Roshan Kishore picks his favourite read of 2024

“India’s near east was administratively united and communally partitioned by colonialism. This book explores how India dealt with these realties to build a nation and project power,” Avinash Paliwal writes in his introduction to India’s Near East: A New History.

While colonialism’s influence on India’s near-east is well known in historical scholarship, Paliwal deserves credit because his account of this history-in-progress is nothing short of an epic equivalent. It deploys, on the basis of what must have been a dogged pursuit of both historical documents and actors, not just the skills of a historian motivated by theoretical underpinnings of India’s post-colonial state formation project, but also another side of the author, who shares almost a spy-thriller-writer-like excitement and fascination for narrating how theoretical beliefs or lack of it translate a state’s beliefs into praxis.

This is exactly why the book keeps you engaged not just from an intellectual but also a dramatic standpoint. In one place, it will confront you with questions about “how colonial authority and anticolonial resistance, warfare and nationalism, partitions, and postcolonial state-building shaped India’s near east” and then go on to give graphic details of how India almost sent more than a thousand paratroopers into Bangladesh in February 2009 to save Shaikh Hasina from a revolt by soldiers in the Bangladesh Rifles.

The book also gives insights into the split personalities a state can display while dealing with different challenges at a historical time. “The state’s framing of political challenge from the left and the right was different. Hindutva was not viewed as a strategic threat, even if it merited containment. But militant communism triggered survivalist anxieties,” the book says, going into great detail about how these historical priorities have shaped our present.

India is extremely polarised today and its near-east is deeply destabilised. From Manipur to Bangladesh, India’s strategic interest is in fighting a wildfire which shows no signs of dying in the near future.

As self-righteous, self-serving, hubris-driven and half-baked (even if inadvertently) accounts of India’s near east populate the public discourse, Paliwal’s long-in-the-making work could not have come at a better time. The complexity and the breadth of his historical work, however, lends itself to a very simple message. “…communal passions are easy to spark and difficult to contain. If there is one lesson to be learnt from the geopolitics of India’s near east, it is this.”