Publications
Publications
- 2020
- Routledge Handbook of China–India Relations
Reflections on Comparing China and India
By: Tarun Khanna and Tarun Khanna
Abstract
In this essay, the introductory chapter to an edited volume (Bajpai, Ho and Miller (edited), Routledge Handbook of China-India Relations, 2020), I reflect on two decades of my comparative scholarship on the trajectories of modern China and India, with a lens that emphasizes the actions of individual entrepreneurs in these very different milieus. I do this by first asking, “Why compare?” I then share my own emergent approach to this comparison, emphasizing my rather non-traditional immersion in the world of practice alongside my scholarly endeavors, as a way of honing insights. After all, as the preeminent social psychologist Kurt Lewin (1951) said, “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.” Finally, I reflect on what I feel has, or has not, changed in the past two decades in China and India, pointing to things that I think I got right and those that I did not.
Keywords
Citation
Khanna, Tarun. "Reflections on Comparing China and India." Chap. 1 in Routledge Handbook of China–India Relations, edited by Kanti Bajpai, Selina Ho, and Manjari Chatterjee Miller, 18–32. New York: Routledge, 2020.
