Class 7 Social Science Chapter 14: India and Her Neighbours

The obvious answer first

Ask who a neighbour is and most people answer the same way: a country whose land touches ours. That is the traditional view, and it is not wrong.

Taken that way the list runs round the compass. Myanmar and Bangladesh lie to the east. Bhutan, Nepal and the Chinese region of Tibet lie north. Afghanistan and Pakistan lie to the northwest.

A very long line

That land boundary is over 15,100 kilometres long, and the figure matters because of what the line crosses.

River valleys and marshes. Mountains and forests. Plains, and desert. One border, and almost every kind of ground India has.

Sea on three sides

Now the chapter widens the word, and it begins from something easy to forget: India has always been a maritime nation, with sea on three of its sides.

So two more countries are immediate neighbours, reached across water rather than land. Sri Lanka, and the Maldives.

The satellite view

Then it widens the word again. Look at India from a satellite high above and more countries come into the frame.

Indonesia and Singapore. Malaysia and Thailand. Oman, and Iran. All of these belong to India's maritime neighbourhood, and the chapter uses that wider sense deliberately, to place India at the centre of South Asia.

So what is a maritime neighbour?

The definition is worth having exactly. Two conditions and no more: a sea or an ocean held in common, and no land border required at all. That is a maritime neighbour.

And the ocean is not merely a gap between them. It has worked as a link for centuries, carrying trade, carrying cultural exchange, building historical ties.

The ocean itself

Three oceans rank larger than none. The Indian Ocean is the third largest in the world, and it is busy.

Two thirds of the world's oil moves across it. Half the world's container ships. A third of its bulk cargo. The countries it connects are home to something like 2.7 billion people.

India's place in it

India's coastline runs about 11,100 kilometres, and its peninsula pushes deep into that ocean.

That shape is the whole advantage. It puts India astride important sea routes and makes it a vital link joining Africa, West Asia and Southeast Asia. Indian ports become the gateways for what goes out and what comes in.

Being near enough to help

One consequence is less about commerce. A country in the middle of a region can get help there quickly.

So India's central position lets it provide humanitarian aid and disaster relief in good time, which is a kind of neighbourliness no border decides.

A word for working together

Involvement of that sort has a name: regionalism. What it builds is peace, stability and progress that is shared.

And it teaches the lesson the chapter has been working towards. Being good neighbours is not simply a matter of borders. It is a matter of working together so that everyone in the region gains.

An association for it

In 1985 many nations of this neighbourhood founded one. Its name is SAARC, which stands for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, and its purpose is mutual interest and progress, both sociocultural and economic.

Eight countries belong. Sri Lanka and Pakistan. Nepal and the Maldives. India and Bhutan. Bangladesh, and Afghanistan.

What it does, and what gets in the way

SAARC aims to pool resources for development, in health and education, in science, and in other fields besides.

The chapter is honest about the difficulty. Tensions of a political kind, among certain of the members, have disrupted how it works more than once. Other regional groups built around the Indian Ocean exist as well, each for some particular purpose.

One thread through every neighbour

Before the countries themselves, one more piece of background, because it turns up in almost every section that follows.

Three main schools of Buddhism grew up in ancient India and travelled out to many of its neighbours. Knowing the three makes the rest of the chapter legible.

Theravada, the School of the Elders

The oldest took shape around the third century BCE, and it is reckoned closest to what the Buddha himself taught.

Its followers today are found chiefly in Southeast Asia, Myanmar and Thailand especially, and in Sri Lanka.

Mahayana, the Great Vehicle

Around the first century BCE came a second school, taking in new ideas and practices. One held that the Buddha was divine in nature, and able to guide people in many different forms.

This one travelled furthest. Korea, Japan and China all received it, and sub-schools grew up along the way, Zen Buddhism among them.

Vajrayana, the Diamond Vehicle

The third arose around the sixth century CE, as an extension of Mahayana, and it is generally known as Tantric Buddhism too.

What it emphasised were special techniques and secret teachings. Mantras. Mandalas, which are sacred diagrams. And visualising the bodhisattvas, and the Buddha himself. Tibetan Buddhism came out of this school around the seventh century CE. All three still have followers inside India, and above all in the Himalayan states.

Scenario:

A class is asked to draw India and shade every neighbour. One pupil shades seven countries and stops. A second shades those seven and adds Sri Lanka and the Maldives. A third shades all nine, then adds Indonesia and Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia, Oman and Iran. A classmate tells her this is simply wrong. Indonesia lies thousands of kilometres away, he says, and shares nothing at all with India. The teacher says all three maps are defensible but the objection is not.

Analysis:

Three maps of the same country, each using a different definition, and one objection that mistakes distance for disconnection.

Activity:

Find out which countries your own state exports to, and whether any share a border with India.

Title:

Three circles of neighbours

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

The outer circle is almost always the hardest, and the reason is the point of the exercise: a land border is visible on any map, while a shared sea has to be reasoned about. That is exactly why the chapter spends a page defining a maritime neighbour before naming one.

Two thirds of the world oil crosses the Indian Ocean.

India land boundary passes through marshes as well as deserts and mountains.

Tibetan Buddhism came out of the Vajrayana school around the seventh century CE.

Land border, shared sea, shared work: three kinds of neighbour.

Theravada elders, Mahayana great, Vajrayana diamond.

Asia's two largest, since 1950

India and China are two of the largest and most influential nations in Asia, and they have shared a long strategic relationship since 1950.

History and geography shape it. So do culture, trade and politics. And China is about three times the size of India in area, which is worth knowing before anything else.

Where the line runs

The Himalayas lie between them, and the border runs from east to west across five Indian territories.

Ladakh, which is a Union Territory, lies at the western end. Then Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Then Sikkim. And Arunachal Pradesh at the eastern end.

A powerful cultural link

Culturally, the strongest tie between the two countries is Buddhism, and the direction of travel is the interesting part.

It began in India, and reached China around the first century CE, carried along the routes used for trade and for pilgrimage.

And monks going both ways

A few centuries later the traffic reversed. Chinese monks came to Indian centres of learning, Xuanzang and Faxian among them.

Indian monks went the other way, carrying Buddhist teachings into China. Kumarajiva. Dharmakshema. Bodhidharma. Between them they built ties that were both spiritual and intellectual, and deep.

Temples in a Chinese port

One detail is easy to miss and hard to forget. In the thirteenth century, temples went up in Quanzhou, built by Hindu merchants. The city was a Chinese port and a trading centre of some importance.

At the Kaiyuan temple there, carvings on the pillars show Shiva and Vishnu, and scenes out of the Puranas and the Ramayana. One pillar carries Gajendra moksham, the story of Vishnu saving an elephant from a crocodile.

What is traded now

The relationship continues in trade. In 2024 to 2025, what India chiefly sent to China was cotton yarn, chemicals and iron ore.

What came back was industrial equipment of various kinds, and electronic items: computer hardware, mobile phones and the like. Operations have been set up by Indian companies inside China, and by Chinese companies inside India.

The imbalance

Now the figure that matters. The balance of trade is at present much in China's favour.

Put precisely: for every rupee of Indian goods going to China, about eight rupees worth come the other way. A relationship can be busy and lopsided at the same time.

Tension, and the attempts to ease it

Tension has risen in phases over recent years too, mostly over the shared borders, and a few of those phases were serious conflicts.

On the other side of the ledger, efforts are being made to settle disputes. Border resolution mechanisms are one route. Dialogue is another. So is trade.

Pakistan: one country until 1947

Before the Partition of 1947, Pakistan was part of India. The Partition was a legacy of the colonial era, and it goes on shaping the present.

One difference should be noted now and studied later. India was not founded on a religious basis; Pakistan was.

One of the most complex relationships

What followed is as complex a relationship as South Asia holds. Since Partition there have been several military conflicts and wars.

Three wars came in 1948, 1965 and 1971. Then the Kargil War of 1999, a full-scale conflict. And the tension is ongoing, which the chapter attributes in particular to attacks by terrorists on India, frequent ones, carried out with the Pakistan army support. These have prevented relations between the two countries from becoming normal.

A border that is also a symbol

The line between them runs across Gujarat, Rajasthan and Punjab, and the Union Territories of Ladakh and of Jammu and Kashmir.

It is not merely a geographical line. It stands at once for a history tragically divided and for a heritage the two still share.

What has gone the other way

The journey has been tumultuous and it has also held attempts at peace. Periods of trade. And pilgrimage routes opened for Hindu and Sikh pilgrims, leading to religious and cultural landmarks of a past the two still share.

One such place is the temple complex at Katas Raj, which stands in the Punjab of Pakistan, is linked to the Mahabharata, and holds a sacred pond. In Balochistan there is the Hinglaj Mata Mandir, and there are several more ancient shrines, Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh. Besides the shrines, festivals and music, cuisines and languages all keep bridging the border.

The Kartarpur Corridor

One crossing deserves its own account. The Kartarpur Corridor is visa-free: Indian pilgrims need only a permit rather than a visa, which has made it far easier for thousands to go.

It leads to the Gurdwara Darbar Sahib at Kartarpur, in Pakistan, and that gurdwara holds great religious significance. It is where Guru Nanak Dev, who founded Sikhism, spent the last eighteen years of his life, and where he was finally laid to rest.

Binoculars, and then a corridor

For decades Indian devotees could only look at the site from a distance. Binoculars were set up for the purpose at Dera Baba Nanak, in Punjab, close by.

A corridor had been put forward as an idea back in the 1990s. It became real only in 2019, opened to mark the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak. The chapter leaves a question hanging over it, and the question is the point of the whole topic: might the Kartarpur Corridor show how peace and dialogue could make progress?

Scenario:

A pupil collects two newspaper cuttings from the same week. The first reports a tense standoff on the Himalayan border and a halt to a planned official visit. The second reports a record month of imports of mobile phones and computer hardware from the same country, and a group of Indian pilgrims crossing a different border on a permit. She says the two cuttings contradict each other and one of them must be wrong. Her teacher says both are accurate, and that the chapter is built around exactly this.

Analysis:

Two true reports from one week that seem to cancel each other, and a chapter that insists they do not.

Activity:

Find one item in your home that was made in a neighbouring country.

Title:

Weigh the ledger yourself

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

The border itself usually ends up in both columns, and that is the chapter own point about the India-Pakistan line: it stands at once for a history tragically divided and for a heritage still shared.

In the thirteenth century, temples went up at the Chinese port of Quanzhou, built by Hindu merchants.

Guru Nanak Dev spent the last eighteen years of his life at Kartarpur.

For decades Indian devotees viewed that site through binoculars from Dera Baba Nanak.

Monks east, monks west: Buddhism travelled both ways.

1948, 1965, 1971, then Kargil in 1999.

A border that was taken away

Afghanistan is landlocked, multiethnic, and sits in south-central Asia. Once it touched India directly, sharing a land border with it.

Then Pakistan was created, in 1947, and getting between the two countries became complicated. The geography did not change; a new country came between them.

The ties held anyway

Despite those geopolitical difficulties, relations between India and Afghanistan have on the whole stayed close and friendly.

What they rest on is a history and a culture held in common, and strategic interests of real importance besides.

A superhighway of culture

Go back to ancient times and the connection was physical. The Uttarapatha trade route tied the Ganga plains to Central Asia, and it ran through Afghanistan.

Its course took in Pataliputra and Varanasi, then Takshashila, and reached Gandhara, which is modern Kandahar. Along that road moved goods, religion and ideas, which is why the chapter calls it a cultural superhighway. Hinduism and Buddhism travelled it, and so did art and philosophy.

Before Islam arrived

Islam spread into the region in the seventh century CE. Before that, Afghanistan was a flourishing centre of Hindu and Buddhist culture.

Kingdoms there mirrored Indian ways of governing, Zabul and Kapisha among them.

The Buddhas of Bamiyan

Afghan cliffs held the gigantic Buddhas of Bamiyan, carved into the rock. They were powerful evidence of how far Mahayana Buddhism had reached from India, and of how deep the civilisational ties ran.

They were destroyed in 2001, which the chapter records with the single word sadly.

What India has built there

In recent decades the people-to-people ties have stayed strong. India has given support to Afghan education, to healthcare, and to building infrastructure.

Two projects stand out. The Afghan Parliament building was constructed with Indian help. So was the highway from Zaranj to Delaram. There have been ups and downs, and what the projects reflect is a wish to build on a long friendship.

A country born in 1971

Bangladesh had a different beginning: it is itself new. Earlier it was East Pakistan, and it came into being in 1971, when India and Pakistan went to war and this was the result.

Three things bind it to India, and the chapter names them as history, culture and language. Language, because Bangla is spoken both in Bangladesh and in India's state of West Bengal.

The longest land border

Here is a fact worth holding. India's land border with Bangladesh is longer even than its border with China.

It runs along Mizoram and Tripura, Meghalaya and Assam, and West Bengal. Five states, and the longest line India has.

Rivers that cross it

The two countries also share several transboundary river systems, rising from the Ganga and the Brahmaputra.

Those rivers do a great deal of work. Agriculture depends on them, and so do fisheries and transportation, and with them the livelihoods of millions of people on both sides.

And a coast, and a forest

Having a shared coastline means a shared maritime environment too. In it lies the Sundarban National Park, which UNESCO lists as a World Heritage Site, and which the two neighbours coordinate in protecting and managing.

It is the largest mangrove forest in the world, with roughly two-thirds of it in Bangladesh and the rest in India. It shelters the Bengal tiger and many other species, so it matters for biodiversity.

Why a forest counts as climate work

The Sundarban does one more thing, and it is the reason the chapter calls it important for climate resilience: it stands in the way of cyclones.

That protection is needed more than ever. Climate change and global warming together mean that experts expect Bangladesh to face cyclones of growing intensity, and rising sea levels, in the years ahead, and many people are likely to lose homes or see livelihoods harmed.

Nepal, in the lap of the Himalayas

Nepal's border with India is long, and it is open. It runs along Sikkim and West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

Being that close has meant centuries of interaction and cooperation. The relationship shows it in four ways: a shared heritage, spiritual links, movement across the border, and political partnership.

What the pilgrims do

Culturally the ties run deep, and pilgrims from both countries visit sacred sites on the other side.

The Pashupatinatha temple in Kathmandu draws thousands of Indian visitors every year; and there Shiva is worshipped in his character as protector of the animals. Festivals cross too: Holi, and Tihar which is Dipavali, and Dashain which is Dashahara, are kept with equal enthusiasm in both countries.

A treaty from 1950

Politically the two have kept close diplomatic relations, and what shapes them most is a treaty of 1950, the Treaty of Peace and Friendship.

Three things come out of that treaty. Borders that are open. People and goods that move freely. And cooperation in fields including defence and foreign policy.

What an open border means

The term deserves spelling out. An open border is one people can cross without a visa or a passport.

The consequences are domestic rather than diplomatic. Families on either side stay connected. People move easily for work or education, for trade, or to make a religious visit. And the two countries work together to keep the open border safe and unmisused, so it works as a symbol of trust.

Trade across it

India is Nepal's largest trading partner. What India supplies are essential goods: manufactured products, food items, medicines, petroleum.

Nepal sends garments, handicrafts and agricultural produce back. Daily life in many border towns shows the closeness, with busy markets and thriving trade, and the exchanges knit the border communities together socially as well as economically.

Scenario:

A pupil is asked why India borders differ so much from one another. She gives three answers. The Afghan border simply vanished one day, she writes. The Bangladesh border is the newest of all, and so the least settled. And the Nepal border is open because the two countries are too poor to police it. Her teacher replies that the first answer is nearly right and badly worded. The second confuses two different things. The third has its reason backwards.

Analysis:

Three answers about three borders, each wrong in a way the chapter can correct precisely.

Activity:

Find out whether anyone in your family has crossed an international border, and what papers they needed.

Title:

Sort a border by what made it

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

The Afghan border is the only one of the three that was removed rather than drawn, and most people are surprised that the Bangladesh border is the longest India has. Noticing that is the point: a border is a historical event, not a feature of the landscape.

India land border with Bangladesh is longer than its border with China.

Gandhara is modern Kandahar.

About two-thirds of the Sundarban lies in Bangladesh.

Afghanistan lost a border, Bangladesh gained a country, Nepal kept hers open.

Uttarapatha: Pataliputra, Varanasi, Takshashila, Gandhara.

The Land of the Thunder Dragon

Its own people call Bhutan Drukyul, which means the Land of the Thunder Dragon. It is a small Himalayan kingdom, landlocked, lying between India and China.

Its border with India touches four states. Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, then West Bengal, then Sikkim. Over centuries it has built strong economic and cultural links with India.

Water, turned into power

Several important rivers rise in Bhutan and flow down into India, and they do two jobs.

Agriculture needs them, which is the obvious one. The other is that they are the foundation for generating hydroelectric power, and that is among the most significant areas of cooperation between the two countries. Major power plants feed Bhutan's economic growth and send renewable energy to India as well. The Tala Hydroelectric Project, built with Indian support, was dedicated in 2008 by the prime ministers of both countries.

A shared religion

Culture and religion strengthen the bond further, and the shared inheritance is Buddhism.

Bhutanese pilgrims often visit sacred Buddhist sites in India: Sikkim, and Udayagiri, and Nalanda, and Rajgir, and Bodh Gaya.

The master who brought Vajrayana

One figure remains central to Bhutan's religious identity. Guru Padmasambhava, also called Guru Rinpoche, was an Indian Buddhist master, and in the eighth century CE he introduced the Vajrayana school to Bhutan.

And the dragon on Bhutan's flag and emblem is said to stand for something precise: the thunderous voice of the teachings of the Buddha.

Measuring a country differently

Bhutan did something unusual with the idea of national progress. It developed the Gross National Happiness Index, as a measure more holistic than the prevailing ones such as Gross Domestic Product.

What it takes in includes the promotion of culture, and sustainability, and governance that is good, among other things. The country assesses how it is doing against that index periodically.

India's gateway to Southeast Asia

Myanmar was known earlier as Burma, and its relationship with India is long-standing, grounded in connections that are historical, ethnic and cultural, through periods of political turmoil.

Being where Buddhism began, India carries a particular spiritual weight for the people of Myanmar, and many of them come here on pilgrimage.

Two kinds of boundary

The two countries are joined twice over: by a land border, and by a sea boundary drawn across the Bay of Bengal.

Four northeastern states of India touch Myanmar: Mizoram and Manipur, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh. Those borders make cross-border interaction and cooperation easier, and they underpin cultural exchange and regional connectivity between the two.

An agreement, and a restriction

Southeast Asia is also reached through Myanmar, which is why the chapter calls it a gateway. In 2018 the two signed the Land Border Crossing Agreement.

It made crossing easier for people living in the border areas, lifted trade, improved connectivity, and deepened the people-to-people ties, above all between Myanmar and India's northeast. Over the past couple of years, however, conflicts in those areas have brought some restrictions on free movement across the land border.

What India has given back

A few years ago India helped restore temples in Myanmar that earthquakes had damaged, among them the Ananda temple at Bagan.

India also made a gift to the Shwedagon Pagoda, which stands in Yangon: a replica of the Sarnath Buddha, sixteen feet high.

Thirty-two kilometres away

Sri Lanka is an island nation lying southeast of India, and what divides the two is a narrow stretch of sea called the Palk Strait.

At the nearest point the gap is only about 32 kilometres. So the two are close maritime neighbours, and the history behind them is long: cooperation, trade, and contact between cultures.

Who carried Buddhism there

Buddhism reached Sri Lanka in the third century BCE, and the chapter names the two people who took it.

They were Sanghamitra and Mahendra, the daughter and the son of the Emperor Ashoka. Hinduism travelled there too, and notably by way of its two Epics. Both countries still celebrate that shared spiritual and cultural heritage.

A civil war, and its consequence for India

The relationship has not always been smooth, and one period was especially difficult: The civil war in Sri Lanka, which lasted from the mid-1980s until about 2010.

Two communities fought it, in the main. On one side the Sinhalese, who are the majority and whose language is Sinhala. On the other the Tamils, a minority with close cultural ties to India. The fighting forced many Tamil families out of the country altogether, and where most of them went was south India, and Tamil Nadu above all. Today the partnership is multidimensional, combining cultural closeness and historical ties with economic cooperation and strategic collaboration.

A nation of islets

The Maldives is made up of more than 1,100 islets, which are small islands. It lies only about 130 kilometres from Minicoy, an Indian island belonging to the Union Territory of Lakshadweep.

That makes it an important neighbour, and particularly so for trade and for security in the Indian Ocean.

What maritime trade carried there

The cultural ties between them are centuries old and were shaped by trade across the sea. Buddhism reached the Maldives early, which is established by what archaeology has found there: inscriptions, and ancient Buddhist temples.

Influences from Kerala and Tamil Nadu brought arts, cuisine and language to the islands. Maldivian dishes such as roshi and coconut curries reflect South Indian flavours. The Boduberu dance echoes Tamil folk rhythms. And South Indian roots show in boat-building techniques, and in the vocabulary of Dhivehi, which is the official language, also called Maldivian.

A language made of contact

Dhivehi is worth pausing on. Centuries of contact with Indian cultures went into making it the blend it is, and it borrows from Sanskrit and Prakrit, from Tamil and Malayalam, and from Hindi.

Mas, meaning fish, and raajje, meaning king, echo the Sanskrit matsya and raja. Kukulhu for chicken and dhoni for boat share roots with Tamil and Malayalam. And filmu, a modern Hindi word, has entered everyday use, thanks to Bollywood.

The region's trusted first responder

When the Maldives became independent in 1965, India was among the first to recognise it, and the two have since built strong ties in defence, in trade, and in disaster relief.

Three crises made the point. The COVID-19 pandemic. Then, earlier, the water crisis of 2014 in Male, which is the Maldivian capital. And earlier still, the tsunami of 2004. India's quick help each time strengthened the bond and showed what the chapter calls the part she plays as a first responder the region can trust.

An island nation and a rising sea

Being an island nation leaves the Maldives highly vulnerable to climate change, and one number shows how much.

Sea level there could rise by as much as a metre by the end of the century, which would partly submerge many of its islands. The Maldives belongs to the International Solar Alliance, an Indian initiative that shares research technology on solar energy, and that joint effort towards sustainability is another instance of a long-term relationship.

Scenario:

A radio bulletin carries four short items in one morning. A new power plant in a Himalayan kingdom will send electricity to India. Movement across one northeastern land border has been restricted again. A fishing boat has been towed 32 kilometres to an island nation for repairs. And an Indian aircraft has landed in an island capital with drinking water. A pupil says only the fourth item is really about neighbours, since the others are business, security and an accident.

Analysis:

Four items from one morning, each belonging to a different neighbour, and a judgement that counts only one of them.

Activity:

Listen to a news bulletin and note any item involving a neighbouring country.

Title:

Match each neighbour to what it gives

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

The Maldives usually looks one-sided until you notice what the chapter says about security in the Indian Ocean and about the Solar Alliance. Bhutan is the most clearly equal: the rivers are hers, the support for building was India, and the energy flows both ways.

The dragon on Bhutan flag stands for the thunderous voice of the teachings of the Buddha.

Dhivehi mas for fish echoes the Sanskrit matsya.

Sea level in the Maldives could rise by a metre by the end of the century.

Bhutan sells power and counts happiness.

Palk Strait: thirty-two kilometres of sea.

Sailing for a golden land

Gold, and other resources of value, drew Indian traders out to Southeast Asia from a few centuries BCE.

They went so often to Malaya, Sumatra and Java that the islands took names from it: Suvarnadvipa, the golden island, and Suvarnabhumi, the golden land.

Indian names in Thailand

India and Thailand share a maritime boundary, and trade and cultural exchange have connected them since ancient times. Spices and textiles went with them, and ideas that would mark the region deeply, when Indian traders and scholars took ship for what is now Thailand by the third century BCE.

The names of later Thai kingdoms show the mark. Dvaravati culture flourished from the sixth to the eleventh centuries CE, and its name comes from a Sanskrit word meaning that which has gates. It points directly at Dvaraka, Krishna's city in the Mahabharata.

Ayodhya, and Ayutthaya

Much later came the Ayutthaya Kingdom, which was founded in 1351 and took its name from the ancient Indian city of Ayodhya, which the Ramayana gives as the birthplace of Rama.

The naming continues into the present. Every monarch of the current Chakri dynasty has been named Rama, and the king at present is Rama the Tenth.

What else travelled to Thailand

Buddhism and Hinduism were both shared inheritances. What shaped the religious and philosophical groundwork of Thai society were Indian texts, scholars and monks.

Theravada Buddhism has wide currency there. Hindu deities and epic stories are woven into Thai literature, dance forms and royal ceremonies. Even Bangkok's airport carries the name Suvarnabhumi, and a massive sculpture there shows the churning of the ocean, the samudra manthana, with Vasuki the serpent as rope and Vishnu presiding.

The Malay Peninsula

Over two millennia lie behind relations between India and Malaysia, back to when sea routes across the Bay of Bengal joined the Malay Peninsula to India.

Hindu and Buddhist influences arrived early, and as in Thailand the names record it: the Srivijaya Kingdom is one. A script based on the Brahmi of India was taken up around the fourth century CE.

What stayed, and what changed

By the fifteenth century Islam had become the predominant religion there. Even so, the earlier influences remain visible in Malaysian society, and in art and literature above all.

A newer movement matters too. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a great many Indian workers migrated to Malaysia, mostly from south India, to work as labour on the rubber estates. That community in Malaysia is prominent still, and 9 per cent of the population is of Indian origin.

The Lion City

Singapore's name comes from Singapuram, meaning lion city, which was borne by an ancient kingdom lying off the southern tip of Malaysia as it is now.

As with Thailand and Malaysia, close ties of culture and of commerce joined it to India, and traders and Buddhist monks came there a few centuries BCE. After many fluctuations it became a British colony, then part of Malaysia, and finally a separate nation in 1965.

What connects the two now

Singapore's contacts with India remain vibrant. Among the largest foreign investors in India it now counts itself, in technology and infrastructure especially, and many Indian companies keep offices there.

Indian tourists arrive in numbers, and Indian students count it among their preferred places for higher study. The cultural presence runs from religion to cuisine to art, Buddhism being the most practised religion now. About 9 per cent of residents are of Indian origin, many in an area called Little India. And Tamil is one of four official languages, with Malay, Mandarin and English.

An archipelago

India and Indonesia are close maritime neighbours, with the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal between them, and a long history of exchange.

Indonesia is not one landmass but an archipelago, meaning an extensive group of islands: over 17,000 smaller ones, and several large. Early sea trade joining Indian kingdoms to Sumatra and Java, the large islands, goes back more than 2,000 years. Collaboration between India's ancient university at Nalanda and the Muara Jambi temple complex strengthened the bond further. Islam came to Indonesia later, and it came from India shores.

A stupa as a mandala

A stupa is a Buddhist shrine, often domed, which keeps sacred relics. They may be relics of revered figures, or of senior monks, or of the Buddha himself.

Borobudur was built in stone across the eighth and ninth centuries CE, and it is unique several times over. Its dimensions are huge. Its shape is pyramidal, rising in five enormous platforms. More than 500 statues of the Buddha are harboured in it, with many smaller stupas. And its geometric design replicates a mandala, a Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina symbol generally taken to stand for the entire cosmos.

What a wave taught

Indonesian islands lie where earthquakes and eruptions are frequent, among the most earthquake-prone country anywhere. On 26 December 2004 a powerful earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean near Indonesia set off a massive tsunami.

Giant waves crossed the ocean and struck many coasts. More than 200,000 people were killed across the region. Some 15,000 lives were lost in India alone, above all in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, in Kerala and in Tamil Nadu. What it exposed was an urgent need for better early warning. So India joined Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and others to build a network of communication links, satellites and sensors, with the centre at Hyderabad now alerting neighbours too.

An ancient neighbour

Turning westward, close ties have joined India and Iran since the Bronze Age. Between India and that rugged Iranian plateau, exchange of culture and of trade began early, by land routes running through what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Those routes gradually became part of the Silk Route, with ideas, people and goods moving back and forth, and the two lands joined in language and literature, in art, in architecture and in food. Sea routes served too, The west coast of India lying within easy reach of the Iranian ports.

Texts, and a link

Zoroastrianism's ancient sacred text, the Avesta, runs parallel in places with India's Rigveda. Persians are named Parasika in Indian texts, the Mahabharata among them.

Sanskrit and later Persian fall in the same language family, and the Mughals and other rulers used it as a court language here. The Parsis of India are a living link with ancient Persian culture. Today the two cooperate in transport, energy and trade, and India is helping develop Iran's Chabahar Port, which gives better access to Central Asia and Afghanistan.

The Land of Copper

Oman sits where the Arabian Sea meets the Persian Gulf, on the coast that runs along the southeast of the Arabian Peninsula, and shares maritime boundaries with India.

Shared geography, history and culture carry the relationship, and people-to-people contact goes back over 5,000 years, to Harappan times. Oman is rich in copper, and Harappan traders are thought to have carried ingots of it back to the Indus-Sarasvati cities, where the coppersmiths were. An ingot is a lump of metal shaped for convenient transport and reworking.

Indians in Oman

Over 10 per cent of Oman's people are of Indian origin. Merchant communities from India's northwest settled there over the past few centuries, and an indigenous Indian population lives in Oman. The Hindu community was allowed a Shiva temple early in the twentieth century, the Motishwar Mandir in Muscat.

In the Gulf, no country is a closer defence partner to India than Oman. The two work together on Indian Ocean maritime security, and it was the first country in the region where India held joint exercises with all three armed forces.

Scenario:

A travelling exhibition shows four objects together. There is an Indonesian banknote carrying a winged figure. There is a photograph of an airport sign reading Suvarnabhumi. There is an ingot of Omani copper, which carries a third millennium BCE date. And there is a street sign in four languages, one of them Tamil. A visitor walks through and is unimpressed. The exhibition is padded out, he says, since only the ingot is genuinely old. The rest are modern items, and they prove nothing whatever about the past.

Analysis:

Four objects, three of them made recently, and a visitor who thinks age is the only thing that makes an object evidence.

Activity:

Look for one word or symbol in your own town that came from somewhere else.

Title:

Trace a name across the sea

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

Suvarnabhumi usually turns out to be the one still in official use, since it is the name of Bangkok airport, and Ayutthaya travelled a very long way for a city in Uttar Pradesh. What the list proves is the chapter point about the ocean: it worked as a link, and names are the receipt.

Bangkok airport is called Suvarnabhumi, the golden land.

Tamil is one of Singapore four official languages.

The Indonesian rupiah carries Garuda, the vehicle of Vishnu.

Dvaravati from Dvaraka, Ayutthaya from Ayodhya.

Oman: copper, 5,000 years, 10 per cent.