountains meet the plain, is the very geographical and national embodiment of all
the Muslim invasions that have swept down into India throughout its history. Pakistan
