Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v2.c15.s2.t71: Mira Sinha-Bhattacharjea
Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v2.c15.s2.t71
- Language
- English
Mira Sinha-Bhattacharjea
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Mira Sinha-Bhattacharjea (April 18, 1930 - December 13, 2009) has been regarded as one of India’s most respected China experts who, with her sound scholarship and understanding of history, contributed to the re-shaping of public perception on India-China relations in the 1970s and 1980s. She joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1955 and served in the Indian Embassy in Beijing for nearly four years. Soon after she resigned from the service Bhattacharjea joined the Department of Chinese and Japanese Studies (now the Department of East Asian Studies) at the University of Delhi where she taught Chinese Foreign Policy and India-China Relations for over a quarter of a century.
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In 1969, she was a founder member of the China Study Group and became Director after it became the Institute of Chinese Studies. After the journal ‘*China Report*’ was adopted by the group in 1978, as one of the early managing editors of the journal she oversaw its transformation from a bi-monthly to a serious quarterly journal in East Asian Studies; she was the Editor of the journal from 1996. After retiring from Delhi University in 1995, she continued as an Honorary Fellow and then as an Emeritus Fellow and later, as Co-chairperson of the Institute of Chinese Studies. During her association with the institute, she demonstrated high quality of leadership and encouraged the professional growth of young China scholars.
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Bhattacharjea’s scholarship represented a perspective on international relations, which challenged the realists and the ‘balance of power’ approach. Her analysis of foreign policy integrated domestic dimensions firmly, with the international
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Mira Sinha Bhattacharjea
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context, and history with the present environment. She took Mao Zedong’s worldview for China and Nehru’s worldview for India as reference points for her analysis of subsequent developments. She also spent a number of years studying Mao and Gandhi in a comparative perspective.
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She analysed the India-China border question from the overall political understanding of the problem in a historical perspective; her famous distinction between border, boundary and frontier contributed a great deal of clarity to the understanding of the ‘line of actual control’ between India and China. She was the author of numerous scholarly papers, and of a book, *‘China, the World and India’* (2002); in 2005, along with Manoranjan Mohanty, she co-edited the volume *‘Security and Science in China and India: Selected Essays of Giri Deshingkar’*.