How celebrating the centenary of Rabindranath Tagore’s China trip can offer New Delhi and Beijing a chance to reset ties

One way of turning things around is to reflect on the times when the neighbours were engaged in the struggle to establish modern states and to take seriously a major thinker of that period, Rabindranath Tagore, who envisioned harmonious relations.

This April marks the 100th anniversary of Tagore’s visit to China and provides an opportunity to celebrate the occasion and study his vision.

His point of view was appreciated and he was effusively welcomed by several Chinese intellectuals, including Liang Qichao, who compared his visit with those of ancient travellers between India and China. In his introduction to Tagore, Liang spoke of how India and China had extensive contact in the past – most prominently through Buddhism – which was interrupted by colonial expansion. Western colonialism had not just hindered positive civilisational exchange; it had created the conditions for mutual suspicion and misunderstanding. Liang saw Tagore’s visit as reigniting the contact between two ancient civilisations in modern times.

Tagore also had a deep influence on modern Chinese literature. “I was so elated as if I had found a hidden orchid while strolling along a mountain path,” the author Bing Xin wrote in her moving tribute to discovering Tagore. Several Indians and Chinese travelled to each other’s countries after Tagore’s trip. India-China relations could be said to have reached a crescendo in 1954 with the signing of the Panchsheel agreement, which created a new paradigm for international relations. The subsequent sad break in ties needs no repetition.

However, the popularity of Tagore in China has only increased. He is widely known and is taught in Chinese school textbooks. In some ways, his ideas have more relevance at this time when