I have an unenviable task, of being the last speaker in a gathering of scholars without having heard any of them! I therefore have three options:
I can say lightheartedly nashistand, guftand, barkhastand; or
I can surmise that a group of scholars from all corners of this common region have added to the compendium of human knowledge; or
I can assert with some certitude that this gathering is premised on a realization that there is (a) physical proximity between Central Asia and India, (b) resumption, after an interregnum, of an interactive relationship based on ties of history, culture and trade, and (c) the emerging world has enhanced mutuality of interests and the imperative of shaping it.
Our knowledge and familiarity with each other has witnessed good and difficult passages. Trade and culture have been beneficial; political interludes brought mixed blessings and our perceptions of these vary. Iran has been called the Aryabhumi; this lends credence to the theory of Aryan migration and reiterates linkages between Vedic Sanskrit and Avastan and Old Iranian. Buddhism moved from India to Central Asia, with or without the Kushan kings who gave themselves the title of devaputra. The Islamic period added a many-sided impetus to these links.
It is a travesty of human understanding that conquerors are remembered more than those who furthered human knowledge and understanding. Perhaps the best instance of diligent scholarship was at the beginning of the second millennium by Abdur Rahman Al Beruni whose encyclopedic study of India remains a classic.
Many years’ back the IIC initiated a dialogue process with our regional neighbourhood under its Asia Project and devoted a conference in New Delhi in November 1998 to bonds of culture, religion and civilization between India and Central Asia.
A seminar in Tashkent in March 2000 shed much light on the two way influences in India’s contacts with Central Asian lands in the pre-Islamic period. The process seems to have been reversed in the Islamic period lending credence to the view that aspects of civilization are camp-followers of politico-military prowess.
Records show that commodities of trade from India to Central Asian lands had a steady market and that Indian traders travelled with regularity to the region and even stayed in settled communities with local trading communities. Some conquerors in the medieval period even took craftsmen back with them and used them with good effect in their domains.
This process of human and commercial contacts for centuries was disrupted by the British rule in India. It closed the land routes and substituted them for their benefit by sea routes. The imperial Russian expansion in central Asian lands in the 19th century had a similar impact. The result of these historical misfortunes was a closing of human and material channels of communications leading to the aashna becoming and remaining ghair.
Independence of India in 1947 brought new energy to our contacts with Afghanistan and Iran and did the same to relations with the Central Asian states after 1991. Yet, there were two impediments to this process: direct physical access (except by sea to Iran) and limitations of capacity to rejuvenate and reinvigorate older ties in terms of today’s requirements.
We have sought to address this conceptually in the framework of our policy of ‘extended neighbourhood.’ Implementation has taken time.
India’s vision of ties with states of Central Asia was spelt out in the 12-point approach enunciated by the then Minister of Sate for External Affairs in his address to the First India-Central Asia Dialogue in June 2012. This has been built upon in recent years in some measure. The Fifth Dialogue, held recently in Tashkent in September, has suggested new areas of cooperation.
Governments by definition often remain bogged down in certitudes premised on caution and living experience. These do not constrain scholars who have the option of creative and speculative thinking beyond the position of their respective countries. The subject of this conclave lends itself to such thinking, to visualize connectivity, freer movement, and mutually beneficial cooperation between South and Central Asia.