The recent rise of publications in China-India studies indicates a lively interest in thinking China and India together. The sheer breadth and volume of scholarship suggests that China-India studies offers a powerful opportunity for rethinking a range of entrenched disciplinary limitations, such as Eurocentrism, the regionalism of area studies, and nation-centric paradigms. Yet, much of this scholarship lacks self-reflexivity on its relevance, approach, and stakes: why pair China and India together, how to do so, and to what ends. This special issue of the International Journal of Asian Studies opens a conversation on these issues of method. We invite articles that present innovative research on Chinese and Indian texts, materials, and/or issues and ideas alongside a sustained reflection – along the lines of the challenges outlined below – on approaches to and reasons for thinking China and India together.

•  Relevance: Why is the China-India pairing meaningful? How viable are the categories of “China” and “India”? And why does this pairing prove uniquely relevant or distinctive, given the many other forms transnational and transregional research can take?

•  Approach: What are the opportunities and limitations of recent approaches in China-India studies, including “India/Asia as method” (Chen 2010, 2011), “connected history” (Sen 2017), “cosmopolitan comparison” (Elman and Pollock 2018), and “convergent comparison” (Duara and Perry 2018)? What alternatives may be better suited to addressing the unique conditions of thinking China and India together? How can we read across archives, languages, borders, and sets of data ethically and responsibly? How traversable are our disciplinary boundaries?

•  Stakes: What is at stake in studying China and India together? How can China-India studies contribute to what we already know or take for granted? Can this exercise help us define what we mean by “China-India studies”? And finally, can the analysis of methods in China-India studies contribute to other fields of examination?

We seek articles that combine theory with practice by exploring some of the above questions alongside new case studies and materials of relevance to China-India studies. We are interested in innovative research from a range of temporal, linguistic, and material contexts, and in a diversity of disciplinary perspectives on method.

As China-India publications proliferate, we invite scholars to pause and reflect. Ultimately, we hope to spark an interdisciplinary dialogue on how and why to study China and India together, as well as on the limitations, challenges, and failures of this conceptual pairing.

Timeline:

•  Please submit your abstract (300 words), and a 2-page CV by June 15, 2020 to the special issue editors, Tansen Sen (ts107@nyu.edu) and Adhira Mangalagiri (mangalagiri@qmul.ac.uk).

•  Decisions on the submitted abstracts will be made within two weeks.

•  Full articles are due on December 15, 2020. Papers should be between 9,000 and 10,000 words in length (including notes and references) and should conform to the journal’s style guidelines.

•  The articles will undergo peer-review to determine acceptance for publication.