The Project centres around three core research questions:

.What were the dominant narratives in India relating to China, to what extent were these paradigms stable?

.What events became inflection points in the shifting of the narrative?

.Why did narratives change and shift relative importance in the post independence period?

These three questions form the core of an inquiry that seeks first to create a historically rigorous data set of Indian narrative discourse and the test key narrative theories in the literature against these findings.