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Globalisation and Social Change The Early Y ears India was not isolated from the world even two thousand years ago. We have read in our history textbooks about the famous Silk route, which centuries ago connected India to the great civilisations, which existed in China, Persia, Egypt and Rome. We also know that throughout India’s long past, people from different parts came here, sometimes as traders, sometimes as conquerors, sometimes as migrants in search of new lands and settled down here. In remote Indian villages often people ‘recall’ a time when their ancestors lived elsewhere, from where they came and settled down where they now live. It is interesting to note that the greatest grammarian in SanskritBoxm6.1 Panini, who systematised and transformed Sanskrit grammar and phonetics around the fourthcenturyBCE,wasofAfghanorigin.…Theseventh-centuryChinesescholar Yi Jing learned his Sanskrit in Java (in the city of Shri Vijaya) on his way from China to India. The influence of interactions is well reflected in languages and vocabularies throughoutAsia from Thailand to Malaya to Indo-China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Korea and Japan. … Wecanfindawarningagainstisolationisminaparableaboutawell-frog-the‘kupamanduka’- that persistently recurs in several old Sanskrit texts…The kupamanduka is a frog that lives its whole life within a well, knows nothing else, and is suspicious of everything outside it. It talks to no one, and argues with no one on anything. It merely harbours the deepest suspicion of the outside world. The scientific, cultural and economic history of the world would have been very limited indeed had we lived like(Sen 2005: 84–86) Global interactions or even a global outlook are thus not novel developments unique to the modern period or unique to modern India. C olonialism and the G lobal C onnection We began our story of social and economic development in modern India from the colonial period. You will recall from Chapter 1 that modern capitalism had a global dimension from its very inception. Colonialism was part of the system that required new sources of capital, raw materials, energy, markets and a global network that sustained it. Often globalisation today identifies large-scale movement of people or migration as a defining feature. You know, however, that perhaps the greatest movement of people was the migration of European people who settled down in the Americas and Australia. You will remember how indentured labourers were taken away in ships from India to work in distant parts of Asia, Africa and Americas. And the slave trade that carted thousands of Africans away to distant shores. Independent India and the W orld 75 Independent India retained a global outlook. In many senses this was inherited from the Indian nationalist movement. Commitment to liberation struggles Reprint 2026-27