Southasia: A Possibility

There are continents, nations, states, and cities - all of them understood in terms of location and culture, society and politics. But what about an alternative way of describing a (to begin with) geographic location that is transnational in the contemporary times but has shared tradition, history, mythology, culture and other intangible bonds?

As human beings reorient themselves to the world in the face of economic, political, religious and environmental crises, we feel the need to explore other ways of being and belonging, existing and associating. That is where new conceptions of elgraphy need to be allowed to emerge.

It is in this context, that we ask the question: What is South Asia? This journal, Sindhu, is a quest to explore the many ways in which the question can be made sense of.

There is a lot of ambiguity around the notion of South Asia. Is it a cluster of countries? Or is it constituted by historical processes that gave rise to the need to address this location as a singular identity? What is this singular identity predicated on? Our attempt is to leverage this singularity to call it Southasia. Sindhu seeks to find possibilities to ascertain this idea of Southasia and also to invite critiques of the same.

The questions that interest us include: What is common to all the units - nations, cities, cultures, knowledges, academia - of analysis here? How does South Asia look at itself and the various cultural affinities that the nation-states here share with their neighbours? Sindhu is an attempt to bring the academicians working in the humanities to engage with these questions, to understand if South Asia can be understood as Southasia.

In our reading of various reputed journals publishing articles and research on South Asia, we have come across this regionality as a given. We, the facilitators at Sindhu, are interested in investigating the origins and manifestations of this unity while also being mindful of the diversity and differences. Do we, the readers and authors working in the South Asian studies, really look at ourselves as “a collective of reluctant states”? (Nandy 541). How can we participate in an exchange that makes this discussion possible and worthwhile?

One idea to explore is to recognise and articulate the similarities amongst South Asians. While the toponym South Asia is a poor choice used only because it is neutral (Nandy 542), more work needs to be done to examine a precolonial consciousness, such as Hindustan, (explored by Manan Ahmed Asif in his recent book The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India) which demonstrates that there are commonalities that South Asians deserve to engage with. These commonalities and contexts need to be foregrounded in all kinds of exchanges among South Asians, not because they do not know about the possibilities of these but because they have been systematically erased by the colonizers. Therefore, they deserve to be made visible too quite systematically.

South Asia is a term that calls for knowledge-oriented discussions by virtue of its neutrality and a lack of emotionality - Nandy calls it “acultural, emotionally empty, territorial concept” (Ibid). The term is usually not a bother when it comes to talking about poetry, fiction, or any other form of cultural text originating here or referring to the region. If it is indeed a shorthand for the region that has experienced colonisation but more importantly has shared tradition, discussing it in terms of an entity that resists definition will turn out to be an interesting exercise.