Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T21:53:17.092Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Sino-Indian Cultural Relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Herbert Passin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

India has been perhaps the most favoured of non-Communist countries in its cultural relations with China. Yet the curve of Sino-Indian relations has been as affected by political considerations as the relations of China to any other country. The scant eleven years of the Communist regime have been marked by sharp ups and downs. In the first period, 1949–50, relations were cool and tentative, in spite of the presence as Ambassador of Sardar K. M. Panikkar, the distinguished historian, who was very friendly to the new régime, and in spite of India's sponsorship of Communist China for membership in the United Nations. This was the period, it will be remembered, when China was taking a very aggressive attitude towards the border problems between the two countries, and when China still considered India's independence not a “true” one and the replacement of the “bourgeois nationalist leadership” as the order of the day.

Type
Population Problems
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 7 , September 1961 , pp. 85 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1961

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 This mission has been fully reported in Fisher, Margaret and Bondurant, Joan V., “The Impact of Communist China on Visitors from India,” The Far Eastern Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 2, 02 1956CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and in 1952 issues of the India Press Digests. See also Panikkar, 's own book, In Two Chinas: Memoirs of a Diplomat (London: Allen and Unwin, 1955).Google Scholar

2 Many members of the first unofficial delegation wrote books and articles, and Pandit Sundarlal, leader of the group, edited a book of essays by the members, China Today (Allahabad: Hindustani Culture Society, 1952).Google Scholar

3 Actually the “Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence” had first been announced in the preamble to the agreement on trade and intercourse between India and the “Tibetan Region of China,” signed in Peking on April 29, 1954.

4 See Gupta, Dhirendranath Das, With Nehru in China (Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1955).Google Scholar

5 See Mukharjee, Sailakumer, A Visit to New China (Calcutta: A. Mukherjee, 1956).Google Scholar Mukherjee was Speaker of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly.

6 He had just been awarded the prize while on a trip to Russia.

7 Some of India's religious leaders and even “saints,” such as Sant Tukodji Maharaj (President of the Bharat Sadhu Samaj, the semi-governmental monks' organisation, sponsored and inaugurated by GulzarUal Nandaji), have visited China and returned on the whole favourably impressed with China's treatment of religious groups.

8 There have been dissenting voices, of course, and important ones. Many connoisseurs and even critics of journals and newspapers have considered Chinese productions, particularly the acrobatics and song-and-dance groups, low in quality.

9 Although it should be remembered that Chattopadhyaya has long been friendly to the Communists.

10 Kirkpatrick, , op. cit., p. 359.Google Scholar

11 Moraes, Frank, Report on Red China (New York: Macmillan, 1959)Google Scholar; Hutheesingh, Raja, Window on China (Bombay: Casement, 1953)Google Scholar and The Great Peace (New York: Harper, 1953).Google Scholar See also the observations of trade unionists Brajkishore Shastri, From My Chinese Diary (Delhi: Siddhartha Publications, no date) and Mehta, R. J. in Thought, 06 25, 1955.Google Scholar

12 India's leading old-style Sinologist, authority in Buddhology and Tibetology as well; author of India and China, A Thousand Years of Cultural Relations (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951)Google Scholar; visited China with the first official mission led by Mme. Pandit in 1952; died about three years ago.

13 Most recently headed by Visiting Lecturer K. C. Chao, now by V. P. Dutt, Lecturer in Chinese History, Delhi University.

14 One Indian student and two Chinese students had already been exchanged in 1954.

15 In September 1956 there were 2,400 Indian students in the United States. See Barghoorn, Frederick C., The Soviet Cultural Offensive (Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 209.Google Scholar In 1958–59, there were 1,511 Indian students in England, and 2,585 in the United States. UNESCO, Study Abroad, 1959.Google Scholar

16 As a generous gesture, Chou En-lai, on his visit to Visvabharati University in January 1957, announced that he was giving scholarships to the daughters of Professor Tan Yun-shan who were studying at the University on the same basis as those granted Overseas Chinese He also agreed to the proposal of the Vice-Chancellor to send Sinological students to China for a three-year period of study, although it is not clear whether this was to be within the formal student-exchange programme or not, nor if anything was even done about it.

17 Three Chinese students spent 12 months in 1956–7 visiting the Bhakra, D.V.C., Hirakud, and other Indian projects. See: Seshadri, S., “Glimpses of Water-Conservancy in China—Part I,” Indian Journal of Power and River Valley Development, 05 1959.Google Scholar

18 in June 1956, for example, Chinese students at Aligarh Muslim University, along with other foreign students, joined Indian students in a camp near Srinagar, Kashmir, sponsored by the New Delhi Branch of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations.

19 In January 1957, Chou also donated 60,000 rupees to the University, which allocated the money to the Tagore Jayanti Fund. He was on that occasion awarded an honorary D.Litt.

20 Sain had already been to China earlier in the year on a preliminary visit with K. L. Rao, Head of the Planning Section of the Commission.

21 Its controversial Report of the Indian Delegation to China on Agrarian Cooperatives (New Delhi: Government of India, Planning Commission, 1957)Google Scholar was answered by a minority report prepared by the Indian Cooperative Union (Krishna, Raj, Jain, L. C., Krishan, Gopi, Co-operative Farming—Some Critical ReflectionsGoogle Scholar), Monographs on Co-operation, No. 1 (New Delhi: Indian Co-operative Union, 1956).

22 Some doctors have been interested in China's attempt to integrate traditional and modern medicine, a field in which some work has also been done in India. Dr. B. K. Basu visited China in 1958 to study acupuncture and was eventually, after initial reluctance, won over to it. See his “My Impression of Acupuncture and Moxibustion,” Chinese Medical Journal, 78, 06 1959.Google Scholar

23 Moraes had been in China during the war, so he had some baseline for comparison. See above, footnote 11.

24 Hutheesingh, a brother-in-law of the Prime Minister, is both a lawyer and a journalist. He went with both the first unofficial delegation in 1951 and the first official delegation in 1952. After his second trip, he was far more critical than after his first. See above, footnote 11.

25 Although there are not many Indian students in Russian universities, Barghoorn (op. cit., pp. 201–4) mentions 91 Indian metallurgists in the Soviet Union “to complete their technical training” (p. 201), oil engineers “who … had been working for several months in laboratories and research institutions in Baku” (p. 202), “Indian specialists in hydrography and forestry taking special courses in the Soviet Union” (p. 202), and “136 engineers and 150 operatives of the Bhilai Steel Mill (who) had gone to the U.S.S.R. for study under a U.N. technical-assistance arrangement” (p. 204).

26 Not to mention the United States, where Indian students average between 2,000 and 3,000 at any given time. See footnote 15.

27 For example: history of the Chinese Communist Party, Sino-Indian relations, Sino-British relations, Sino-American relations.