Guest Post by Samyak Dixit

Read the Previous Part in the “South Asia” Series Here

So let’s dig into it. Removing India’s centrality in its region.

It’s a noble goal. Right? This is, of course, presented by our American friends as an act of charity towards the other nations in the Indian subcontinent – those small, helpless, masses who have spent centuries being crushed by the thumb of Indian aggression and imperialism… And of course, it is to elevate the voiceless masses of these helpless nations – like Pakistan or Afghanistan – that the American academic has decided to intervene on the behalf of a quarter of the world’s population and impose these alien categories on them.

Now, as we move beyond the sarcasm, the need to investigate this instinct becomes more apparent. The simple question that cuts to the heart of the issue is:

Why? Why is it so important for the American academic to not have India as the central entity in the region?

Let’s start with the obvious – by presenting the case for why the modern Republic of India deserves to be the central node in any discussion surrounding the region.

Colonial Roots

First, and quite self-evidently, India is the largest country in the Subcontinent, and as a result, will, and should, naturally be at the center of the discourse about the region and its categorization. While it may be true that it is not only Indians that live in this region, it is also true that any discussion about the region without considering the Indian identity and development is incomplete and inaccurate. With its size and central role in the region, India and her culture have greatly affected the historical and sociological trajectories of her neighbors over a period of thousands of years, and continue to do so today. The region has seen millenia of cultural exchanges and transfers, from big country (going by modern-borders) to small, or from small country to big. If we are objectively trying to get our categories right, then placing India at the center of the discourse surrounding the Subcontinent is a perfectly defensible position. It would be a far more accurate categorization than one that is defined by its purposeful emptiness and distance – like “South Asia”.

Upon further exploration, I also think that this curious desire to unperson the entire country of India and remove its epistemological centrality in the region (nothing more than what geography and history objectively point towards) by western forces cannot, and should not, be considered a purely good-faith act. Given the history of this field, given the history of western colonization and the overrepresentation of westerners in the field of “Indology” (a true outlier when compared to other similar “area studies” fields in Western Academia), we cannot rule out bad faith activism and ideological arson in this bizarre obsession with the epistemological erasure of India. And like with any social phenomenon, a brief trip down history will help us understand this arson better.

It’s perhaps easiest to start with the British colonial denial of Indian nationhood. This is a well-known aspect of Indian history that most of my readers will already be aware of, but it bears repeating here for the sake of thoroughness.

The story only truly starts after nearly a century of the establishment of British rule in India (primarily starting in Bengal and then moving onto a conquest of the rest of the country, by hook and crook). We start in the late-19th and early-20th century, with the British Empire coming under fire from the “prayers and petitions” of the newly British-educated Indian nationalists regarding the Dominion Status policy of the Empire. By this point in their Empire, the governing British aristocracy had been pushed (through internal and external forces) towards a stated policy of granting their existing colonies the status of a “Dominion of the Crown”, and they promised to grant this status only to those groups of people who could show that they are indeed one, undivided, nation and could demonstrate that they could achieve “responsible self-government” within their boundaries. Examples of this “process” can be found in other modern nation states like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, who were made Dominions by the British Empire before they became fully sovereign nations. This being the British Empire, there were no truly objective standards for what defined or characterized an “undivided nation capable of responsible self-government”. The British were, of course, the prosecutor and the jury on this criteria of “being one nation”.

As the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire and a reliable source of wealth extraction, the British understandably did not want to grant India the status of a Dominion, which meant that it became imperative to demonstrate in public that India was not a nation and therefore definitionally incapable of establishing responsible self-government for the whole country.

Evidence of this can be found in the failure of The Commonwealth of India Bill, 1925 to be passed within the British Parliament. This Bill proposed that “… India should be placed on an equality with the Self-Governing Dominions, sharing their responsibilities and their privileges, as a Free State in the Federation of Free States owing allegiance to H. I. M. the King-Emperor”. Due to the winds of British politics, this Bill failed, and the goal of turning India into a Self-Governing Dominion was even dropped by most Indian nationalists in 1929.

I think it’s much easier to understand statements like the ones made by Churchill and John Strachee, or read the histories of colonial historians (like Vincent Smith or Mountstuart Elphinstone) when reading them in this context. And I’m not completely dismissing this point of view as being guided purely by self-interest. For all their faults, the British were some of the most pragmatic colonizers the world has ever seen, and their primary interest in studying the various countries and peoples they colonized was to obtain an objective understanding of the subject population. Only this would allow their aristocrats to craft the form of governance needed to sustain their Empire and the industrial capitalism it facilitated. There was something very calculated and scientific about this approach to Empire, and I think the British genuinely studied India and found it to be a country defined by its centrifugal forces. One that would need a strong, central, possibly alien, ruler to oversee and keep together. The British genuinely believed what they wrote about the nature of India and Indians, including the fact that it was not one, coherent, nation.

Over the centuries, this British colonial viewpoint of India has stuck, and has eventually become the foundational assumption with which most western “scholarship” started with when it came to India. We can even see this assumption regurgitated by the prominent British-influenced Asian leader Lee Kuan Yew, in his infamous assertion that “India is not a real country. Instead it is thirty-two separate nations that happen to be arrayed along the British rail line”. As the United States took over from the British Empire, these assumptions were understandably transmitted from the British aristocratic class to the American Priestly Class (university academics, i.e. “experts”), who often built upon the works of British historians. Suddenly, the instinct of the American academic to instinctively deny Indian nationhood makes a lot more sense…

Islamic Exceptionalism

The next aspect of denialism when it comes to Indian nationhood comes from a source much closer to the Subcontinent – the Muslim aristocracy (and their progeny), whether they live in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh, who were the ruling class of much of India through a large portion of the medieval period. Given their power and influence over multiple centuries, and their central role in forcing the Partition of India on religious lines, and even modern domestic Indian politics, it makes sense to study what their intellectual instincts are when they look at India, and how these instincts drive their political action.

An objective study of this group reveals that, like with almost any of their political activity in this country, the Elite Muslim political instinct in India is driven by what is best described as the “psychology of separateness”.

Separateness is the core instinct of any convert population that still lives among the culture it has converted away from. And the reasons for this are obvious, but worth repeating. If you are a convert running away from an Indic tradition (like the vast majority of Subcontinent Muslims are) who is a minority but has to live alongside a much larger majority culture, you have to constantly mark yourself out as distinct and separate from this majority culture, or else you risk losing your separate identity and being slowly “assimilated” into the majority culture. Therefore, the things that separate you from the majority culture become the most important parts of your identity. On an individual level, you can see this in the fact that the convert first tries to dress differently and wear different names from the majority culture surrounding them. On a cultural level, the convert wants to have separate food habits from the majority (hence the oversized importance of eating beef in India), wear distinct clothes, and even speak a different language and write in a separate script from the majority (in India this role is played by Urdu and the Naskh script). Socially, it manifests itself in the fight for separate laws, separate education systems, separate institutions, all the while petitioning to Power (whether it is the British Colonial Aristocrats, or the Shuddho Elite that succeeded them) that these are necessary to retain your separateness and any attempts to bring you in the same realm as the majority is an assault on your “distinct identity”. This instinct puts the convert in a praxis of permanent dialectical mutiny against his pre-conversion culture and religion. On a social level, this instinct becomes the key to collective survival for any converted population and is the single most important driver of their interaction with the rest of the society. On a political level, it has manifested in the Subcontinent with the forced creation of the Islamic Republics of Pakistan and Bangladesh. From the individual level to the national, the praxis and instinct is consistent and thorough.

Perhaps my favorite example of this instinct comes from the history of Islam in its early years. In order to set his true believers apart from the non-believers (referred-to in the texts by the moniker “People of the Book”), the Prophet Muhammad is reported to have told his followers to “Trim the mustaches and let the beards grow; be different from the Magians”. “Magians” here is supposed to mean “those who follow Magis”, with Magis being Priests of Zoroastrianism. This is obviously an important historical example, recorded in the Islamic texts themselves, and credited as being the words of the Prophet himself. While there is an aspect in this advice/instruction that is related to personal hygiene, the main purpose is supposed to be to set the believer apart from the non-believers, and to create a separate, distinct, visible – here manifested in a very physical and external form – identity for the believer. My favorite part of this example is that the specific physical form – without a mustache but with a beard – is supposed to have been a direct inversion of the look of the followers of the Zoroastrian faith they were trying to differentiate themselves from. The Persians are said to have kept mustaches, but not beards!

It is important to understand this instinct of separateness to fully realize how it plays out in the sphere of politics. Its primary impact is that it leads to the implanting of a new tribalism in the hearts and minds of the convert, permanently replacing the old tribalism. This is why the Bengali Muslim sitting in Chattogram has a higher sense of tribalism for the displaced Arab Muslims in Gaza, than he might have for the Bengali Hindus displaced in the political turmoil of August 2024 in Bangladesh. There are many other books that can help you understand the deeper instincts of Muslim politics in the Subcontinent, its driving factors and its Dreams and fears. But for the purpose of this article, this instinct helps us understand why in the minds of the Muslim elite of the Subcontinent, who were prominent players in the ruling of the country till the British arrived, the nation of India cannot be central to any discussion on the Subcontinent. This is because in the minds of this Muslim elite, India represents “Hinduness”, and the Muslim Elite is therefore instinctively inclined to separate themselves from the name “India” itself.

It’s worth understanding what standards of proof this Muslim elite uses for their conclusion. They consider India to be a “Hindu” country not because the modern Republic of India is explicitly Hindu in its goals or laws. Rather, the Republic of India is considered “Hindu” … by default. Keep in mind, this is not a new accusation that this old Muslim Aristocracy has towards India, one that has only come up suddenly in the last ten years when the country had a supposedly more outwardly “Hindu” government and polity. This same Muslim elite, represented back then by the All India Muslim League, was making the exact same accusations towards the Congress-lead Freedom Struggle movement in the late 1930s-early 1940s. Keep in mind this was a Congress led by Gandhi and Nehru, who were self-professed champions of “Hindu-Muslim unity”, a cause they held so dearly that no cost in terms of lives or bloodshed was high enough for it to be given up on.

The only conclusion one can draw is that this elite considers India to be a “Hindu” country by default because the presence of Hindus (and other non-Muslim populations) means that the polity and culture of modern India is not explicitly Muslim. The laws governing a Hindu majority polity will not be Islamic laws, unless they are enforced through violence and conquest, as they were in the medieval age. Therefore, India is “Hindu”, and the convert needs to establish some “distance” from it to maintain his distinct identity. In the minds of the Subcontinent Muslim elite, this is why India’s epistemological centrality in the Subcontinent has to be prevented.

Now, one element of this worth touching on is that the Muslim Elite of India has historically used their own Urdu term to refer to the Indian Subcontinent. This term is “Barr-E-Saghir”, which literally translates to “Subcontinent”. “Barr” meaning “land” or “continent” and “Saghir” meaning “small” or “minor”. This being Urdu, these are obviously loan words from Arabic. The thing that immediately stands out to me here is the absence of “India” in the name. Instead, the term takes a general approach, almost as if it were referring to any unnamed small continent in the world. There is no place for “India” in the Muslim Elite conception of the Subcontinent.

Which is why South Asia, “politically neutral” and devoid of any reference to the “unacceptably-Hindu” India is a perfect term for the Old Muslim Elite of India.

The Shuddho

Somewhere in the middle of these two understandings of India – the thesis of the British Colonial “Parts but not the Whole” view of India and the antithesis of the Muslim Elite Praxis of Separateness – lies the synthesis Shuddho view of India. This view of India takes the above two views as undeniable assumptions and is primarily concerned with maintaining what it euphemistically calls “communal harmony”. It starts with the “facts” that the Republic of India is an accident of history created by the British administrator for the purposes of management and governance, and the Muslim Elite’s desire to maintain separateness and the consequent ghettoization that follows, as non-negotiable starting points for the modern Indian polity. Shuddho considers these two assumptions to be unchangeable features of the Social Contract of the 1950 Republic, and believes that maintaining this Social Contract is the single most important objective of Indian politics.

Most of India’s Legacy Nehruvian ruling Elite, which has spent much of the last decade either pulling up the gates of their little institutional castles as they wait out the storm of the 2010s, or has “graduated” to becoming “India whisperers” for western liberal institutions, considers the Shuddho view of the country to be axiomatically true. This understanding of India is primarily concerned with what it perceives as communal peace-keeping, like a parent trying to manage their immature and argumentative children, and it consequently considers any outward statement praising India or Indian nationalism as “majoritarianism” (again assumed to be “Hindu” in nature) to be a clear and obvious threat to this painfully-brokered “peace”.

Shuddho as a belief structure subscribes to the belief system that Arun Shourie in “Eminent Historians” called “The Parts but not the Whole” understanding of India. In this view of India, the “whole” of the Indian nation is not real. Instead, the only things that are “real” about India are her “parts”. Therefore, Shuddho is much more likely to pick at India’s seams and talk only about the things that are not common throughout India. They will pick at the faultline of language, of jaati/varna, of region, of history. It’s not that different to how many western-trained academics looked at Yugoslavia and only saw Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, etc. Shuddho looks at India and only sees the centrifugal forces operating in India. What 20th-century Indian nationalists, even ones like Nehru and Gandhi (now the heroes of Shuddho), considered to be India’s diversity, bound together by a civilizational glue, Shuddho sees today as disparate parts only glued together by British law and railways.

Is it any wonder then, that if you don’t even think India is a coherent nation, that you wouldn’t want India to be the epistemological center in her own region? If India is not even a nation, how can it be the most significant nation in the Subcontinent? This is why the term “South Asia” is an easy term for Shuddho to latch onto. “South Asia” conveniently helps describe this region with a complex history where the largest country is an accident of history plagued by fault lines (that will obviously balkanize them and put everyone out of their misery…) in a “political neutral” way.

Therefore, for Shuddho, the post-Partition managers of India, “South Asia” is a helpful term to deal with the pesky and inconvenient past, especially the Partition Moment of Exception that has been the starting point of most of the post-1947 history of the region.

As our old friend Professor Carol Christine Fair, the staunch Southasianist, puts it below:

“Never did ONE ruler consolidate control over all of South Asia prior to the British. You can make up shit and deploy mansak mingnis from WhatsApp. It’s still just mansik mingnis. Look at maps for f*s sake.“

(Mansik Mingnis!)

Professor Fair is spicy and memorable in her madness, but she touches on a belief that has been a starting point of all rulers of India, from Dalhousie to Churchill to Indira Gandhi. All of these rulers have expected India to succumb to its centrifugal forces and obvious contradictions, eventually. Therefore, in the minds of those peeking at India from the outside, “South Asia” can also be seen as a term for the future. A future with an India balkanized on the basis of jaati/varna, language or region. India has always been too diverse to be able to survive as one nation in the long run anyway… So if you are preparing for such a future, or expect it to happen one day, eventually, there’s no wonder that you do not want the region to be called “Indian Subcontinent”. In this view of the future, guided by the supposed lessons of the past, “South Asia” makes for a much safer bet for what the future of India, and the region, will eventually be. And it helps understand, from all the various angles – cold British calculation, instinctive Muslim praxis, or Shuddho communal “management” – why “South Asia” is the perfect symbol for the denial of Indian nationhood.

This is the third part of a multipart series. To follow along & find more of Samyak, follow him at his Twitter & Substack