ABSTRACT
Throughout the historical and contemporary examples in this book, we can see the ways in which colonial/postcolonial identities of colonizer and colonized have shaped and continued to shape international relations between India and the Anglosphere. Despite the immense enthusiasm for India across the English-speaking world, India has not behaved in the manner expected by Eurocentric IR theory or by the Western-Anglosphere states that have become so enamoured with it. This is the crux of the English-speaking world’s contemporary India problem. This is only possible, though, on the basis of the excision of histories of race and decolonization from IR theory and international politics. This neglects India’s continued reliance on its postcolonial identity and the ways in which it has continued to limit its engagements with the Anglosphere. India understands the US-led liberal-hierarchical order in a fundamentally different way from the Anglosphere states. This has led to repeated confusion over India’s foreign policy, with foreign policy elites across the Anglosphere seeing it as irrational and unnecessarily concerned with colonialism, and now as erroneously see India as ‘just like us’, a part of the Anglosphere.
