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India’s North East is regarded as the natural pivot for India’s engagement with South East Asia and East Asia through the continental route. The books reviewed here are excellent attempts at bringing out the historical, political, social and cultural underpinnings and impacts of India’s ‘Look East Policy’ and its transition to the ‘Act East Policy’. They are important contributions to the understanding of India’s foreign policy strategy towards its immediate neighbours when this transition is actually happening.

The two volumes under review are dissimilar books—dissimilar in structure, approaches and style. And yet, in their juxtaposition also emerges many interesting insights on the common theme in the two volumes namely, of the triangular relationship between India, South East Asia and China. Amitav Acharya’s East of India, South of China has China much more upfront as a central factor but Heading East edited by Karen Stoll Farrell and Sumit Ganguly would not stand either without China being the unspoken elephant in the volume.

‘…the gaze forward in time is always in the last analysis an exercise of the imagination.’ It shapes both the realist and speculative forays of this galaxy of acknowledged scholars looking towards 2030, but as Victor Faessel reminds us, each of the chapters of this volume represents a thematization, more or less explicit, of conflict over dominant imaginaries. Also knitting them together is a shared ethical standpoint of struggling to envisage an alternative approach of diverse groups with divergent values living well together. In encouraging these contributors’

Asia, the largest continent with its several civilizations going back to millennia was subjugated and dominated by European powers for over four hundred years since the sixteenth century. A number of countries of Asia which collectively accounted for a very substantive global economic activity and growth as late as the early 19th century were impoverished with resultant underdevelopment, ill health, poor education and social inequality.