The term, “South Asia”, makes geography prevail over history and culture. But geography cannot determine the culture of a region.
The seemingly innocuous is acquiring controversial edges. Names, and the manner in which they are used, do not ordinarily appear to be the stuff of debate. But in California, there was a raging controversy recently over the name given to the subcontinent in the school syllabi there. A number of people have grave objections to Indian history being labelled South Asian history. This will strike a chord among Indians who will resent being made part of a catch-all category like South Asia. There are more serious objections to the category called South Asia. The category is of very recent origin and is a fallout of the process of the withdrawal of the British Empire from the Indian subcontinent. The British did not only leave this geographical area, they divided it and left. Not satisfied with this division, British academics coined the term, “South Asia”, into which they lumped together India, Pakistan, Nepal, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and, after 1971, Bangladesh. A large geographical space that had for many centuries been part of similar civilizational currents and influences was broken up and disaggregated in an attempt to give them distinct regional characteristics. They were then aggregated to form South Asia, to bring them under another new academic label – area studies.
This genealogy of the term, “South Asia”, justifies the point made by some scholars in the United States of America that the term is an anachronism when used to refer to historical epochs that predate the withdrawal of the British from the Indian subcontinent. The use of “South Asia” to refer to India’s ancient and medieval worlds is a deliberate attempt to deny the civilizational unity that was such a remarkable feature of India’s past. There was something unique in the way the various influences that came into play on the Indian soil in a historical way were fused together to form an entity that goes by the name, “Indian civilization”. The fusion allows for distinctness as well as for unity. “South Asia” in no way conveys this. Its use, in fact, makes geography prevail over history and culture. Geography cannot determine the history or the culture of a region.
This is not to suggest that the term, “Indian civilization”, which is very capacious, is completely unproblematic. It is often used synonymously with Hindu civilization and this creates serious issues because it makes “India” out to be narrow and exclusive rather than wide and inclusive. The term, “Hindu”, is often used to describe India’s ancient world. But even in that world there were large realms of human activity and achievement, which cannot be described, by any stretch of the imagination, as being Hindu. The attempt to lump together India and Hindu is as pernicious as the project to appropriate or suppress India under the category, “South Asia”. The champions of “India” over South Asia in California and elsewhere should tread with caution and ensure that “India” does not become Hindu.
