I have been musing about the nature of Indian nationhood for at least the last four decades, ever since a distinguished foreigner said to me: ‘You Indians have allowed yourself to forget that there is such a thing as Indic civilization. And we are its last outpost.’
The words were spoken to me in 1982, when I headed the United Nations office in Singapore, by the Khmer nationalist politician and one-time Prime Minister, Son Sann, lamenting India’s support for Vietnam in its conquest of Cambodia in 1979. To Son Sann, a venerable figure then already in his late seventies, Cambodia was an ‘Indic civilization’ being overrun by the forces of a Sinic state, and he was bewildered that India, the fount of his country’s heritage, should sympathise with a people as distinctly un-Indian as the Vietnamese. Given that Vietnam’s invasion had put an end to the blood-soaked terror of the rule of the Khmer Rouge, I was more inclined to see the choice politically than in terms of civilisational heritage. But Son Sann’s words stayed with me.
