Contours Of The Greater Game: Why India Cannot Afford Geopolitical Illiteracy

Contours of the Greater Game: Access, Control, and Geopolitical Orders. Arindam Mukherjee. BluOne Ink. Pages: 320. Price: INR 899.

There is a popular saying that you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.

Arindam Mukherjee's Contours of the Greater Game makes a similar appeal for the salience of geopolitics. It urges Indian minds to make sense of shifting sands, anticipate risks, and foster strategic thinking.

The scope of the book is wide. It covers history, social analysis, geography, collective identities, trade, colonialism, the power of narratives, propaganda, public opinion, consent, and structures of power. For history buffs and policy wonks, there is plenty of food for thought in this gripping read.

In the era of Donald Trump's trade wars and 'America First' unilateralism, the core assumptions of free market globalisation have been shaken. Identity, culture, religion and national sovereignty were supposed to have been rendered meaningless. Instead, an astute geopolitical mindset has become imperative.

With the resurgence of great power politics, which the philosopher John Gray calls the Age of New Leviathans, interest in geopolitics has returned. What was once dismissed as the painful baggage of a fraught past has staged a comeback. McDonalds and Coca-Cola have not mitigated conflicts. Neither the world nor history is flat.

Eurasian integration, regional trade alliances, hegemony, and de-dollarisation are no longer buzzwords confined to elite policy circles.

Arindam's well-researched book explains International Relations and Geopolitics not as a theorist or ideologue, but as someone who has witnessed global shifts and their impact. He recalls the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of India's licence-permit-quota economy, and the decline of industrial townships such as his birthplace, Durgapur.

Power today resembles a distributed network with nodes and hubs. It is more multi-faceted than ever, shaped by digitalisation, mass surveillance, deepfakes, the data economy, and new forms of propaganda and disruption.

The hybridity of power, along with technological supremacy, financial weaponisation, and control over banking and trade, calls for diversification, localisation, and resilient systems. The author argues that thorough geopolitical knowledge and a conscious grasp of geography’s hard realities are essential.

He sees great potential in an alliance of Asian countries, especially the Indo-Pacific rimland, which holds 60 per cent of the world’s population and produces more than 50 per cent of global GDP. This region is a fast-moving engine of growth that can shift the global balance of power. It can move the centre of gravity away from the Anglophone West, the inheritors of Kipling’s ‘White Men’s Burden’, now recast as ‘multicultural woke (wo)men’s burden’.

Kishore Mahbubani, the veteran Singaporean diplomat, has called the 21st century the ‘Asian Century’.

Arindam Mukherjee is optimistic about the untapped energy of multilateral Asian collaboration. Yet he sounds a note of caution. He reminds readers of the chaotic half-made societies described by V S Naipaul, where trampling on the past to make way for the new unleashes creative destruction, but also sparks crises of identity and dignity. These, he notes, are at the heart of much agitation and turbulence.

Shiva Naipaul, younger brother of the Nobel laureate, compared ancient Rome with ancient India: Rome began as a state and, as its powers grew, became a civilisation. India, more slowly and without clear direction, accumulated a civilisation but never managed to create patterns of consistent, self-conscious statehood.

The Naipaul brothers captured the gap between grand ambition and sordid reality, and the anxious influence of a wounded civilisation, as well as the disarray of mimic modernity.

Contours of the Greater Game is a timely reminder to resolve confusion and contradictions, discard hesitations, start afresh, and build a bridge between the past and the future. The book insists this can only be done through concrete historical and geopolitical analysis.