The epilogue sketches, in broad brushstrokes, the afterlives of the Greater India discourse in the postcolonial period, with particular reference to the writings and politics of Jawaharlal Nehru, the academic realm, and the Hindu nationalist imagination. It examines how the Greater India imagination reconfigured Nehru’s understanding of India’s ancient past and future role in global politics. It also shows that the story of the ‘glorious’ spread of Indian culture became a canonized theme in post-independence nationalist historiography and was promulgated by influential historians including R.C. Majumdar and K.M. Panikkar. Yet although the ‘discovery’ of Greater India had opened a new window on the ancient past, it also marginalized histories of connection and entanglement, most notably pertaining to India’s Islamic traditions, that did not fit the master narrative that celebrated an expansive ancient India as Asia’s cultural and spiritual fount. Finally, the epilogue reflects on how the legacies of the Greater India movement are mobilized in contemporary India to bolster visions of Akhand Bharat and position India as a civilizational actor on the global plane.

This chapter addresses how Greater India featured in the Hindu nationalist imagination and B.K. Sarkar’s oeuvre. Disavowing Indian exceptionalism, Greater India became a tool to trace and project the Hindu nation as a historical actor making its mark on the world. Magna India was imagined as a colonial sphere where the vigorous, manly Hindu imposed his national will. The twin objectives of challenging the East-West civilizational dichotomy and ‘restoring the nation to the world’ rested on reclaiming a form of historical agency that had been forgotten or ignored in British accounts. By stressing equivalence with the West and emphasizing the secular and ‘national’ agency of ‘world historical figures’ such as Ashoka and the Buddha, Sarkar sought to puncture the ‘myth’ of Indian civilization as other-worldly and mystical, and argued that ancient India had been a great colonizing, civilizing and secular power on a par with ancient Greece and Rome. Writing India into world history on decidedly Eurocentric terms inspired presentist calls for Young India to compete with the West. Such visions of a ‘Modern Greater India’ were linked to debates about the fate of Indian diaspora communities.

The poet Rabindranath Tagore linked the scholarly quest for ‘India in Asia’ to visions of an Indian cultural renaissance, Asianist agendas and the Visva-Bharati project to inaugurate a global civilizational dialogue. This chapter examines the relationship between Orientalist scholarship, interwar Asianism and emerging visions of Indian exceptionalism. Tagore and like-minded GIS-members mobilized the ancient, transregional circulation of Buddhism to pitch Greater India as an internationalist template with contemporary relevance. Epitomizing India’s civilizational legacies abroad, the ancient Pan-Asian Buddhist ecumene was evoked as a cultural counter-geography and harmonious ‘empire of culture’. Reinforcing Theosophical visions of ancient India as Asia’s spiritual fount, and drawing on the visionary writings of the Japanese art historian Okakura Tenshin, this Buddhist past, and especially the legacies of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, were contrasted with the aggressive mode of past and present Western colonizing schemes. The topos of ‘ancient bonds’ energized calls to unite under the spiritual banner of a ‘Greater India’ and a rejuvenated ‘East’.

This chapter looks at the thinking and practice of international relations and world order in pre-Muslim India. It opens by setting India’s geopolitical context. In terms of thinking it covers Kautilya’s Arthashastra, Ashoka’s Dharma, and the ontology and epistemology of India’s epic literature. In terms of practice, it covers the Mahajanapadas and the peaceful spread of Indian culture.

This chapter addresses five difficulties in our approach: how to handle the close link between the discipline of IR that we now have and the period of Western world dominance; does culture matter in international relations or is it all materialism?; how ‘Western’ is modern IR?; Can ancient and modern concepts and practices be equated?; Empires versus states, and how to differentiate inside and outside.

Traditional housing markets have primarily ignored both the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) and the Middle of the Pyramid (MOP), as these groups are expelled out from commercial banking given they have insufficient money to formally build their homes, so they remain as vulnerable people. This housing shortage is of particular importance in developing countries where public intervention is not efficient to solve this social problem. In this chapter, and applied to the Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) nations, we show how the public–private initiatives based on innovation can help to solve this shortage of quality housing. We conclude that managers located in LAC countries have an active role in identifying social needs to satisfy them by applying innovative processes focused on reducing poverty gaps in housing from private initiatives. These creative procedures allow social entrepreneurs to adopt flexible and adjustable models to the variety of needs emerged in the different segments of the low-income market, and we show it in various cases for some LAC countries.