A disappointing compilation of studies on Central Asia
Parshotam Mehra

Central Asia, the Great Game Replayed: an Indian Perspective.
edited by Nirmala Joshi. New Century Publications. Rs 670. Pages 294.

IN more ways than one, Central Asia has been and indeed continues to be the hub of Asian life, not only in terms of the way it has impacted the polity, but also the way it has affected economy and the cultural mores of large parts of Asia — of Russia, China, India, not to talk of sizeable chunks of West Asia on the southern rim of the Caspian Sea. For a proper perspective, it would help if a few basic facts about the Central Asian landscape were kept in view.

There are two major components of Central Asia — the Russian and the Chinese. Broadly, the Russian Central Asia embraced the 19^th century khanates of Khiva, Bokhara and Samarkand which, under the Soviets, emerged as the republics of Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The Chinese Central Asia, sadly completely ignored in this volume, embraced Xinjiang, Tibet and Mongolia. With India under the sway of the British, the 19^th century was witness to Tsarist Russia’s relentless expansion into the near-empty spaces of the khanates on its southern periphery. A battle royale was joined between the two great land powers for the control of Central Asia. This was the Great Game of Kipling’s celebrated ‘Kim’.

To defeat Russia's possible domination over the ramshackle Safvi empire in Persia or direct/indirect control over an uneasy regime in Kabul, the Raj waged a series of hot as well as cold wars. Happily, these were for most part proxy wars as the two protagonists were careful to stay away from direct confrontation.

With some dramatic changes in the political landscape in Europe in the opening decade of the 20^th century, the Great Game wound down as Russia was drawn closer to England to fight a resurgent Germany in alliance with a decrepit Ottoman Turkish empire. World War I put paid to the Ottomans even as it redrew the map of Europe. In the wake of the October 1917 Russian revolution, the five ‘stans’ discussed earlier emerged as integral parts of the erstwhile USSR — with their polity as well as economy forming part of the larger Soviet whole.

As the last decade of the 20^th century saw the Soviet Union come to grief, its Central Asian republics were left to fend for themselves. This was by no means easy. Their Islamic identity, rich oil and mineral wealth and location drew extraneous poachers — Saudi Arabia's Wahabism for one, Uncle Sam's and Beijing's greed for oil for another. Above all, the aftermath of 9/11 proved to be the most unsettling, for in its wake came large-scale US presence both in Afghanistan as well as some of the ‘stans’ for waging a holy war against terror, sadly, inextricably linked, in popular thinking, with Islam and its fundamentalists.

The book takes up some facets of this new reality in its weighty themes — Russia and Central Asia, the USA and Central Asia, India and Central Asia, China’s emerging ties with Central Asia, politics of energy resources of Central Asia and Central Asian economic models. As in most compilations, the presentations, by no means outstanding, are at best uneven and hang loosely. How one wishes the editor had exercised her prerogative to persuade the contributors to stick to some broad pattern with a sharp focus and mounted her own effort to dovetail the individual pieces into and integral whole. In the event, her iteration of a "deep sense of gratitude" to one and all has resulted in a volume that lacks any cohesive cement except perhaps a common cover.

As if this was not enough, the composition is somewhat slipshod and the text reeks with errors of omission and commission. Editing and proofreading leave a lot to be desired and the maps have been a disappointment. The regret is greater because the contributors have respectable academic profiles — a Vice-Chancellor, professors of prestigious universities and senior fellows in research institutes — any of whom, this reviewer has little doubt, could have off his or her own bat, produced a better study.

HOME