Sociology · Ch 11 — Globalisation and Social Change
Are Global Interconnections New to World and to India
Are Global Interconnections New to World and to India
The idea that globalisation is about global interconnections naturally raises a question: is this really a new phenomenon? Were India and the different parts of the world not interacting with each other in earlier times? The answer is that global interconnections are not new at all.
The Early Years
India was not isolated from the world even two thousand years ago. The famous Silk Route, which we read about in history textbooks, connected India to the great civilisations of China, Persia, Egypt and Rome centuries ago. Throughout India's long past, people came from different parts of the world — sometimes as traders, sometimes as conquerors, sometimes as migrants in search of new lands — and settled down here. Even in remote Indian villages, people often 'recall' a time when their ancestors lived elsewhere, from where they came and settled down where they now live.
The greatest grammarian in Sanskrit, Panini, who systematised and transformed Sanskrit grammar and phonetics around the fourth century BCE, was of Afghan origin. The seventh-century Chinese scholar Yi Jing learned his Sanskrit in Java (in the city of Shri Vijaya) on his way from China to India. The influence of these interactions is well reflected in languages and vocabularies throughout Asia — from Thailand to Malaya to Indo-China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Korea and Japan.
There is a warning against isolationism in a parable about a well-frog — the 'kupamanduka' — that persistently recurs in several old Sanskrit texts. The kupamanduka is a frog that lives its whole life within a well, knows nothing else, and is suspicious of everything outside it. It talks to no one, and argues with no one on anything. It merely harbours the deepest suspicion of the outside world. The scientific, cultural and economic history of the world would have been very limited indeed had we lived like well-frogs.
Global interactions, or even a global outlook, are thus not novel developments unique to the modern period or unique to modern India.
Colonialism and the Global Connection
The story of social and economic development in modern India begins from the colonial period. Modern capitalism had a global dimension from its very inception. Colonialism was part of the system that required new sources of capital, raw materials, energy, markets and a global network that sustained it.
Today, globalisation often identifies large-scale movement of people or migration as a defining feature. However, perhaps the greatest movement of people was the migration of European people who settled down in the Americas and Australia. Indentured labourers were taken away in ships from India to work in distant parts of Asia, Africa and the Americas. And the slave trade carted thousands of Africans away to distant shores.
Independent India and the World …