Gabriel Garcia Marquez said in the context of Latin American solitude and the irony of Spanish colonialism, “The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, and ever more solitary.”
In the Indian subcontinent, however, the colony’s solitude was so profound that it turned into an abyss.
The British colonial experience in the subcontinent wasn’t merely about trade depredation—reducing the region’s share of global GDP from around 25% to a mere 2-4% in two centuries, as Harvard professors David and Jeffrey maintained—or about the legacy of geographical mismanagement like Kashmir, which has now turned into a nuclear flashpoint; rather, it was about an ‘intellectual robbery’ that not only obstructed the organic evolution of a civilization’s sense of existence but reframed a reductionist, superficial, and communally divisive understanding of history.
In 1817, a year before Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in England, warning against the transformations of man under the Industrial Revolution, James Mill began fragmenting the subcontinent’s political history into Hindu, Muslim, and British periods.
James Mill, followed by other colonial historians like Vincent Smith, W.W.Hunter, and Henry Elliot, however, failed to grasp the mystical and creative unity—the underlying apolitical consensus for coexistence among the subcontinent’s endless layers of cultures and stories.
The imperials’ understanding of linear time, their worldview based on the Western definition of nationalism (as criticized by Rabindranath Tagore), and their administrative compulsion aimed at maintaining control through division collectively generated a body of knowledge in the 19th century that was incoherent with the operative essence of the subcontinent’s non-linear history.
One can glimpse the lost essence in the Allahabad Pillar, a testament to the subcontinent’s definition of civilization. This ancient monument bears inscriptions from three distinct eras: Ashoka’s edicts in Brahmi script, Samudragupta’s eulogy in Sanskrit, and Jahangir’s verses in Persian. Three religions, three emperors, and three languages yet all claim the subcontinent as their own.
Sanskrit derived its script from Brahmi in antiquity and later evolved into Prakrit dialects like Punjabi, Bengali, and Khari Boli from the 5th to 10th centuries under the Mauryan Empire.
From the 10th to 16th centuries, after the Delhi Sultanate, Amir Khusro’s language, Hindwi, emerged from a blend of Prakrit dialects with Arabic, Persian, and Turkish languages.
By the 17th to 18th centuries, Hindwi evolved into the language of Ghalib and Meer, known as Rekhta.
In the 19th century, Rekhta was formalized into two registers: Hindi and Urdu, now the third largest lingua franca, spoken and understood by around 700 million people globally. Its historiography, as Tariq Rahman concludes, is the essence of the subcontinent’s story—a civilization of deep synthesis and transformation.
British colonials were distinct in their mercenary approach, unlike previous influences such as the Aryans, Persians, Arabs, and Mughals, who arrived in the subcontinent, settled, integrated, and contributed to the local body of culture.
English materialism, based on capital, labor, and white supremacy, was too shallow to get along with the philosophical cosmos of the Indian subcontinent, which drove metaphysical inquiries through the oral tradition of Vedic non-dualism transmitted via symbolism and allegories, and through debates on transcendence and immanence in Islamic Sufism, together with an overarching practicality in building statecraft and marvels of architecture.
This civilization, shaped by cultural habits derived from a vast geographical spread—from the wilderness of the Himalayas to the cosmopolitanism of Calcutta and Karachi—was, in Mark Twain’s words, “older than history itself.”
Its intrinsic pluralism was shaped by Cyrus the Great 2,500 years ago, as reported by Alexander’s naval commander Nearchus, and by Buddha, who observed “an equality like an ocean” in the assembly of his Sangha.
Ancient universities like Nalanda and Taxila attracted scholars from across the world, and Buddhism, born on this soil, spread peacefully globally.
The corporate dimension of this plurality was shaped by what William Darlymple calls “the monsoon rhythms of the Indian Ocean”.
The Greek historian Strabo viewed the Indian subcontinent as “the drain of all the precious metal in the world” due to its extensive trade networks in the first century BC.
Pliny the Elder, a Roman commander and author during his visit to Egypt after Cleopatra’s defeat, estimated that around 250 vessels traveled annually between the Red Sea and Indian Ocean ports, showcasing the region’s central contribution to global commerce.
The people were skillful, renowned for their delicacy and unique assimilative power, with a romantic depth capable of “Indianizing” new arrivals—a trait acquired through extensive interactions spanning over two millennia with Romans, Arabs, Persians, Chinese, and the Far Eastern Asian archipelagos.
The British imperial policy deliberately fostered communalism, which ultimately attained uncontrollable proportions as demonstrated in the works of two famous Indian historians: Bipan Chandra and Romila Thapar.
British administrators drew lines to generate bureaucratic leverage—Hindus and Muslims, Sikhs and Jains, friends and foes.
They overlooked another stream of consciousness running parallel to the lane of power—the true drivers of the subcontinent’s history: the common people—farmers, craftsmen, architects, storytellers, laborers, and artists—who, despite their soulful commitments to their respective religions, were enriched by the subtleties of their shared history in literature and art, culture and cuisine, poetry and music.
Anticolonial movements like the 1857 War of Independence and the 1859 Indigo Movement in Bengal were driven by this collective political consciousness of the subcontinent’s common people.
Two World Wars had destroyed Britain’s economic and administrative capability to hold onto its colonies in Asia and Africa, making decolonization inexorable.
However, between 1857 and 1947, the seeds of identity crises sown had already germinated into what George Orwell calls “negative nationalism”—a collective consciousness based on communal skepticism and insecurity among Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and other religions.
This perpetuated distortion of reason has played a key role in shaping the independence movements and strategic constructs of India and Pakistan to this day.
The 1947 division plan was hasty, ill-managed, bloody, and callously indifferent to the consequences of the social and geographical time bombs precipitated during the partition process.
India, after successfully denying Nehru’s notion of secular constitutionalism, has reached a point in the 21st century where the majority of Indians have been electing a Prime Minister for a third term, with a posture in politics that contradicts the foundational principles of the Indian Constitution.
Prime Minister Modi’s political career symbolizes Hindutva populism, violence, and a rhetoric of historical communalism in domestic politics.
Unlike Pakistan, Indian electoral campaigns often revolve around the question of how to deal with Pakistan.
On the other hand, to counter the fragility of Kashmir and Baluchistan, Pakistan has emerged with an overwhelming emphasis on military institutions over civilian ones.
This civil-military imbalance has weakened constitutionalism, fueled internal political instability throughout Pakistan’s history and fostered a security-centered outlook in its foreign policy.
Both countries have acquired nuclear capabilities, fought three wars, developed proxies against each other, and seen their security concerns cripple the enormous prospects of economic cooperation possible between two neighboring states.
Despite some serious efforts at reform and peace, both countries continue to grapple with the enduring effects of colonialism in their legal frameworks and state consciousness.
The fast-melting Himalayan ice sheet, amid alarming water insecurity for the exploding populations, has further exacerbated the unrest.
The Himalayan water tower, including glaciers in Kashmir, has become critical for sustaining agricultural, industrial, and domestic demands in the Indian plains.
The situation alarmingly points toward the first water war on Earth, where the upper riparian India has been threatening to use water as a strategic weapon against the lower riparian Pakistan.
The recent conflict between India and Pakistan was a breathless recap of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Though the conflict was short, it has sketched the broad contours of the future strategic landscape in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea.
The majority of impartial military analysts have conceded that Pakistan’s aviators, backed by China’s aerial machines, dominated this conflict.
It was the first battlefield-proven competitive edge of the China-led defense alliance system in this part of Asia.
The Kashmir issue got re-hyphenated with India and Pakistan as another nuclear flashpoint after Taiwan.
Moreover, Indians have realized that the domestic perception of PM Modi’s strong statesmanship and his poverty alleviation success is insufficient to overcome his personal and ideological shortcomings in global diplomacy.
Afghanistan and Bangladesh have also become integral variables in the Indian Ocean’s power matrix.
China uses its economic leverage on the Afghan Taliban to counter Indian efforts, corroborating the Taliban’s capability to enlarge the TTP’s operational and moral base along Pakistan’s western border and the BLA’s access to the US-left advanced weapon black market.
China is deepening its strategic footprint around the Indian Ocean—ports in Gwadar, Colombo, Hambantota, Kyaukpyu, and an expected airfield at the World War II-era base at Lamonirhat, Bangladesh, a district 135 kilometers from the sensitive Siliguri Corridor, India’s “Chicken’s Neck”.
To conclude, factors such as the colonial legacy of historical communalism, China’s strong revitalization in the Indian Ocean, the existential importance of Himalayan rivers and Kashmir for India and Pakistan, the religiosity of the current decision-makers in both countries, post-US Afghanistan and post-revolution Bangladesh have pushed South Asia into a heightened round of escalation dynamics.
However, this escalation will only exacerbate the pervasive poverty in the region.
According to the World Bank’s recent Poverty and Equity Reports 2025, around 410 million people in India and 105 million in Pakistan earn less than $3.65 a day.
Frustrated by the lack of opportunities in their homelands, the young populations of both countries, including Bangladesh, comprise the largest diasporas struggling to make ends meet in Europe, America, and Gulf countries.
The Author is a columnist and member of UNFCCC and ICAN. He taught Public Policy in the National Defence University of Pakistan.
