Description
Shipra Publications India And Central Asia February 2012 by Surendra Gopal
A regular flow of men and merchandise has been characteristic of the millennia old relations between India and Central Asia. Their inclusion in a common cultural complex evolved through their age old interaction has imparted strength to them for overcoming the political barriers. The present volume is an anthology of seven contributions by four scholars, two each from India and the former Soviet Union, throwing light on the multifaceted contacts between India and Central Asia from the 16th century to the early decades of the 20th century. The three essays by Surendra Gopal cover the gamut of these relations from 16th Century to the first decade of the 19th century focussing largely on Indian traders in Central Asia and Russianand Central Asian travellers to Kashmir and Panjab. In his two papers included in this volume Devendra Kaushik examines the economic relations between the two regions during the 19th century and reconstructs the history of their political contacts from the colonial period to the aftermath of the establishment of the Soviet rule. The other two contributions by Russian scholars, late G L Dmitriyev from Tashkent and late I M Oranskii from Leningrad (St. Petersburg), provide respectively socio-cultural profile of the Indian settlers in Central Asia from the latter half of the 19th century to early 20th century and information about an Indian ethnolinguistic group settled in parts of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan which still speaks an Indian dialect and observes several Indian customs.