Part I - (Inter)national Orders and State Futures

Summary

For much of the modern period, South Asia was home to a diversity of politico-territorial formations: massive land-based empires like the Mughals and the Marathas, networked maritime possessions of European empires like Portugal's Estado da India, tiny principalities, and non-state spaces. Managing “foreign” relations between these entities was fundamental, both to negotiating political, military, or economic settlements and to enacting, or performing, their differentiation from one another. Straddling three centuries, this first section highlights three historical moments of systemic adjustment to the South Asian international order, moments when the future (and future shape) of the region's polities was thrown in question. Tanja Bührer takes us back to the late eighteenth century, when the East India Company, the Maratha Confederacy, and Hyderabad defeated Tipu Sultan. Tipu's fall was not merely the result of a conflict between Mysore and the rising power of the EIC, but of an alliance with other South Asian powers – an alliance between equals. The Marathas, Hyderabad, and the EIC saw themselves as part of a sophisticated, rule-based, reciprocal international order in which they all had a stake, and they negotiated as such. Rather than a linear story of world politics from which non-European powers were systematically and fully excluded under the so-called “standard of civilization,” Bührer reveals the late eighteenth century as a time when Indian and European polities saw themselves as equally legitimate, and integral, parts of an inclusive and truly global international order.

By the twentieth century however, areas “directly ruled” by the Raj sat alongside princely states big and small and frontier areas where colonial authority was fragile; polities like Afghanistan and Nepal enjoyed varying, ill-defined degrees of independence. Formal decolonization therefore meant an extended moment of flattening and streamlining for state sovereignty in South Asia. Swati Chawla's chapter underscores how worrying 1947 was for Bhutan and traces the creative diplomatic and discursive strategies this Himalayan state deployed to preserve its independence and seek international recognition. Determined to avoid the fate of the princely states, its ruling elites coordinated with neighbouring Sikkim – with whose rulers they shared both family ties and educational experiences – to assert their countries’ political sovereignty and to construct themselves as culturally distinct from India. Sikkim would fail, but Bhutan successfully kept its relationship with India international.