ABSTRACT
Kipling’s famous ‘Ballad of East and West’ was set in an area of South Asia that is now Pakistan. It points to a relationship in which ‘the twain’ do meet: in this case, two men from different worlds facing each other across the barrel of a gun. The romance of imperialism is dead, and the white man as colonial master has long departed the subcontinent. Yet, in an ironic twist, South Asia is the globe’s only region where two strategic rivals remain locked in an ongoing hot-cold war spanning some six decades, a peculiar subcontinental relationship in which disputes could easily precipitate a major crisis with escalation potential. Meanwhile, from global Cold War to transnational ‘war on terror’, the militaryindustrial landscape of modern India and Pakistan has continued to be shaped by countless waves of cross-cultural interaction amid the shifting sands of international politics.
