South and Southeast Asia once enjoyed close trade relations, which ultimately helped to lay the foundations of modern culture and society throughout the mainland and island chains of the latter. Both of the principal religions of Southeast Asia – Islam and Buddhism – arrived via the Subcontinent, usually on ships borne by the monsoon winds. Yet today it is common to assume that Southeast Asia feels a lot closer to China than to India.
Patterns of colonial rule had a lot to do with this protracted separation. Burma was never 'good enough' to be incorporated into greater British India, even if it was ruled from Calcutta. South and Southeast Asia were regional definitions concocted by allied military commanders during the Pacific War; never mind that at their nearest points, the islands of Indonesia and India lie less than 100 km apart.
In the modern postcolonial era, the development of South and Southeast Asia has been a study of contrasts. Southeast Asian states tended to be aligned rather than staunchly non-aligned, as with India. They tended to be capitalist, solidly anti-communist and freewheeling, not socialist and tied to tedious socialist Five Year Plans. States in Southasia remain locked in bitter conflict with one another, in contrast with Southeast Asia's relative (if sometimes fragile) inter-state harmony. For all of these reasons, there has developed a gulf that reflects little of what the two regions actually have in common: Islam, Buddhism as well as Hinduism, the common use of the English language, and a great love of ancient traditions as well as modern nationalist symbols.
You have to cast back as far as the Bandung Conference, in Indonesia in 1955, to recall a time when South and Southeast Asia last truly chimed and communed on issues of common interest. It was really only after the late Congress Prime Minister P V Narashima Rao visited Singapore in 1994 that India's more recent Look East policy started taking shape. In the meantime, while trade and other indices of cooperation have grown by leaps and bounds, there has remained a curious paucity of understanding. If the cultural influence of the West is waning, it is being replaced by Shanghai chic, not by Bollywood. Even Southeast Asia's reflexive bid to escape China's encroaching embrace has had little tectonic effect on the two regions, which remain physically near but realistically far from one another.