When we peer across the vast canvas of human civilisation, we usually do so through lenses ground and polished in the West. The Cartesian scalpel, the Kantian imperative, Carr’s pseudo-realism, the liberal international order – all these are familiar coordinates by which we map the world. We are used to thinking of global power in strategic terms: GDP, fleets, alliances, deterrence.
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But the mechanics of geopolitics, like those of rivers, cannot be fully known by surface currents. Beneath the veneer of outward appearances flow deeper structures shaping how power and purpose have been imagined across time.
To flip the conventional lens through which we view the world is to unmoor ourselves from the civilisational grammar inherited from Europe’s Age of Discovery and instead listen more closely to the ancient patterns and self-conceptions of non-Western polities.
What emerges from this reframing is something startling. If we disabuse ourselves of the Westphalian predilections that haunt us and look not from 1648 but from 324 BCE, a rich new geometry of global politics emerges. One in which China becomes the bureaucratic and hierarchical, almost centripetal ‘Mughal’ force – orderly, vast, revanchist, and imperial. One in which America plays the role of a postmodern nomad, a self-anointed purveyor of dynamic liberalism, possessed of missionary zeal and merchant cunning, a kind of Anglophone Timur. And somewhere between them, absorbing, reflecting, and occasionally deflecting both, stands India as a living heir to the dharmic cosmopolis of the Mauryan age.
I. THE CHINESE ORDER AS A MUGHAL SURROGATE
It may sound jarring to juxtapose ‘Mughals’ and ‘China’, two civilisational constructs that, on the face of it, appear historically distinct. Yet beneath the artificial skin of dynasty and geography, the comparison holds.
Like the Mughals, imperial China defined its legitimacy through a moralised cosmology of order. The Mandate of Heaven resembled, in spirit if not in name, the Mughal vision of sulh-i-kul, universal peace forged through centralised power and bureaucratic fixity. In both systems, the emperor stood as the cosmic axis, responsible for maintaining harmony through hierarchical coordination.
Much like Akbar’s Din-i-Ilahi, Confucianism was less a fixed theology and more an ethic of power, stressing order, filial piety, proper conduct, and the ritual structuring of life.
Even today, China’s Communist Party exhibits an echo of this logic. It is secular in name but Confucian in function – ritualised, puritanical, hierarchical, and obsessed with ‘stability maintenance’ (weiwen). Beneath the veneer of Marx, it behaves like a dynasty: forcing social harmony, punishing hubris, rewarding conformity in performance, and, above all, fearing chaos more than tyranny. Its people are subjects in the classical sense, part of a carefully calibrated organism where stability is the highest good.
Xi Jinping is no Stalin. He is a modern Yongle Emperor, trying to restore tributary relationships under the Belt and Road Initiative. Often framed in Western commentary as an autocrat, he is better understood as a Mughal emperor, a mandarin among technocrats.
This is the ‘Mughal China’ in the deeper cadence of governance and in the style of sovereignty it manifests.
II. KISSINGERIAN AMERICA: CHAOS IN THE NAME OF FREEDOM
If China is the modern Mughal empire, America is something else entirely: an evangelist republic wielding liberty like a sword, cloaked in moral purpose yet driven by the restless churn of its own exceptionalism. To call it ‘Kissingerian’ is to align it with the man’s vision of world order as outlined in his writings. A vision where power and principle dance a dangerous tango, and where peace is merely a pause.
America’s civilisational archetype is a direct by-product of Protestant millenarianism, leavened with Jeffersonian ambition. It moves like a frontier spirit, always toward and never inward, and it does not respect borders as sacred lines but treats them as temporary lines of resistance, waiting to be crossed and integrated. The world must become safe for democracy, and if not democracy, then markets. And if not markets, then order of the American kind. Venezuela may be learning this too late.
Vietnam, Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, each began as a mission, each ending as tragedies, but all were framed as part of a civilising arc. And yet America remains addicted to motion. It cannot sit still. Its institutions are mercurial and its society volatile to the point of brilliance. It creates without knowing what it will do with its creations – start-ups, social platforms, drones, and ideologies.
But this, too, has precedent in Eurasian history. Think of the Mongols. Mobile, meritocratic, armed with novel technologies of war and trade, and sweeping across sedentary empires with the arrogance of inevitability. The United States is the modern inheritor of that spirit. Silicon Valley is Samarkand and Wall Street is the new Silk Road. America does this with a force which is part Whitman, part Ford, and part Truman.
Where China seeks to build vertical hierarchies, America seeks to build horizontal networks. Where China endures, America accelerates. It is this contrast, between the static sublime of imperial order and the kinetic sublime of liberal dynamism, that defines our global moment.
III. INDIA AS THE MAURYAN IMPERIUM: DHARMIC REFLEX AND STRATEGIC FLUIDITY
And India? India sits at the pivot, as it often has. To consider it as merely a geographical intermediate between China and the United States would be an error of myopia. It is civilisationally amphibious, able to speak to both hierarchies and freedoms without fully succumbing to either.
In the Mauryan era, India too wielded a bureaucratic machine of extraordinary scale and sophistication. The Arthashastra, often mistakenly cast as an Indian version of Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’, in fact articulates a logic of power. Unlike Confucianism, which rests on ritual harmony, or Western liberalism, which rests on abstract rights, the Indian tradition views the world as fundamentally fluid. Dharma is not law but a process. Period. It is the art of aligning oneself with the ever-shifting contours of reality. Dharma is the art of balance between roles, duties, desires, and truth.
This gives Indian statecraft a peculiar elasticity. The Mauryans built an empire that was centralised, yet religiously diverse. Their administration was meticulous and at the same time, pragmatic. Ashoka governed through edicts that were less commandments and more invitations to moral reflection. The Mauryan state managed multiplicity without seeking to impose unity.
Contemporary India, despite the distortions of colonial legacy, retains this deeper intuition. Its political culture is noisy but not nihilistic. Its bureaucracy is sclerotic yet resilient. Its democracy is chaotic but not unmoored. And at the civilisational level, it possesses a remarkable capacity for absorbing contradiction without disintegration.
This is the Indian genius: not the eschatological synthesis imagined by Hegel or Fukuyama, but cohabitation in the dharmic sense. This is the ‘Nasadiya Sukta’ thinking: the admission that some truths may be unknowable, and yet must be lived with grace.
IV. A THREE-BODY PROBLEM: BEYOND THE COLD WAR LENS
If we read the 21st century through the binary lens of the Cold War, we will misread its gravity. This is not a world of two poles. It is a world of three centres of gravity, each drawing in satellites and each projecting its temperament. This new triangle is unstable, like a three-body problem in physics. No single order will hold, and the orbits will shift.
China offers order, efficiency, and continuity, but at the cost of compression, control, and conformity. America offers liberty, dynamism, and pluralism, but with volatility, fragmentation, and imperial overreach. India offers something less easily defined: a tolerance of ambiguity, a pluralism that does not depend on consensus, and a strategic culture shaped by centuries of negotiation, not conquest. To surmise: China wants tribute. America wants conversion. India wants conversation.
V. TOWARDS A DHARMIC WORLD ORDER
What, then, does it mean for India to embrace its Mauryan legacy in the present?
It means resisting the urge to pick sides in a bipolar contest and recovering the civilisational memory that power need not be zero-sum and that influence can be exercised without hegemony.
In practical terms, this might mean reimagining the Global South as a sangha, a fellowship of the diverse. It might mean investing in corridors of cultural and infrastructural connectivity that do not replicate Western models of development or Chinese models of control. It might mean anchoring global institutions in a philosophy of subsidiarity, where power is distributed rather than concentrated. And it would certainly mean crafting a new civilisational narrative, for narrative, as much as military strength or economic prowess, shapes the world.
The 21st century will not be owned by one civilisation, nor ordered by one vision of the good. It will be contested, shared, and co-authored. And in that polyphonic future, India’s greatest contribution will be its capacity for civilisational poise, for living and leading, without needing to dominate.
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