The Durian Flavor: A Book Review

The durian is a fruit that divides people the moment they meet it. It smells strong, looks intimidating, and is loved deeply by those who take the time to get past the smell. Ambassador Gurjit Singh uses this fruit as the title of his new book, The Durian Flavour: India and ASEAN after a Decade of the Act East Policy, and it turns out to be a fitting choice. India's relationship with Southeast Asia, like the durian, is not something that gives itself up easily. It takes patience, familiarity, and a willingness to look past first impressions before the rewards show up.

Illustration by The Geostrata

Gurjit Singh served as India's Ambassador to Indonesia and to ASEAN from 2012 to 2015, a period that placed him at the centre of major moments, including the 20th anniversary of India-ASEAN relations, the start of RCEP talks, and the launch of the Act East Policy in 2014. That proximity to the events shows in the writing. The book begins by tracing how India's original Look East Policy of the 1990s, born of an economic crisis, gradually grew into something larger.

A policy with strategic and defence goals layered on top of the original trade focus. 

Singh also walks through how ASEAN itself has changed over the decades, through its three pillars of political security, economic, and socio-cultural cooperation, with some parts growing stronger and others weakening. This history-telling is detailed and clearly comes from someone who lived through it. Where the book gets interesting is in how it treats India's civilisational links with Southeast Asia.

The Ramayana and Mahabharata are still told and performed there, and around six million people of Indian origin live across these countries. Ambassador Singh doesn't stop at celebrating this shared history. He asks a harder question: if India is present everywhere in the region's culture, why hasn't that translated into real economic or strategic gains today? It's a fair question, and one the book doesn't try to dodge.

On trade, the book is refreshingly straightforward. Bilateral trade between India and ASEAN has grown to around $130 billion, but it remains heavily tilted against India, with a large and persistent trade deficit. Singh points to a structural reason for this: India and ASEAN countries often end up competing for the same investors and the same manufacturing opportunities instead of complementing each other.

He also doesn't avoid the China question: the possibility that loose rules of origin allow Chinese goods to enter India disguised as ASEAN products. 

The book is equally direct about India's exit from RCEP in 2019, treating it less as a wise economic decision and more as a step that sat oddly next to years of talk about deeper regional integration. This gap between what India says about its ties with ASEAN and what it actually does is really the heart of the book.

Towards the end, the book widens its scope beyond ASEAN itself and connects the relationship to India's larger Indo-Pacific thinking, like SAGAR, the blue economy, and the Indian Ocean Rim Association. Ambassador Singh argues that India's approach to Southeast Asia can't be separated from its wider maritime strategy anymore. He also suggests that trilateral partnerships, especially with Japan and Australia, remain underused tools that India could lean on more, given the network of trade agreements it already has across the region.

The Durian Flavour succeeds in telling the story honestly, without dressing up a decade of mixed results as a success story. It reads less like a celebration and more like an honest account of a relationship that has been active, but not yet fully realised. One that, like the fruit in its title, still has more flavour to offer once people are willing to get past the first impression.

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BY PARI MUNDRA

TEAM GEOSTRATA

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