Description
Kw Publishers Contours of Relationshio India And the Middle East by Kingshuk Chatterjee
India’s relationship with the Middle East is a very good example of ties between people that are genuinely of historical. The peoples of the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East have down the ages been interacting with each other – travelling to each other’s lands, engaging in trade and commerce, settling down, intermarrying and contributing in every way possible in each other’s lives long before the political frontiers of the present emerged. It is difficult to readily comprehend that what appears today as the distinct regions of South Asia, Middle East and Central Asia were not readily comprehensible as distinct regions even a hundred years back. While the natural frontiers of the Hindu Kush, Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea divided the peoples into linguistic and cultural zones that were Indic, Arab, Persian and Turkic, (and a host of others) such cultural frontiers, despite being thick, were never quite hard. Thus while linguistic spaces were easily discernible (i.e. thick), people were always able to move (i.e. not hard) from one zone to the other, were at liberty to settle down and – according to the dynamics of immigration and settlement – be subsumed within the host population with a fair degree of ease. It is no wonder, therefore that Armenian, Iranian, Baghdadi Jewish, Sunni and Shi‘i Arab, Kabuli, Multani, Shikarpuri, Parsi, Ismaili, Surti, Sikh/ Punjabi, Peshawari and many other such communities moved back and forth across the overland trading routes that connected what is today South Asia with the Middle East.