The Glass Giant, or How to Write an International History of Modern India (B. Guyot-Réchard)

How should we approach such claims? As a rule, discussions on Indian diplomacy focus but on the last few decades. Yet, it’s on a wider temporal canvas that one should understand India’s relationship with the international order—its vision of the role it should play in it, and how that role took shape and evolved. Independent since 1947, India’s connection to the world is shaped by a dual and deeply ambivalent inheritance, at once anti-colonial and imperial and shot through with the idea of an exceptional nation with a correspondingly exceptional role to play in the world. These parameters have defined India’s international identity since the 18th century. Managing the tensions between them, and the gap between aspiration and reality (familiar to other countries possessed of a sense of exceptionalism), is at the heart of independent India’s relationship to the world. This seminar will discuss a book project, The Glass Giant: India and the International Order, where I retrace, over two centuries, the paradox of India’s international relations.