ABSTRACT
Defining Asia is not at all self-evident. During the last quarter of the 19th century
with the high age of Western imperialism and the related rise of movements for
national independence, a larger Sino-Indic conceptualisation of ‘Asia’ was much
more to the fore amongst Asians themselves. This notion of Asia reached its apex at
the Afro-Asian summit in Bandung in 1955: an event, as argued by Acharya, that
determined many of the norms of regionalism and multilateral behaviour in Asia.1
With India’s growing domestically focused policies after independence and within
the context of the Cold War, this notion fell into abeyance until the 1990s and the
launch of the ‘Look East’ policy of the then Indian finance minister, and later
prime minister, Manmohan Singh. At this point India can be said, at least rhet-
orically, to have entered into the Asian developmental state schema that in various
nuances is a common characteristic of East Asia.2
