In July 1776, the world experienced a momentous geopolitical upheaval.
In Philadelphia, a group of Enlightenment rebels and bravehearts, fortified with the audacious ideas of Locke and Montesquieu, were calling for a death warrant for “the Royal Brute of Great Britain.” They were giving birth to a “Novus Ordo Seclorum” — a New Order of the Ages. They looked at the future and saw a Republic. And they promised to build it. And they dared to keep it.
In the same span of time, in my 5,000-year-old ancestral home, the majestic land straddling the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, the Sun of the Great Mughals and the Taj Mahal was not just setting. It was being extinguished. By 1776, the Emperor Shah Alam II was made into a “pensioner” of a private corporation, the East India Company. While America was throwing off the yoke of the British Crown, India was being molded and refitted for the yoke.
Consider the man who linked our two fates: Lord Cornwallis, the British general during the American Revolution, who in 1781 capitulated and surrendered his sword to George Washington at Yorktown. To Americans, he was the face of British defeat. But do you know where the British sent him next to redeem His Majesty’s reputation? India!
The loss of the American colonies would make India the “Jewel in the Crown,” an absolute imperial necessity. As a historian might say, the British Empire acquiesced in the loss of the 13 colonies only because it could consolidate and loot the Indian subcontinent. India’s colonization and America’s independence, in a sense, are historical twins born of a single global convulsion.
For a long time, the view from India toward America was one of envy mixed with inspiration and admiration. But the bridge between two great people wasn’t built by soldiers; it was built by philosophers and visionaries.
In the mid-19th century, Henry David Thoreau experimented with transcendental life at Walden Pond, just a few hours south of where we stand today. He wrote “Civil Disobedience,” a rationale for his refusal to pay taxes to a government supporting slavery and war. A half century later, a young Indian lawyer in South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi, read Thoreau. He didn’t just read him — he operationalized him. He took up the New England transcendentalists’ protest and transformed it into Satyagraha, the moral force that would eventually dismantle the very empire that Cornwallis had built. Many decades later, Martin Luther King Jr. would walk the Gandhi’s walk of non-violence and humanity’s shared dreams.
When India finally stood up to declare its “Tryst with Destiny” at the midnight hour of 1947, Indians looked across the Atlantic. They built their parliamentary system with the heart and soul from the American Bill of Rights.
When the Indian Constitution begins with “We, the People,” it isn’t just a legal preamble. It is a civilizational bond. India and America are two nations built not on ethnicity, or religion, or shared blood, but on a shared text of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” (Sanskrit: Āyuḥ svātantryaṁ sukhānveṣaṇam).
Nowadays, the view in India has shifted from aspiration to the Indian diaspora exploring the new “Silk Road” in America. One of the most successful ethnic groups in the United States, Indian-Americans, from Silicon Valley to elite universities and health care systems, represent the vital talent driving America’s core institutions.
Today, America looks at India for the “iCET”—the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology. Whether it is jet engines, semiconductor chips or AI ethics, the two nations have realized they are “indispensable partners.” India has the youthful brainpower; America has the ecosystem. Do you see the future? Our interests have finally aligned with our values. We both face a systemic challenge from an authoritarian model that rejects the 1776 vision.
In 1776, America was a radical experiment. In 2026, America is the most prosperous, open, compassionate and innovative civilization in history. India is an ancient civilization, but a young Republic. When an Indian reflects on America at 250, through a looking glass, he sees India as the only other nation on Earth, large enough, crazy enough and diverse enough to attempt the impossible, to govern 1.5 billion free people under the rule of law.
The rule of law gives America deep advantages. The capacity to attract genuine talent from around the world, to allow people to vote with their feet, to build lives and companies and futures here — that’s something no authoritarian state can manufacture. The rule of law, for all its failures, creates conditions for economic dynamism that centrally planned economies consistently fail to match. And sometimes, they collapse, as the Soviet Union did. The rule of law is not for nothing. It cannot be belittled even in the age of Donald Trump.
America is not declining, regardless of Xi Jinping’s admonishment to Trump in Beijing on a recent visit. America has extraordinary assets. Its institutions, its talent, its culture of innovation. These are real, and they are formidable. But America cannot win on autopilot.
The countries, the empires, the powers that have fallen throughout history, they didn’t fall because they lacked strength. They fell because they stopped seeing clearly. Because they confused the present moment with the permanent. Because they ceased to be vigilant. That’s the challenge for America at 250.
Narain Batra is a study leader at the Osher Institute at Dartmouth College. He lives in the Upper Valley.