South Asia, Explained

Guest Post by Samyak Dixit

This is an article I’ve been meaning to write for at least two years. The term “South Asia” is one that has seen a sudden surge in usage to describe the land mass that has historically been known in English as the “Indian Subcontinent”. This same part of the world has also been called “Jambudvipa” and “Bharatam” in Sanskrit, and “Barr-E-Saghir” in Urdu (with these being loan words from Arabic). Despite this increase in popularity, “South Asia” has not existed without controversy. And at the root of this controversy is a simple question: Is “South Asia” a valid and accurate category for this part of the world, and does it honestly and accurately encompass the history and culture of this part of the world?

The purpose of this article is two-fold:

1. To compile an objective list of the various phenomena associated with the term. While the term may feel simplistic, I actually think that there are many different streams of thought and narrative trajectories that have combined to create and popularize this term.
2. I also hope to demonstrate why the term “South Asia” fails as a category and will never take off like its proselytizers want it to.

Before I dive into the topic, I wanted to provide a quick background of my own memory of the term. I first remember reading and noticing the term “South Asia” back in 2019 in a small booklet that was supposed to be a primer for Indian foreign policy. In that booklet, the term was sold to the reader (clearly targeted at young, English-educated urban Indians) as a “neutral” term to describe the Indian subcontinent. The reason given was that India, despite being the largest country in the region, was not the only country in the Indian Subcontinent, and hence a more “neutral” term would be more acceptable to other countries. It was explicitly aimed at de-emphasizing the centrality of India to the region, and presented this as something that would be appreciated by India’s neighbors.

At that time, I paid little attention to this. But as I started participating more and more in the Indian discourse on Twitter (now X), I started seeing an acceleration in the usage of the term, especially by western journalists and the “expert class” in the West who work as “India Hands”. The peak of this phenomenon, the absurd extension of this empty and alien term to its logical conclusion, came from this amazing piece in the Gray Lady.

Diwali, of course, the South Asian Festival of Lights. And this is not just one isolated description either. More than one year later, the defeated Vice Presidential candidate of the Democratic Party joined this chorus towards the tail-end of his failed campaign.

We can also consider this insightful (but paywalled) article in the mothership of “South Asianism” itself – The Juggernaut. The article goes into “how brown people around the world reclaimed a term created by CIA-funded orientalists”.

The immediate conclusion one can draw is: even the users of this term do not know what the appropriate usage is. Is “South Asia” a region? A common culture? A social entity? Nobody really knows, but they seem to want to continue to mindlessly use the term anyway.

As the years went on, I started following this trend too. And it came across as a topic that did not just possess one single explanation. It wasn’t just one group of people that had suddenly started to use this term. It seemed to be increasingly used by many different groups, all of whom were using the term for their own purposes. It came across as a messy and entangled phenomenon, and I even started to struggle to keep track of it.

An example of this exploration was when I stumbled upon the textbook controversy in California that had played out in the mid-2010s. When I started exploring this controversy (years after it had actually happened), this struggle, led by the likes of Suhag Shukla, came across as a canary in the coalmine for this phenomenon. So many elements of this story, and this NYT article on the story in particular, demonstrate the multi-layered confusion of the “South Asia” phenomenon. The most startling of which is the dynamic between the pushback from Indian-origin Americans against the imposition of the term, which was being propagandized by Western “Indologists” who have no relationship to India and the Subcontinent beyond an academic one.

The most revealing part of this article is how the Gray Lady continues to uncritically use the term “South Asia” in its own “reporting” language, while seemingly exploring how and why the term is complicated, and is being rejected by the people who are being categorized by it. Jennifer Medina opens her article by saying “Victors are said to write history. But in California, history is being written by a committee that is at the center of a raging debate over how to tell the story of South Asia as it tries to update textbooks and revise curriculums for Grades 6 and 7”. Later in the article, she writes, “During a hearing last month, dozens of Indian students spoke out against the changes the South Asian scholars have suggested to the commission, accusing them of “Hinduphobia” and robbing them of selfhood”. I couldn’t make this up if I tried…

It’s a bizarre scene, and reminds me of the pushback by Latino communities in the U.S. against the term “Latinx”, similarly exogenous in its origin and the product of evangelization by the American priestly class. This is what makes the 2016 California textbook controversy an important primer for this series of articles. One can find the Gray Lady’s coverage of it over here.

As we dive into this series of articles on “South Asia”, my goal is to demystify all angles of this peculiar phenomenon, and to endeavor to explain to the reader where the sudden usage of this term is coming from, who uses it, and why.

Let’s start by exploring the historical origin of the term.

South Asia as an Instrument of U.S. Security Policy

The very first angle I want to explore regarding the term “South Asia” is its obscure and nebulous origin. In particular, I wanted to confirm a nagging suspicion I had been developing since I first encountered the term. This suspicion was based on one simple assumption: as this is a matter of naming and categorization, I was sure that there would be an Anglo/American role in the emergence of the term. In particular, it gave off the scent of an American military mind, and it seemed like the obvious thing for the U.S. Intelligence Community to come up with a “South Asia” to complement the existence of “West Asia”, “East Asia” and “South-East Asia”. It made perfect sense in the context of the American obsessive instinct towards categorization and their need to sort the world into regions based on military theaters as they run their Empire.

I’m happy to report that this suspicion seems to be largely true. This paper titled “Imaginations and Constructions of South Asia: An Enchanting Abstraction?”, published, of course, in the South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ), is a great place for us to start as we try to declutter this term and its obscure origins.

In the section “Tracing the genealogy of the name”, author Aminah Mohammad-Arif, states the following:

“There is however consensus that the word “South Asia” officially emerged as a category to divide the Asian continent, in the wake of the establishment of area studies in the United States. This emergence was the outcome of two interlinked concerns: one was the development of scholarship on the ancient Indic civilization; the second was a strategic interest in the study of contemporary Asia as the Second World War had highlighted the shortage of specialists capable of dealing with economic, social and political issues in the region. As Nicholas Dirks (2003) explains, Norman Brown, a professor of Sanskrit at the University of Pennsylvania, was particularly instrumental in establishing this conjuncture and in subsequently shaping South Asian area studies between 1926 and 1966…”

“Yet, the very fact of establishing interdisciplinary research centers on the Subcontinent, named after the term “South Asia”, has endorsed the region with some unity in academic circles and beyond. Similarly, the creation of journals, entitled South Asia(n)…, such as SAMAJ, contributes to construct the region as a cultural entity. That, in reality, India occupies center stage in most area studies departments and publications is symptomatic of a peculiar feature characterizing the Subcontinent, mentioned above, i.e. the “asymmetrical” presence of India in the region, an issue to which we will return later”.

“To come back to the history of the name “South Asia” as such, the word was also used from the 1940s to the 1970s by policy-making institutions such as the American State Department*,** which published in 1959 a briefing document entitled The Subcontinent of South Asia, and international organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank”.*

“The genealogy of the word thus shows that it was officially conceived and used outside the Subcontinent testifying to its exogeneity”.

A big thank you to Ms. Aminah, who brilliantly pulls the curtain down on the history of the term “South Asia” in her paper. As we can see, the term clearly originated outside the Subcontinent of India. It originated explicitly in American Academia and Security circles to categorize the Indian Subcontinent in a way that was less centered on just one country (India). We also get a name – William Norman Brown – to help us set an important marker in explaining the emergence of this term.

Information on Mr. Brown is limited, but here’s what the X AI assistant Grok has to say on the good professor:

William Norman Brown:

• Pennsylvania’s South Asia Program: Brown was instrumental in founding one of the earliest academic programs dedicated to the study of the region. His work at the University of Pennsylvania included setting up a comprehensive program that covered the arts, languages, religions, and histories of the region, which he referred to as “South Asia.” This academic focus helped legitimize and popularize the term.
• Publications and Lectures: Through his extensive publications and lectures, Brown promoted a holistic view of the region that went beyond just India, encompassing the broader cultural and political entities now categorized under South Asia. His academic work helped in shaping how scholars viewed and studied the region, influencing both educational curricula and research orientations.
• Cultural Exchange and Understanding: Brown’s efforts were also aimed at fostering cultural exchange and understanding between the U.S. and South Asia. By using “South Asia,” he highlighted the interconnectedness and diversity of the region, which was crucial in an era where understanding cultural nuances was becoming as important as understanding political boundaries.

Again, this history is on expected lines, and just helps us put a face to the origin of “South Asia”.

Now let’s return to Ms. Aminah’s paper:

“Several decades after its appearance and increasing use in regional and international institutional circles, the term “South Asia” remains, however, a largely debated and often contested as an artificial and exogenous category”.

Some even see “South Asia” as an empty category, whose sole heuristic value might be that the word is politically neutral (Sugata Bose & Ayesha Jalal 1999: 3), as opposed to the “Indian Subcontinent” which includes the name of one of the countries of the region.

In just a few paragraphs, Ms. Aminah’s research has helped us establish that our hunch about the origins of “South Asia” was correct. It’s also startling to me how this description by Ms. Aminah matches almost word-for-word with the small foreign policy pamphlet I had read back in 2019. It’s a small insight into how western academia builds consensus over topics and terminology, till the point where you as the subject of categorization are now being described using a term that you’ve never heard of before. The emotionless nature of the term itself (described by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal as “politically neutral”, which is a phrase worth exploring in itself), seeking to pull out any possible emotion or sentiment (that usually accompanies history) from the description of a region, also displays the American Regime’s impulse towards sterility. This, of course, is an obvious extension of the impulse that renames blind people as “visually impaired”, or civilian casualties during war as “collateral damage”, or one that measures strontium radiation levels after a nuclear fallout in “sunshine units”. Like most Americanisms, “South Asia” is cold, sterile, and designed to be so.

While I do not agree with everything she lays out in her paper, Ms. Aminah’s chronicling of the invention and external imposition of this term on the Indian subcontinent is a great starting point for this series of articles, and makes the alien nature of “South Asia”, and consequent unwitting imposition on one-fourth of the world’s population, clear and undeniable.

I suppose that I should also make mention of the foundation of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in 1985 as an economic and political regional organization made up of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Afghanistan later also joined SAARC in 2007. Without going into the details of this organization, for the purposes of this article, it is significant to note the usage of the term “South Asia” to name an official forum in the year 1985. This marks a worthwhile touchstone for us as we track the usage of the term, as the term has clearly graduated from the dimly-lit corridors of American universities to being accepted as the official category by then-leaders of the nations of the Subcontinent. And from what we have already encountered in this section, it would not surprise me one bit if there was the hand of some American “South Asia Studies” academic behind the naming of the organization…

So, dear reader, you might be asking yourself: So what? So what if the term is invented in a foreign land? Isn’t it still a good thing that the other countries of the Subcontinent are not being made to feel left out? Why should anyone oppose such an obviously positive development?

Even though I disagree with these questions, I do not want to dismiss them completely. Instead, through the other sections in this article, I will explore the various different streams that have gone into the adoption of this terminology that still largely remains alien to the Subcontinent, and the large mass of people who live in the region.

We have established a few things in this section: If I went into writing this series with an educated guess that the obsessive Anglo/American instinct of categorization was behind the invention of this artificial term, then Ms. Aminah’s research has confirmed my speculation. We have established that “South Asia” is a term that is external and alien to the Indian subcontinent. It is an alien term, created by American academics and diplomats/spies, partially out of ideology and partially to come up with a categorization of this complex part of the world. Taking these points as established, I will continue to explore the various streams in the next sections.

But before I get into those sections, I want to briefly touch on the shortfalls of using incorrect terminology or an inaccurate lens of categorization. Simply put, the need for accurate categorization understandably arises as one is trying to study a complex topic. When you start objectively studying social phenomena that are diverse and multifaceted, the need for accurate definitions and categories arises is self-evident. If you do not categorize and define terms accurately, you run the risk of every single piece of analysis that you conduct on top of this categorization to be built on shaky assumptions. If your categories are not right, you are building a castle of sand.

This, I believe, is the eventual fate of the expanding usage of the term “South Asia” in academic and official circles today.

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