The Pulse | Society | South Asia

Their customs, norms, language, food and music are different. They have radically different approaches to politics, ideas, and religion too.

Indian and Chinese civilizations have known about each other and been in contact with each other for over 2,000 years. Any book or article that focuses on the relationship between India and China will usually include some mention of their long — and usually peaceful — ties. These include trade and civilizational influence. The export of Buddhism from India to China, and its long-term impact on that society is invariably alluded to. Additionally, China is India’s largest trading partner today. However, there is little historical evidence of influence in the other direction: Indian interest in Chinese thought or literature.

Moreover, despite their current rivalry, what is going on in China barely catches the attention of the Indian public, unlike India’s other rival — Pakistan.

According to a recent survey, a plurality of Indian adults ranked China as the greatest threat to their country. According to a Pew survey, released after the May 2025 India-Pakistan military clashes, China was rated India’s second greatest threat after Pakistan. It is clear that Indians are aware of the Chinese threat, but this does not translate into a desire to learn more about China.

Aside from a few specialized institutes, governmental organizations, and university departments, why has there been little interest in Chinese culture, history, language, philosophy, and politics in India, both in the past and in the present?

India and China have been aware of each other for at least two millennia. The Hindu epic, Mahabharata, and Kautilya’s Arthashastra, an ancient manual on statecraft and economics, contain references to cīnapaṭṭa or Chinese silk bundles. Zhang Qian, an early Han dynasty emissary to Central Asia in the 120s BCE, saw bamboo and cloth from China in the marketplaces of Balkh (Bactria), which he was told arrived there from India.

There is therefore evidence of two-way trade dating from ancient times, both over land and by sea, through intermediaries, or directly. By the time of the Chola dynasty in the 11th century CE, Tamil envoys and merchants were going directly to China: there are records of tribute missions and colonies of merchants. The land routes from India to China tended to skirt around Tibet, because of the high Himalayan barrier, and hug the northern and southern edges of the Taklamakan Desert in Xinjiang, and enter China through the Gansu Corridor. The sea routes utilized the monsoon patterns to reach the southern Chinese coast via Southeast Asia, seeding Indian-influenced kingdoms in places like Java, Champa (now in Vietnam), and the early Khmer polities of Funan. In addition to silk, Indians bought paper and porcelain from China. The earliest evidence of the use of paper in India is mentioned by Chinese pilgrims in the 7th century CE. At the same time, India exported spices, incense, high-quality steel, and horses from West Asia, to China.

In addition to trade, Buddhism spread from India to China after the establishment of the Kushan Empire, which straddled both sides of the Himalayas, in the first century BCE. Buddhism became popular in China after the fall of the Han Empire and grew, perhaps to fill the void of poor governance, in the three-century interregnum between dynasties that ruled over a united China, the Han, which ended in 220 CE, and the Sui (581-618 CE). The Sui were succeeded by the Tang (618-907 CE), who presided over the heyday of Chinese Buddhism, before the rise of Neo-Confucianism during the subsequent Song dynasty. It was during this heyday that many Chinese scholars sought out Buddhist manuscripts, made translations from Sanskrit into Chinese, and even traveled to India, often with state sponsorship, thus facilitating the transfer of much Indian knowledge to China. In addition to Buddhist manuscripts, the Chinese acquired works on a variety of topics.

In his book India, China, and the World: A Connected History, Tansen Sen writes that in 1924, when the Chinese intellectual Liang Qichao delivered a series of talks to welcome the famous Indian author and poet Rabindranath Tagore to China, he “outlined the various ways in which Chinese culture was indebted to India in the realms of philosophy, literature, music, architecture, art, astronomy, and medicine. Calling India the ‘elder brother,’ Liang emphasized that what China received were ‘gifts of singular and precious worth, which we can never forget.’”

But why did India not receive similar intellectual gifts from China? To begin with, it was easier for Indian culture to exert an influence on China because Indian literature, ideas, and knowledge arrived with Buddhism, and for centuries, China continued to seek Buddhist texts from India. There was no similar conduit for texts and knowledge from China to India. This may be because Confucianism and Chinese literary culture in general are not optimal for export: it requires immersion in a highly developed, particularly Chinese worldview, along with mastery of a complex writing system.

It is telling that even when cultures had the choice of adapting Indian or Chinese traditions to their needs, most of China’s immediate neighbors in the Eurasian steppe, Himalayas, and Southeast Asia chose Buddhism or Hinduism, and writing and political systems derived from India. The few exceptions, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan, are telling: these societies did not have direct access to Indian civilization itself during their formative periods, except through China. It is therefore no surprise that Indians themselves, having their own complete intellectual and literary traditions, did not usually seek out Chinese knowledge, given the intricacies of travel and translation. There is a singular tantalizing reference, however, to a lost translation in Sanskrit of the Daodejing, a Daoist work, that was requested by the king of Kamarupa, in modern Assam.

None of this, however, prevented the exchange of useful trade goods or even technology. It is reported that during the reign of the Emperor Harshavardhana of Kannauj (606-647), Chinese and Indian monks met at the Mahabodhi Monastery in Bihar and exchanged knowledge of silk and sugar production.

Over a thousand years later, in the 20th century, in significantly different geopolitical and civilizational circumstances, the modern nation-states of India and China emerged in the 1940s. A festering territorial dispute in the Himalayas led to a brief war in 1962, which China won, shaping modern Indian security policy. Indian policymakers are aware of China’s support for Pakistan, its coolness toward the rise of India as another Asian power, and the greater geopolitical competition between the two countries, and have begun planning accordingly. The Indian population believes, for the most part, that China is India’s biggest threat. According to a 2024 survey of India’s youth by Observer Research Foundation (ORF), an Indian think tank, 89 percent of respondents deemed the border conflict with China India’s biggest foreign policy challenge.

Yet other countries loom a lot larger in the Indian imagination: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Israel, the United States, Russia, the Arab states, and Japan. In the case of Pakistan, there is a sense of these being a fraternal conflict between two siblings who eat, dress, and speak similarly. The recent success of the “Dhurandhar” movies in India — the highest-grossing Hindi-language films in India, ever — is a function of India’s familiarity with, and obsession with Pakistan. The movies feature an undercover Indian agency infiltrating a gang in Karachi in order to inhibit the movement of terrorists and weapons against India. It is inconceivable that a similar movie set in China would be as successful.

India’s rivalry with China has not translated into a broader interest in China and what China has to say, either among the population or among the political class: suggestions that India has something to learn from, or about China, even in the service of strengthening India, often meet with pushback from Indians. There are abysmally few China Studies programs in India, and even among those, few that teach Chinese or encourage students to conduct research using primary sources in Chinese. A part of the reason may be a lack of teachers, funding, and opportunities for research in China itself. According to Madhavi Thampi, honorary fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies at New Delhi, because of the emphasis in India on either studying China through the lens of its foreign policy or trade vis-à-vis India, interest in studying Chinese civilization as a whole has few takers and, as a result:

…[A] holistic understanding of China and the Chinese people still eludes us. Even where claims to be ‘multi-disciplinary’ are made by departments and think tanks engaged in China studies, in practice the overwhelming emphasis is on China’s foreign relations and how these impact India. This myopic approach to the study of China — a neighbouring country with a deep and complex society and culture and a growing impact on all spheres of life in the world today — is certainly one of the major obstacles to developing a holistic and informed understanding of China in India.

My own anecdotal experience, through discussions with many Indians, is that Indians would be hard-pressed to speak, even in general terms, about China’s recent history, its posture toward Taiwan, Japan, or Russia, or its economic and technological advances, and what those mean for India. Even fewer would have dabbled in Chinese philosophy or its ancient history.

In addition to government policy, and the emphasis on geopolitics or trade at universities, another explanation for this lack of interest in China amongst Indians may simply come down to the significant distance between the two countries in terms of customs, norms, language, food, music, clothing, and even their radically different approaches to politics, ideas, and religion. Various contemporary China and India watchers have generalized the Chinese as being more pragmatic, practical, and materialistic, whilst disinterested in abstract, grand theories, while Indians are seen as being more argumentative, traditional, and interested in religion and abstract ideas. These are stereotypes, of course, but the point is that Indians and Chinese people, taken as a whole, have significantly different worldviews and approaches to life.

It is therefore clear why China has never entered the Indian imagination as deeply as other places, although it may seem surprising at first, given their contemporary geopolitical tensions and ancient cultural ties. Trade is one thing; interest in another society or country is another, a phenomenon dependent on a variety of contingent circumstances such as the quality of university programs, governmental priorities, and most importantly of all, cultural interest and similarities.