India, Oct. 4 -- On a flying visit to Colombo last week, I gave the inaugural keynote address at an international conference on the cultural footprint of India across South and South-East Asia. In the annals of world history, there must be no other example of this kind of sanskritic vistaarvaad or cultural amplification, which continued over a millennium and a half - from roughly the 6th century BCE to the 12th century CE.

The remarkable thing is that this spread took place without military conquest. There are many examples in history - particularly so during colonial hegemony - of alien cultures being imposed after armed invasion. But in India, with the emergence of Buddhism around the 6th century BCE, an unprecedented philosophical exp...