Deep Footprints of Odyssey

Abstract

This is the presentation of the joint project on twenty centuries of civilisational dialogue between India and China, India and China: Twenty Centuries of Civilizational Interaction and Vibrations, with Professor Tan Chung. Chinese literature, in its gigantic historical spatiality, has captured crucial glimpses and registered innumerable milestones of the odyssey of India–China civilisational dialogue. The division of labour between me and Professor Tan Chung is—while he uses a positional approach to try to juxtapose and integrate the diachronic and synchronic contexts of historical events, I follow the ‘shu er bu zuo’ (presentation without creation) motto of Confucius. The India–China civilisational dialogue took place not between government institutions, but among the ordinary people. Information about the dialogue inevitably originated from oral sources, and was later found in written reportage in a variety of genres.