*Originally published in 2023. Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or make a donation, to support our work.

This article is part of the Indian IR Meets Global IR series, edited by Deepshikha Shahi and Raghav Dua.

The ever-shifting shapes, sizes, and colours of the clouds of our earthly existence have remained marked with a solid silver lining – which reaffirms that those birds that are not sceptical about their ability to fly do so defying all temporal-spatial bondages. This series of articles showcases a glimpse of the nonchalant glide of one such ‘golden bird’ in an ‘open sky’: the golden bird is none other than ‘India’ (conserving the intellectual foundations of Indian IR) and the open sky is what we have come to acknowledge as the scholarly vistas of ‘Global IR’ (which seeks to reconcile the West–non-West binaries in theory-building and policy-making).

When the feathers of the Indian golden bird were cut during British imperial rule, it led to not only the plunder of its political economy but also its deeper intellectual foundations – that is, “indigenous interests, values, norms, knowledge systems, and practices” (Rieck 2017, 15). The premeditated denigration of these intellectual foundations by spreading the “twin myths of Indian isolationism and oriental despotism” by British imperialists (Hobson 2004, 79), and, even more regrettably, the thoughtless absorption of these British-imposed twin myths by the self-enslaved Indians who were “so much beset by the disease of civilization that [they could] not altogether do without English education” (Gandhi 2008, 284), manifested as a protracted post-colonial hangover. Even though British imperial rule came to an end before too long, the post-colonial hangover of the still self-enslaved Indians continued to reinforce scepticism toward the validity of the Indian intellectual heritage. As expected, this scepticism prohibited the re-growth of the diverse multilayered feathers of the golden bird.

As far as the academic discipline of International Relations (IR) was concerned, the idea of reclaiming the validity of the Indian intellectual heritage unleashed myriad forms of scepticism. Most of the Indian IR scholars – whose cerebral roots were buried deep in Western education (or Western theoretical and praxeological frameworks) – expressed uncertainty toward the prospects of formulating an ‘Indian IR theory’ or institutionalising an ‘Indian IR school’. They preconceived these potential initiatives as a narrow exercise in the direction of propagating nativism, methodological nationalism, essentialism, ethnocentrism, and self-centrism (Behera 2010, Acharya 2011, Mallavarapu 2014). They wondered if the unsighted dependency on Western education caused Western-centrism, then how could the revival of the denigrated Indian intellectual heritage, not contribute to the consolidation of Indian-centrism?

The show of scepticism on the part of Indian IR scholars was mirrored by Western IR scholars. While some of them suspected that the orientation to theorise was an exception rather than a rule in Indian IR (Hansel, Khan and Levaillant 2017), others alleged that the entire enterprise of the revival of the Indian intellectual heritage – or say, the appeal to boost “India’s self-image as a knowledge-producer” and “integrate Indian IR with Global IR” (Mehta 2009) for the purpose of “building an eclectic and inclusive Global IR” (Paul 2022) – was nothing more than a strategy to propagate ‘ethno IR’: Audrey Alejandro (2018) misleadingly contended that the quest to integrate Indian IR with Global IR essentialised and legitimised certain selective philosophical positions as being ‘the national’ – i.e., ‘the Indian’ – tradition, thereby enforcing a monolithic conception of Indianness upon the Indian scholars and falling into the same trap as ethnologists who developed ethnosciences.

Due to these clouds of scepticism, there was much less interest in India in developing an IR school. This risk was foreseen by Kanti Bajpai, before anyone took note of India’s rise, when he warned that efforts to develop an IR theory out of India might carry the perils of lapsing into unsuspecting nativism or pursuing some essentialist Indian prophecy (Acharya 2011). However, the awareness of........

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