*Originally published in 2024 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

A substantial amount of India’s international thought engages with the idea of the Indian civilization (Mawdsley, 2023). Statist perceptions and usage of civilization as a category need not overlap with the academic study of what constitutes a civilization. Rather statist imaginations of civilizations are contingent, constructed and deeply political. Civilizational imaginations are contingent as they change and evolve with time depending on who is constructing them. For instance, the state in India has so far oscillated between a Nehruvian and a Hindutva understanding of the Indian civilization (Chatterjee & Das, 2023). While both these imaginations agree on India’s civilizational greatness reserving a rightful place in the world order, their understanding of what consists of the Indian civilization is different. It is precisely because they are constructed that they are termed to be imaginations. There is no one authoritative account of a civilizational past which is pure. Therefore, a civilizational past is refashioned and popularized selectively owing to the needs of the present.

Statist usage of civilization is inherently political. It is curated and projected by political elites. It serves a political identity. It is the political calculation that propels civilizational projects to be created at certain junctures, in some cases, inflated and in other cases consciously toned down. Consider a counter proposition: if all civilizational arguments are predicated on a usable past, notwithstanding the prominence of a civilization, all states would have raised civilizational arguments. All states are historical entities and they are products of the past where they belong centrally to a civilization or attached to one. However, only some states raise civilizational arguments. The question beckons: what makes a state actively shape a past into civilizational imagery? It depends on the projected audience and the prevailing context. This is supplemented by the political will, capability and machinery that propels a civilizational imagination in public memory and imprinted into policy making.

Civilizational arguments of a state are projected at two levels – state actors and people, both domestic and international populace. For the domestic audience, civilizational underpinnings may invoke a sense of identity to relate to the community and the state. This may be enacted in multiple forms ranging from pedagogy to political campaigning. They are useful in creating a sense of national identity that is historical. They are easy to convey to the masses as they come in the language, metaphors and folklore that the people are well versed with. However, any project of mobilization runs the risk of including some and excluding others. While the boundaries of a civilization are more fluid than a nation-state, civilizational metaphors deploy similar tropes of the insider-outsider as the civilized and barbarian. Civilizational projects can be corrosive if the barbarians of the past are found within the territory of the present. For the international audience, civilizational arguments can be couched in terms of soft power to wield attraction. This can be carried out through modes of public diplomacy. The other state actors in the international system are another set of stakeholders. Civilizational arguments may be used to invoke respect, solidarity or hierarchy between states. This depends on how the civilizational arguments are conveyed by a state and how they are received by the other states in concern. Take, for instance, the objective of status and prestige that the Indian state seeks to achieve by using its civilizational past to create an image of a rule-abiding and responsible power. India’s civilizational claims have contrarily also created fears of hierarchy and cultural hegemony through the expression of Akhand Bharat in South Asia since the ascendancy of the Hindu Right.

Within the domain of International Relations, the question of civilization and foreign policy can be broadly located within the constructivist understanding. Unlike the realist understandings that emphasize timeless models of state behaviour, constructivism emphasizes how ideas and identity have an imprint on state actors (Hurd, 2009). A good exposition of this is Priya Chacko’s work where she highlights the linkages of India’s foreign policy with the politics of the postcolonial identity. It shows how India’s imagination of its civilizational exceptionalism along with its experiences of the colonial period shapes up its foreign policy (Chacko, 2014). The Indian Nuclear Doctrine is a case in point. It is drawn from the inherent desire for strength that results from a fading civilization facing colonial subjugation (Chatterjee & Das, 2021). The realists effectively can reverse the causal arrow. A plausible realist counter to this is that states projecting civilizational arguments intend to guarantee defence and secure power like any other state. While they do deploy civilizational arguments, they are more symbolic means than causal explanations of state behaviour. A constructivist reading sheds light on how civilization as a category shapes India’s imagination of itself, its visions of the international and its international engagement. The underlying argument here is that what explains India’s international behaviour cannot be reduced to generalizations of state behaviour without the historicization of its past (Bayly, 2022).

India’s Civilizational and International Thought

Reading civilizational arguments in India’s foreign policy opens up three themes. First, India’s political elite has consistently argued that India’s civilizational prowess deserves a rightful acknowledgement in the community of nations. Centuries of colonialism not only have materially drained India but legitimized the West as the sole representative of the international system. This modern international system marginalizes the non-Western states of which India is a vital representative owing to its civilizational greatness. This has been a constant thread in India’s foreign relations. One can argue that the invocation of India’s civilizational past was a product of its idealism in the immediate years post-independence where it sought to compensate for its lack of economic and military heft. This can be a less informed argument as civilizational rhetoric has been rather enhanced with a relative increase in India’s material heft since post-liberalization. Second, while there are variations as to how Indian civilization is defined, borrowed and inherited civilizational attributes offer ways in which India can envision the world around it and conduct its foreign relations. India’s former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran in his work, How India Sees the World, points out how sources of India’s worldview borrow from the past. A good illustration is how the Jambudvipa Mandala theory helps in understanding the geopolitical contiguity of South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region as a geostrategic and geoeconomic unit (Saran, 2017, 16-17). Amitav Acharya points out how India’s civilizational discourses engage with both realism and idealism, combine rationalism and transcendentalism and view the world in both anarchic and hierarchic arrangements. Delving further into this, he shows how the civilizational reading offers an interpretation of an Indianized social contract theory and a doctrine of human rights (Acharya, 2023). Finally, India's civilizational arguments do not seek to structurally alter the international........

© E-International