The Shifting Cultural History of Afghan-Indian Relations

India’s aid to Afghanistan may soon end as a result of the Taliban taking power in Kabul. Indian assistance, admittedly, was built on the cornerstone of political relations with the U.S.-backed Afghan government. Aid arguably contributed to the rising popularity of India over the last 20 years. The history of earlier interactions between India and Afghanistan – or, more precisely, between Indian and Afghan peoples – is not rosy. It is a history in which instances of deep cultural interactions and literary images are overshadowed by stories of bloody struggles.

In the ancient era, what’s now Afghanistan sat on the borderlands of the Indian civilization. It was a connecting region between Central Asia and South Asia, an avenue through which trade and culture flowed; a route through which Buddhism reached China. In parts of modern Afghanistan, Greek and Indian cultures mingled for centuries; it was in this period that not only Buddhist statues but Hindu temples were built in Afghanistan.

That history has been largely overshadowed by later periods, and was partially wiped out by the encroachment of Muslim rulers and most devastatingly fundamentalist ones in the modern period. The best known symbol of the abovementioned ancient period in Afghanistan – the Buddha statues in Bamiyan – were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. It is hard to tell if the Taliban will spare what remains of Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic heritage. Even if New Delhi wishes to take steps to protect that history, India will not have the political means to do so.

Between Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic period and the modern age is history Indians likely best recall: When Islam was dominant in the region and Afghanistan a vector for conquerers. To be sure, various rulers and groups invaded India in that period, and while many of these attacks came from the territory of Afghanistan, this did not mean they were actually all led by Afghans.

The region was, once again, a conduit between Central and South Asia – for armies rather than religion. Afghanistan itself had fallen prey to many invaders who later used it as a springboard to attack India. This was what Timur did, as well as what the later Timurids, the Mughals, did as well. After taking over large swaths of northern India, the Mughals would sometimes take the reverse route: Their hold over parts of Afghanistan fluctuated and they would often fight for that territory with Central Asian rivals, coming to rule Afghans with Indian armies.

But there is no denying that Afghan rulers – or, at times, rulers of Afghanistan who were not always ethnically close to its people – played a part in invasions of India as well. Sher Shah Suri, who deposed the Mughal Emperor Babur and ruled in Delhi for a number of years, was an Afghan. So was one of the most notorious families of Muslim nobles in Indian history, a lineage that played a particularly cruel role in the downfall of the Mughal empire – Najib-ud-Daulah, his son, Zabita Khan, and his grandson, Ghulam Qadir. They hailed from the region of Rohilkhand in northern India, a territory that carries in its name the memory of those times, as it had been once ruled and populated by the Rohilla Afghans.

The cordial relations that New Delhi and Kabul enjoyed for most of the last 20 years were not in any obvious way influenced by that dark past. Small echoes of this history could only be heard in instances such as in 2019 when the Bollywood movie “Panipat” – the story of an invasion of north India by an Afghan ruler that occurred in the 18th century – reportedly caused some discontent in Afghanistan.

Under late British rule, the situation in certain ways was reversed. While Afghans had once served in the armies invading India, now Indian soldiers were used by Britain to fulfill its imperial designs by marching into Afghanistan a few times. The memory of those wars – the first and second Anglo-Afghan Wars – may not resonate that much in the Indian public mind, but those experiences are very much a part of the history of the Indian armed forces.

In the West, the image of Afghans of that time was partially built on literary works that told the stories of British engagement in the region, such as those by Rudyard Kipling. But a part of contemporary Indian literature popularized its own image, too, and a more benign one at that. It was an image that referred to a particular Afghan community that was perceived very differently from the famous Pathan warriors of the borderlands: the traders that would come to India to sell Afghanistan’s merchandise, the “things from Kabul,” such as dry fruit or spices. The descendents of those merchants still live in small numbers in cities like Kolkata.

One work in particular popularized this image: a short story titled “Kabulliwallah” and authored by the Noble laureate Rabindranath Tagore. It is so popular in India that it was remade into a movie a few times over the past few decades. As professor Avinash Paliwal writes in his 2017 book “My Enemy’s Enemy: India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to the US Withdrawal,” this one story “has decisively influenced the way many in India view Afghans, i.e. aggressive but righteous, united against foreign occupation but wrought with familial and tribal differences, martial and possessive but also softhearted.”

Indians and Afghans share long history of cultural interactions and a recent cordial political friendship on which they can build future ties. At the same time, however, their bilateral history is also filled to the brim with bloody conflicts that can easily be brought to light again and again to weaken relations. If the Taliban take full control (which appears nearly certain as of writing) and retain it for a longer time (which is hard to predict but unfortunately may be likely), political relations between Kabul and New Delhi will surely suffer, and narratives on the darker sides of that history may grow stronger as well.