India and South East Asia: Mapping the Changing Contours of Partnership in the Twenty-First Century

Perhaps there is no other regional space in Asia that enjoys a significant cultural, geo-political and geo-strategic proximity with India, other than the South East Asian region. With the spread of spiritual and mythological roots to the post-colonial vision of an Asian solidarity, the foreign relations between India and South East Asian states have been a tale of substantive engagement and a trusted forum of partnership. However, despite the fact, due to the cold war politics, the interplay of major powers and the sub-regional geopolitics of South Asia within the first few years of Independence the relations got marred by the policy of isolation and misunderstanding. It was the historic dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the restructuring of India’s economic policy in the early decades of the 90s that brought forth a new dimension in the relations between the two. Since then, India and South East Asia have been the most preferred and trusted partners of each other with a renewed vision of 3C’s—Commerce, Culture and Connectivity. This chapter makes and attempt  to map and appraise the 75 years of India’s engagements with South East Asia and seeks to explore how the development in the relations has given a renewed thrust in achieving the foreign policy objective of India in the Indo-Pacific region. The chapter plans to systematically locate the relations in 4 major phases- the pre-colonial roots of cultural syncretism, the post-independence vision of an alternative order, the shift from the West to 'looking east' and the contemporary vision of a shared and collaborative rules based world order.