Great Decisions with Sugata Bose|India: China, the West, & the Global South

As an emerging major power in world affairs, India occupies a pivotal position between China, the West, and the Global South. India's complex history, and its enduring cultural and economic ties across Asia, Africa, and the West, have led to a delicate balancing act of complex international relationships. Today, the country’s population and economy continue to grow, and as global power structures shift, India’s history informs its strategic decisions. How will India draw on its past to define its path forward in the competition between the U.S. and China? How does India’s historical legacy form its identity as a leader of the Global South? And how might these patterns shape future collaboration between India and the rest of the globe?

Join us for a timely discussion of this topic with Sugata Bose, Former Member of Parliament in India and Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University. This program will feature an expert presentation, live audience Q&A, and time for networking and discussion with other globally-oriented participants.

The program will be live-streamed to Zoom from 6:00-7:00 PM. To attend virtually, please register here.

Sugata Bose is the Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs, Harvard University. He has served as Director of Graduate Studies in History at Harvard and as the Founding Director of Harvard’s South Asia Institute. Prior to taking up the Gardiner Chair at Harvard in 2001, Bose was a Fellow of St. Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge, and Professor of History and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Bose was educated at Presidency College, Calcutta, and the University of Cambridge where he obtained his Ph.D. His many books include Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (with Ayesha Jalal, 5th edition 2022), A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (2006), His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire (2011, 10th anniversary edition 2022), The Nation as Mother and other visions of nationhood (2017) and, most recently, Asia after Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century (2024). He was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997 and gave the G.M. Trevelyan Lecture at the University of Cambridge. In 2015 he was awarded the Rabindra Puraskar.

Sugata Bose has jointly with Sisir Kumar Bose edited the 12-volume Collected Works of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. He is joint editor with Krishna Bose of Rabindranath Tagore, Purabi: The East in its Feminine Gender, translations of Tagore’s poetry by Charu C. Chowdhuri and translator of Tagore’s songs in his book Tagore the World Voyager. He has made three highly regarded documentary films on modern South Asian history and published several albums of Bengali music and poetry, including Amaar Rabindranath (My Tagore) in 2010.

Sugata Bose served as a Member of Parliament in India elected to the 16th Lok Sabha (2014-2019) representing the Jadavpur constituency in Bengal and throughout that period as a member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs. His eloquent speeches in Parliament in defense of democracy were widely heard and appreciated.