Early winter of 2024. I stand on an old Delhi rooftop imagining the Yamuna’s sluggish flow glinting somewhere close by, as I watch the city hum under a haze of dust and ambition. The air carries the honk of autorickshaws, chatter from the street, and a faint unease — a sense that India, for all its vibrancy, sits on a fault line of history and geography. Not the kind that shakes the earth, but one that tremors through the soul of a nation, caught between the Eurasian steppe and the Indo-Pacific’s restless waves. India, as I’ve come to experience over multiple visits, remains a fractured world: a weathered crucible where empires, faiths, and modern powers collide, each leaving scars that shape its destiny.
A Weathered Crucible
To call India a fractured crucible is not to diminish its resilience but to name its geopolitical reality. Halford Mackinder, the geographer turned political thinker that remained scarred by Bismarck’s Germany and Czarist Russia, saw the Eurasian heartland as the world’s pivot. To him, this steppe where power was won or lost. Nicholas Spykman, his contrarian heir from across the Atlantic, argued it was the Rimland — the coastal arcs from Suez to Singapore — that held the key.
And India, straddling both, remains neither the heart nor the rim, but a hinge — its mountains and ports, a stage for ceaseless contest. From Alexander’s horsemen to British frigates, from Turkic hordes to Chinese drones, India has been a prize, its geography a curse and a crown. I think of Naipaul’s mournful gaze, his vision of a wounded civilization, and wonder: is India’s stress its strength, or its undoing?
The picture of a Mughal court of the 1600s comes to the mind. Where Persian poets and Rajput warriors might have toasted under the same Delhi sky, their unity fragile but real. I fast-forward to 1857, and the same city burns, sepoys and their sahibs locked in a dance of betrayal. The British, masters of divide-and-rule, turned India’s diversity into a weapon, pitting Muslims against Hindus, caste against caste. So, by 1947, as Cyril Radcliffe’s pencil carved Punjab and Bengal, that same diversity became a dividing wound.
This is a wound that remains underlined by a million dead and fifteen million displaced. My Delhi guesthouse owner, a boy then in Lahore, recalls fleeing with a suitcase, the train’s whistle drowned by screams. Resident historians like William Dalrymple might be inclined to linger here, painting the human cost as the bazaars turned to battlegrounds. Naipaul however would see in it a deeper tragedy: a civilization unmoored, its shared memory shattered.
The External Stress
Yet this fracture is not just historical. India’s geography makes it a geopolitical fulcrum, a destiny it cannot escape. To the north, the Himalayas loom, where Chinese troops and Indian jawans face off in Ladakh’s icy wastes. In 2025, the Line of Actual Control remains a tinderbox, with skirmishes in 2023 leaving scars and dead bodies as memory. China’s Belt and Road, snaking through Pakistan’s Gwadar port, tries to encircle India in a noose of asphalt and ambition. To the south, the Indian Ocean churns with rivalry as American carriers, Chinese submarines, and India’s own frigates jostle for primacy.
Some of the contemporary observers might frame this as a multipolar drama, where India, courted by Washington and Moscow, dances a delicate barn-dance, neither fully aligned nor truly free.
Why this stress? Because India’s position demands it. Mackinder’s heartland beckons towards Central Asia at the one end, and India builds Chabahar port in Iran or establishes a line with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Across the other end, Spykman’s Rimland pulsates in the Andaman Sea – where India’s Act East policy courts ASEAN nations, wary of Beijing’s shadow.
The Internal Stress
Yet, India’s internal fractures — communal tensions, domestic oversight, and economic disparities — amplify the strain. Naipaul’s ghost whispers of a section of the Indian society “subtracting” their past to mirror Pakistan’s own erasure of identity, one that gets compounded by the state’s reluctance to address or reconcile. Over chai and samosa on the terrace, a friend quips: “India’s a family reunion where everyone’s holding a grudge.” It hides a truth: millions of voices, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, pull in opposite directions.
The British understood this fault-line and exploited it. Their Partition of 1947 was no clumsy exit but a calculated fracture, ensuring a divided subcontinent too weak to consolidate or challenge. Pakistan, perched on the Rimland’s edge, became a buffer against Soviet expansionist dreams, its rugged mountain passes a hurdle to their southward expansion, and its seaports a docking point for the Western vigil over the subcontinental Rimland.
Bangladesh, born in 1971, was India’s triumph but also its burden, a neighbour oscillating between gratitude and grievance. Today, India watches silently as an interim government runs its course in Dhaka, remaining undecided on whether to play the creditor or the collector.
The Quad — India, U.S., Japan, Australia — offers maritime muscle, but the world is changing, and alliances have turned fickle. Washington’s embrace constricts rather than offering comfort while India continues to look towards Russia, where the Soviet-era memories still linger.
Resilience faces Contradictions
The stress is not just external. India throbs with ambition but remains staggered at the contradictions. A 2023 report found 68.7% of Indians with chronic diseases suffer stress, a silent epidemic that could dwarf geopolitics. In Bangalore’s IT corridors, coders burn out under deadlines, their dreams of Silicon Valley clashing with traffic jams and power cuts. Young writer Janak Pandya observes: “There is something masochistic about Bengaluru’s relationship with its most productive citizens. In the monsoon, the founder of a $2 billion fintech wades through knee-deep water to reach his glass-and-steel office.” In rural Bihar, farmers toil under debt – their livelihood remains underscored by gambling with the yearly monsoon, while their Punjabi brethren thrive on government schemes and an abundant water supply.
The subcontinent’s history, at the same time, suggests resilience. The Gupta-Mauryas defined it; the Mughals outlined it; the British enriched it, but, in their final act, broke it. Yet India endures. Today’s India, with its space missions and digital revolution, is no mere victim. Its Chabahar port, its Buddhist circuits in Myanmar, the Middle East Economic Corridor, the vaccines for Africa — all echo Aurthur Wellesley’s vision of a power that influences the region and beyond.
A Billion Dreams on a Faultline
Can India transcend these contradictions, this stress? The path is fraught. China’s border provocations, the USA’s about-face, Pakistan’s terrorists, and Bangladesh’s drift are just some of the realities that demand a statecraft both ruthless and wise. Voices from the past urge India to embrace its role as the civilization that it once was, while the present tempts India to become a swing state – a balancer of East and West, at the cost of losing focus on identity.
How does one balance the past and a fractured identity with the geopolitical undercurrents of the present?
As I leave the rooftop that evening, the Yamuna only a shadow in my mind, my thoughts turn to Naipaul’s wounded India – a civilization adrift, its ancient rhythms slowly getting drowned by modernity. It was less about those timeless tales and more about the contested present. Would it fracture again? Would it forge a new unity – Akhand Bharat being a federation of mission that anchors the spirit of Asia against the intrusive Eurocentric worldview? For now, it stands, a billion dreams on a fault line, its future as uncertain as the river’s flow.
