ABSTRACT
Transculturality as a lens helps to unravel the complex fabric of cross-cultural relations and to avoid the tendency to identify “container cultures” and thus “container economies” too, underlining relationality and entanglement more than monolithic binary differences (such as “West” versus “East”/“rest”; center versus periphery; modern versus traditional; progressive versus backward). Moreover, the linear narrative of globalization, modernization, and colonization has eclipsed, for instance, the point that India has been integrated into the world economy as a major player long before colonization (see QR-Code 8.1). A transcultural approach draws attention to how in preIndependence India, regional actors (such as kingdoms) within India shaped very strategic economic, social, and political connections with the world outside and ought to be seen as active agents in the transitions that first facilitated European, then Mughal and, later, Britain’s imperialist expansion into and across India (Subrahmanyam 1997). Thus, the argument that economic liberalization in federalist India during the 1990s was a watershed tends to exaggerate novelty and singularity at the expense of continuity and the intermeshing between social, cultural, and political processes over time. The claim that it is only since the 1990s that India developed such a high degree of openness is therefore to be critiqued and the implications treated with great care. Similarly, the notion of India as having been a socialist and centralized economy requires careful delineation (Balachandran and Subrahmanyam 2005, 33-5).
