The Indian Mimicry Behind “South Asia”

Guest Post by Samyak Dixit

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

So far in this series of articles, we have covered various different angles of the phenomenon around the term “South Asia”. We’ve looked at the American role in the creation of this term and its propagation as ideology. We’ve seen the hazy idealism of Diaspora Southasianism (or the “Brown” or “Desi” phenomenon) and the centrality of the term for Pakistanis in their permanent search for a coherent identity. In this current section, we will now look at an important group of people we haven’t covered so far – Indians.

On the face of it, Indians have a peculiar relationship with the term “South Asia”. Of all the groups we have discussed so far, Indians have the most to lose with the adoption of this term, and the epistemological replacement/erasure of the “Indian Subcontinent”. So why would any Indian be interested in using this term? It is a mystery indeed, but I think there are two primary, and interconnected, reasons for this.

First, we need to realize that there is a noticeable internal divide within the Indian political discourse regarding the term. More specifically, divisions over the term seem to manifest along the already-existing class and status lines of post-Partition Indian society. Therefore, what the honest observer of this phenomenon will find is that the most common users of “South Asia” in India seem to be the English-educated Old Elite class. I’ve previously termed this class of people as “Shuddho”, and even though their influence has waned over the last decade, this Shuddho class continues to have a heavy presence in Legacy Indian institutions like the media, education institutions, publishing houses, etc. This is the group of people most likely to be caught unironically using the term “South Asia” to describe this region.

On the other side of the divide are the group of people I would describe as the post-Liberalization Middle Class of India, whose political influence has grown in the last decade and a half and who have shook up Indian discourse to a considerable extent, often at the cost of a retreat from Shuddho from this very discourse. These people might not be attending art fairs, literature fests or Urdu poetry slams, but they’re loud and vocal on social media. This latter group also has the numbers on their side, and they are more in the nature of an unorganized ideological stampede than an insulated vanguard. This nouveau riche Indian class is the one that can be seen increasingly protesting the encroachment of the term “South Asia” in the Indian discourse. From a sociological point of view, it is fascinating to find that the division over the usage of “South Asia” maps so clearly onto a broader divide that has become the main cleavage of Indian political discourse over the last decade.

To fully explore this phenomenon, I think we need to first understand why Shuddho has so eagerly adopted “South Asia”. On the face of it, this adoption makes little sense, but exploring the different angles involved here will give us a clearer picture. And while they are a diminishing force in the Indian political discourse, Shuddho still maintains enough of an inertial presence in Indian discourse that it is necessary to study how their mind works on a topic.

The Shuddho’s South Asia

The first reason for the Shuddho proclivity towards adopting “South Asia” is what I would describe as “Shuddho empathy”. Let’s walk through this concept through a hypothetical Shuddho explanation for their use of “South Asia”:

Sure, the category “South Asia” has been explicitly designed to undermine Indian nationhood and its (natural, just by size, location, and population) central place in the term used to describe this Subcontinent. 

But so what? If adopting this new, more “neutral” term helps calm the fears of the other nations in the Subcontinent, why shouldn’t Indians be open to adopting it? If anything, giving up “centrality” in the terminology proves that we are the bigger and mature nation willing to extend a hand to the helpless neighboring nations (like Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, of course) that feel permanently threatened by India’s mere existence! It displays India’s higher moral standing and proves that we are the kinder, gentler elder brother to these helpless neighboring nations…

True to the nature of Shuddho, the above way of thinking is mostly heady rhetoric that is drenched in pathos. The purpose of this line of argumentation is to “win” an inebriated argument in a Khan Market café at 9:00 pm on a Thursday evening. My own position is that this is an unsustainable way of thinking on foreign policy and foreign relations. That’s not to say that it is wrong or “weak” to have an ideal version for how things should be, in the foreign policy space or beyond. It’s just that the idealist school, while noble, is simply not enough to navigate a world full of rationally self-interested and highly-motivated actors who are scrambling for limited resources in a Game Theory scenario. In that context, this rhetoric ends up sounding ephemeral and substanceless. “Words are wind”, as George R.R. Martin says in his A Song of Ice and Fire series…

Now, liberalism and idealism are indeed established schools of foreign policy. But there is a reason why many thinkers who espouse liberalism and idealism in their domestic setup still end up becoming realists when it comes to foreign policy. This is because foreign policy is measured by how well you protect and advance a nation’s interests – material and non-material – in the context of the narrow and limited hand you are dealt with. There simply isn’t as much wiggle-room on the crowded global stage for any nation to down tools and act in a way that undermines its own interests in order to project idealism. You cannot control your geography, the pacifism/aggression of your neighbor, the desires of the global hegemon, etc. While being a “bigger and more mature nation” or talking about India’s “moral standing” (a phrase that Shuddho keeps using, but never explains what it actually means. Moral standing in front of whom?) in the region and the world are good soundbites, they fall apart when one asks the basic question of: what would India have to gain or lose by the relevant action? Shuddho’s rhetoric fails to meet this basic test of foreign policy realism and the confusing actions they’ve taken in the past (like the complete non-response to Pakistan’s attack on Mumbai on November 26, 2008, an inaction that destroyed Shuddho’s Mandate of Heaven among an entire generation of young Indians) demonstrates that this is an old struggle of Shuddho in this realm. It goes all the way back to J.L. Nehru, who was so confident in his foreign policy credentials that he did not have a Foreign Minister in his cabinet. He bet the farm on his foreign policy, which included the disastrous “Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai” policy. Nehru’s idealism led him to believe his own rhetoric on this matter, and it led to the Chinese invading and occupying Tibet and finally backstabbing Nehru but invading parts of northern and North East India. This “betrayal” by the Chinese is said to have destroyed Nehru, and he died not too long after. This failure is probably the first of many that can be attributed to the substance-less idealism that the Indian foreign policy blob has shown over the years. It did not work in “Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai” and increasing “India’s moral standing” by adopting “South Asia” certainly won’t help better our relations with the other countries in our complex and crowded neighborhood.

Even beyond the failures of Shuddho in their air-headed foreign policy idealism, there is one other factor that undermines Shuddho’s emotion-based rhetoric in this line of thinking – it doesn’t map onto Shuddho’s own actions since Partition. For all that they can be criticized for, Shuddho has historically dealt with India’s internal territorial integrity and any challenges to it (including armed insurrections, Left-Wing extremist movements separatist movements) with a remarkable degree of seriousness. It has crushed separatist movements in many different states with a level of efficiency that has drawn severe criticism from many, farther Left, quarters. I might be letting my biases show here, but talk of empathy in foreign policy is one best left for academic journals and Bohemian cafés, and if you a citizen of a country (unless you live in the world hegemon – the United States, who uses idealism like “Rules Based Order” to exercise power) whose foreign policy elite spends their time talking about (and acting on) the country’s “moral standing”, you should be very, very worried. On “moral standing”, to their credit, Shuddho has often failed to practice what it preached!

Therefore, if one were to narrow down the adoption of “South Asia” by Indians to a frame of national self-interest, and if one were basing their analysis on reason and logic, the Indian ruling class should reject the imposition of the term “South Asia” by Americans, despite emotional arguments for “inclusivity” from Southasianist Georgetown Professors. From the point of view of Indian interests, the pushing of “South Asia” is a naked attempt to undermine India’s rightful place in the region through epistemological mischief and erasure. It doesn’t quite offer anything truly substantive to our allies in the Subcontinent (e.g. Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, etc.) either apart from a surface-level rhetorical balm on any perceived sense of grievance they might have against Indian overreach (which I’ve never truly understood, because the “grievances” seem to arise from India’s disproportionate influence in the economy and culture of the region, which is not some smoke-filled-room conspiracy but rather just a result of India’s size and history as a nation in this region).

More importantly, the Southasianist Georgetown Professor does not offer anything to India and Indians in return for consciously-admitted and naked attempts at epistemological erasure. We’re supposed to go from using a term that is rational and logical and obviously serves India’s interests, to one that erases the above and offers Indians nothing in return. Any rational actor would reject such a trade. It’s a zero-sum game, and the “zero” in this particular game seems to be reserved for Indians alone…

And while this is a cheap point for me to make, it does bear repeating: the same line of argument that the American academic uses for replacing the “Indian Subcontinent” with “South Asia” can be applied to the Indian Ocean too. In fact, the argument for changing the Indian Ocean to something more “neutral” is even more convincing if one follows this logic. The countries that have a presence in the Indian Ocean span a much more diverse set of nations than the Indian Subcontinent. These are countries that lie on different continents (Asia, Africa, Australia, etc.), are homes to vastly divergent cultures and histories. They make up the spectrum of countries ranging from India to Somalia to Yemen to Indonesia to Australia. If anything, there should be harsher cries from our favorite Georgetown Professor to rename the Indian Ocean to something more “inclusive”. But no such cries exist. Why?

The answer, of course, is simple. The desire to epistemologically replace India’s “centrality” in the region does not come from wanting to be “more inclusive” or to cater to the sensibilities of the smaller nations in the region. The real, actual reason is, in many ways, boring. It has to do with the very specific and peculiar history of the Indian Subcontinent and the nations that inhabit it. The core driving force is an instinct that I can only call Partition Denialism.

The Whitewashing

Simply put, it comes back to the confounding Western desire to play a game of moral equivalency when it comes to the Partition of India. I, however, believe that the “neutrality” over the Partition discourse in western academia is a morally indefensible one.

The discourse around this bizarre Partition Denialism demonstrates the following pattern: First, the blame for Partition is attempted to be thrown onto the outgoing British aristocrats and politicians. As the departing Foreign Kings who were loath to leave their crown jewel, but had to due to American pressure, the British are easily smeared in this telling of the history of Partition. Politically speaking, it is convenient for Shuddho, the class of Indians who inherited rule of a Partitioned India from the British, to lay the blame at the feet of a now-departed alien power. And while the British certainly did everything to fan the flames of communal division in the country, the unfortunate reality of the Subcontinent is that they were only exploiting divisions and trend lines that already existed. In particular, there was the rigid certainty of the Indian Moslem, specifically its Elite section, to fulfill its destiny and Dream for Separateness at the political level. The British, never ones to let a good opportunity go to waste, did what any realist actor in their position would – Divide et impera.

But the British and their successful playing of inter-community politics in India should not distract from the fact that a group of people can only be divided by a neutral “stranger king”, if the roots of the division are real and organic. The British were able to divide Indian Elites from different communities on the basis of religion, because the divisions already existed in these communities, and no amount of middle-ground playing by the leaders of the Indian National Congress (like removing the singing of parts of Vande Mataram beyond the second paragraph to appease the All India Muslim League) was able to stop the inevitable outcome. The INC desire, though noble, was always swimming against the tide and the result was that millions of Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and Buddhists in Panjab, Bengal, Sindh and Kashmir were abandoned by the INC and left without a leader or political champion. The leaders of the minority communities in Moslem-majority provinces were often left to fend for themselves, with the national INC steadfastly and blindly sticking to the delusion that it “represented everyone”, no matter the number of lives lost or the suffering caused. Therefore, I do not believe that the British were the primary cause of Partition, even though they made hay while the sun shined to achieve their own ends.

Another moral equivalency is created between the Indian and Pakistani sides during the Partition years because “both sides lost lives in the aftermath of the decision”. It is a devious sleight of hand. Saying “both sides lost lives in the aftermath of the decision” is a great way to avoid talking about the elephant in the room – that “the decision” was made in the first place! In particular, to avoid the discussion on how this “decision” was made and who insisted on it being made.

The answers to the latter questions are simple, but uncomfortable for Shuddho to hear and accept due to their desires to not let the past affect what they see as the communal harmony of modern-day India. Let’s just say that the Hindu and Sikh families in Lahore were not desperate for the Partition of India – and the Panjab – to happen on religious lines so they could more quickly become religious refugees in their own ancestral homes. The Partition of India happened because of the political and religious Dreams of the Indian Moslem elite (embodied in the AIML), the mobilization of Moslem masses throughout British India, the culmination of a near 150-year ethnogenesis process of the Bengali Moslem of East Bengal, the deadheaded stubbornness of Kemal Ataturk-cosplayers like Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and the complete capitulation of the Indian National Congress. For better or worse, it was the political maneuvering of the Indian/Subcontinent Moslem that made Pakistan happen. If any one group has to be ascribed responsibility for the decision and the eventual human tragedy, it is this group of Moslem Elites and everyone who supported them.

This is why, by any moral standard apart from most deeply ideological ones, there cannot be any moral equivalency between the people who died trying to come over to modern-day India from modern-day Pakistan or Bangladesh, and the people who died trying to make the trip the other way. One group – the Hindus, Sikhs and Christians, etc. – suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of an arbitrary border against their will or desires, and were given the choice of either becoming displaced people on the Indian side of the border, or living as second-class citizens in the places where their ancestral homes were. Meanwhile, the group of people who migrated as “Muhajirs” from modern-day Indian to modern-day Pakistan/Bangladesh moved because of an ideological commitment to Islamic separatism. One group had a choice to make, and the other group didn’t. Any reasonable observer should be able to make a moral distinction between these two situations, and the fact that no one does, particularly the ultra-progressive Georgetown Southasianist academic, is incredibly perplexing and confounding.

For Indians, capitulating to this whitewashing of the Partition through the means of epistemological erasure should be an unacceptable thing to do. We owe it to the memory of our ancestors who, through no fault of their own, became refugees in their country because of an ideology of religious separatism. This should be reason enough for Indians to not use “South Asia” as a term to describe this region.

And yet, many Indians can’t help themselves. Even the ones who really should know better. Be it India’s erudite Foreign Minister (a Shuddho convert to the zeitgeist of the day), or the Chief Minister of the second largest state in the country, or the hot-headed Pakistan watcher who works for the State Department-funded ORF and has a show called “South Asia Diary”, or the English-language news channel fishing for a foreign audience who has a series called “Inside South Asia”, the term does seem to be finding currency among a very specific class of people in the India. It is the media class and the class of people who derive their patronage and idea cues from the American priestly power structure. Their actions, as we will see below, can be better explained by the second dimension of Shuddho’s proclivity towards “South Asia”.

The Mimicry

The second reason for the Indian use of this term is an old friend of ours – Shuddho mimicry. In his seminal first book on India – An Area of Darkness, Indo-Caribbean author V.S. Naipaul famously remarked on the Indian propensity for “mimicry”:

“It is the special mimicry of an old country which has been without a native aristocracy for a thousand years and has learned to make room for outsiders, but only at the top. The mimicry changes, the inner world remains constant: this is the secret of survival. And so it happens that, to one whole area of India, a late seventeenth-century traveler like Ovington remains in many ways a reliable guide. Yesterday the mimicry was Mogul, tomorrow it might be Russian or American, today it is English.”

More than sixty years have passed since Sir Vidya wrote this book. And it’s safe to say that we have an answer to his open-ended speculation in the final line – why not both!

True to their nature of being swept away by the latest intellectual trends in the world, the Indian Elite (and even the electorate) went through a significant love affair with all things hammer-and-sickle in the post-Partition period, especially during the Cold War. Even those places in India that did not see political dominance by the Communists (e.g. West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura) had (and continue to have) some variety of Socialism as a major factor in their politics. We’ve had Jayprakash Narayan’s movement for Sampoorna Kranti, Socialist movements like the Janata Dal and its splinter parties, or even Deen Dayal Upadhyay’s movement of Integral Humanism. The impact of Socialist and Communist politics, both of the foreign variety and the emergent variety, has been significant in India’s post-Partition history, for better or worse.

But ever since the Cold War ended, this love affair has been greatly diminished, with the mothership of the Soviet Union itself falling apart and Communist China making a heel-Capitalist-turn. This love affair is now largely restricted to old timers who resemble the last priests of a religion praying to their gods one final time before they are killed by the invading army. Instead, Shuddho has bent their knee in front of a new master – the American priestly/expert/academic class.

This proclivity towards mimicry and the push to follow the newly dominant American priestly class after the 1990s has naturally led to a complete takeover of the Indian academy, in particular the Social Science and Grievance Studies departments. This is the kind of change one should expect to see in the periphery of the Empire when a new Regime has taken over the Core. What is amusing here is that the Indian aspiring-future-American-academic has taken over from the communist (previously loyal to the Soviets) academics, although there still remains a large amount of overlap. If you’ve ever met one of these Future American Citizens Temporarily Inconvenienced by an Indian Passport, you will have seen how everything about them screams the kind of mimicry described by Naipaul in the passage above.

What questions to explore as an academic, what areas to research (and more importantly for any priestly institution, what to bury through a strategic silence), what social cause or norm to support, what ideology to have…

In all of these fields the Indian social scientist is a pristine imitation of her western counterpart. She is a progressive because the Western academy is progressive. She supports Palestine because the Western academy supports Palestine. She believes nationalism is verboten (despite its role in achieving freedom for India, a once-Colonized nation) because the Western academic believes nationalism is verboten.

And, for the purpose of this article, she uses the term “South Asia” to refer to the Indian Subcontinent because the Western academic uses South Asia to refer to the Indian Subcontinent. After all, she has to make it to the U.S. someday, and who will accept her PhD thesis at the South Asian Studies Department if she uses a term as vile as “Indian Subcontinent”!

Nothing embodies this mimicry and cowardice of the Indian academic than the office of the South Asia Institute of Harvard University located in Connaught Place, New Delhi. Situated in one of the most famous landmarks in India’s national capital, its sign towers in an imperial capacity over the mixture of lawyers on a break, confused foreign tourists and beggars and kinnars trying to harass the former two (someone will run after you to get your shoe shined too!). From its elevated perch, it brags down to the unwashed masses: the South Asia institute is proudly funded by Laxmi Mittal and Family!

The front page of its website is a complete embodiment of Frantz Fanon’s observations about the elites of these post-colonial countries: (h/t Vishal):

It (Shuddho) mimics the Western bourgeoisie in its negative and decadent aspects without having accomplished the initial phases of exploration and invention that are the assets of this Western bourgeoisie whatever the circumstances.

In its early days the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries identifies with the last stages of the Western bourgeoisie. Don’t believe it is taking short cuts. In fact it starts at the end.

The Instagram feed of the South Asia Institute brags about being “A Connector in South Asia” and about being “Delhi’s Academic Hub: Where Harvard Meets India”. We know what this means in English: it’s the place to be if you’re a future American citizen temporarily inconvenienced by an Indian passport!

On its website on October 15, 2024, the SA Institute informs us about an event titled “Chronicling Unrealised Trajectories: The Plurality of Historical Experience in 1940s South Asia”.

1940s South Asia?

Just when you thought that the Indian social scientist couldn’t go any lower in their reputation, they slap you in the face by creating something as outlandish as “Ancient Pakistan”. 

This expression – “1940s South Asia” – does illuminate an important aspect of the South Asia phenomenon: the desire to project the (a sterile version of the) present into the past. It’s not enough for the modern day Indian Subcontinent to be “South Asia”. British India, with millions of people about to become religious refugees in their own homes in a few years, has to be called “1940s South Asia”. It’s hard not to see this tampering of history through the means of destructive language as anything less than a version of Orwell’s “endless present where the Party is always right”.

To end this article in the series, I will perform a case study on one of these Indian social scientists who quite brilliantly embodies this class of people. I am not doing so to pick on this individual, but I happen to think that his views are a great illustration of the thrust of this article. His views are also public, and shared on a public platform, which makes it fair play for me to discuss them and offer my comments on them.

The individual we are looking at is named Aditya Harchand. He is a PhD student at the University of Chicago. His X/Twitter account states that he is interested in “Tamil literature, polyglossia, sensory culture, Islam in South Asia. Currently working on Persian literary culture in Tamil Nadu”.

Aditya had a post from June 2024 (I’ve had to include a screenshot as Aditya has since protected his account) that I came across in June 2024 and it has since stuck with me. It is a post where he chides his father for the latter’s support of the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections of 2024. His father responds by saying that since the son does not live in India, he doesn’t have the same say in the matter, and doesn’t quite understand where things are in the country. Aditya continues in an amused manner that he told his father how he (Aditya) is a “specialist of South Asia” and that the father was not.

The follow-up post is even better, where Aditya explains that he is “not interested in understanding inhumane perspectives, especially if my expertise is denied or disrespected”.

I will refrain from commenting on the morality of the personal relationship here, as that is evident to any sane reader, but I did want to focus on this unearned sense of vanity of “South Asian specialists”. It is especially stark to me as someone who spent four years in a top American university and studied political science as one of my majors. The truth is, no one in Western academia truly respects the Indian imitation of the western academy. And why would they?

For nearly 80 years since the Partition of India, the Shuddho social scientist class has produced nothing noteworthy that would make the world sit up and take notice. In fact, nearly all their time and efforts have been spent chasing the latest trend that would get them “promoted” to a western university. Their poverty of output is most stark in the field of Indian history and culture, where they are at the forefront of exploring every fissure or cleavage in Indian society that proves that India is not a nation and does not deserve to be proud of her history. They’ve treated the India past, especially its pre-Moslem past with the hermeneutics of suspicion, leaving countless academic topics unexplored (e.g. how did East Bengal become a Moslem majority province?) due to commitments of ideology. And India’s understanding of her own past and identity is poorer for it. Overall, the Indian social scientist has consistently portrayed a lack of respect for their own country and their own past. So why would anyone else respect them?

It makes complete sense for this group of people to be the most interested in the adoption of “South Asia”. It is an act that is perfectly consistent with their track record of ideology and mimicry over the decades since Partition. The pushback to them is also natural, as, surprisingly, most Indians would not want to “remove India’s epistemological centrality in the region”. As the phenomena discussed in this series widen, the divergence between the public and India’s Legacy “Anti-Elite” will continue to grow, on the adoption of “South Asia” and beyond.

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