• 1 Although ‘Enchanting Abstraction’ is first and foremost the name of a painting by Yoshida Shizuko, (...)
• 2 My grateful thanks to Gilles Dorronsoro, Grégoire Schlemmer and Sanjay Subrahmanyan for their usefu (...)
• 3 The Directorial Committee (2010-2013) was composed of Blandine Ripert, Loraine Kennedy, Stéphanie T (...)
• 4 This curiosity led to the organization of a conference at the CEIAS in November 2012 on ‘The Idea o (...)

1The idea for this special issue of SAMAJ² came up in 2010 when the Directorial Committee3 in charge of France’s largest research centre on South Asian studies tried to change its name from Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (Centre for Indian and South Asian Studies) to Centre d’Études Sud-Asiatiques (Centre for South Asian Studies). Our institutions, the EHESS and the CNRS, as well as a number of colleagues, objected to the change of the name, arguing that ‘Asie du Sud’ was too unfamiliar a term in France. The proposal was dropped but the objections triggered a curiosity to know more about the history of the name, its multiple meanings and uses, and the notion(s) behind it.4

• 5 The region primarily refers to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives, (...)

2The term ‘South Asia’ is indeed interesting for several reasons. First, it refers to a region5 where several religions, that may be identified with different ‘civilizations’, have been interacting, potentially challenging the idea that a region forms a cultural realm. Second is the ambivalent role of British colonization, which on the one hand laid the foundations (partly started by the Mughals) for a mental representation of the region, through its unification policies, and on the other contributed to create divisions between distinct states and across common cultures at the time of Independence. Third, the Indian Subcontinent, a more familiar term for ‘South Asia’, has been characterized by a tragic history that witnessed several partitions rendering notions of ‘region’ and ‘regionalism’ particularly sensitive. Fourth is the peculiar dominating position of a single country, India, and the specific nature of another one, Pakistan, which is the only country, along with Israel, established in the name of a religion (see Devji 2013). This gives both region and regionalism a unique flavour as compared to regional constructions in other parts of the world.

3In this introduction, I will focus on the polysemy of the term ‘South Asia’, and the notions behind it. To highlight some of the underlying debates behind the politics of naming and the formation of a region(alism), I will take as entry points the multi-layered processes of construction, and deconstruction (through contestations), by various actors. I will thus try to answer the following questions: what does the expression ‘South Asia’ convey that ‘Indian Subcontinent’ does not? In other words, as a term, is ‘South Asia’ systematically interchangeable with ‘Indian Subcontinent’? The name ‘South Asia’ is only a few decades old, but how new is the process of imagining and constructing the region as a common cultural space? What are the underlying stakes and ideologies behind such constructions? In the process, different meanings of regionalism will be examined: first is the top-down construction of a series of economic and political institutions, whose aim is to foster collaboration between the different states of the Subcontinent; second is a bottom-up construction nurtured by a sentiment of belonging, which is expressed at the level of both emotions and practices.

• 6 This comparison could have been stimulating given the similar gap between state spaces and cultural (...)

6Writing this introduction indeed turned out to be a difficult task for at least four reasons. First, the subject requires a constant shift from etymology to social sciences (see Emerson 1984: 14), i.e. from the name ‘South Asia’ to the multiple notion(s) behind it (region, regionalism, civilizational entity and so on), necessitating a constant vigilance so as not to confuse both. Second, it demands a multidisciplinary approach, including disciplines other than mine (anthropology), such as history and political science. Third, the magnitude of the task is such that some angles have been privileged (constructions from below, brief comparisons with Europe), while other aspects, which would have been interesting, have been left aside (such as the comparison with South America6) or only alluded to (like the geopolitical dimension). Fourth, the subject would necessitate thorough knowledge of several countries and parts of the Subcontinent whereas most of the empirical examples I have taken are only about India and Pakistan. The co-editor of this special issue, Blandine Ripert, and I have however solicited authors capable of covering other countries of the region (although unfortunately not all).

• 7 This book is mentioned in Emmerson’s article (1984).

8It is not easy to determine who first coined the word ‘South(ern) Asia’. The earliest occurrence I could find7 is mentioned in the title of a book by Horace Bleackley about a region that would correspond today to… Southeast Asia (except Ceylon): A Tour in Southern Asia: Indo-China, Malaya, Sumatra and Ceylon, 1925-1926, published in London in 1928.

• 8 See Szanton (2004: 1-33).
• 9 As a specialist of Sanskrit studies, Norman Brown was above all a classical scholar, but he was int (...)

9There 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.8 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. Drawing from a book published by Brown in 1953, entitled The United States and India and Pakistan, Dirks points out that although Brown’s endeavour to establish departments of South Asian studies in the United States was rooted in the aspiration to promote understanding and exchange between India, Pakistan and the United States,9 his own sense of Indian history was shaped by a vision whereby Hinduism and the Sanskrit language represented exclusively the cementing forces of Indian civilization, while Muslims were considered as the disruptors of India’s cultural unity (2003: 7-10). As a result, Brown analyzed the partition of India in essentialist terms, as the following excerpts from his book show: ‘the basis of Hindu-Muslim communalism lies in cultural differences’, (Dirks 2003: 9). While this vision of Indian civilization was to have significant repercussions on the development of South Asian studies in American universities (Dirks 2003: 9), it also implied that the use of the word ‘South Asia’ was not necessarily associated with a conceptualization of the region as a civilizational entity. Yet, the very fact of establishing interdisciplinary research centres 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 centre 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.

• 10 United States Government Printing Office (1959).

10To 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,10 and international organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank.

• 11 For example, the Asian Relations Conference in Delhi in April 1947, the Baguio Conference in the Ph (...)
• 12 Although the construction of the campus will start in 2014, the university has started offering cou (...)
• 13 See http://sau.ac.in/downloads/accredit/Inter-Governmental-Agreement.pdf.
• 14 Point 2 reads: ‘Conscious that in an increasingly interdependent world, the objectives of peace, fr (...)

12In the 1980s, the word ‘South Asia’ was given a new impetus with the creation of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). The idea of regional cooperation, stemming from the conception of the region as an entity, had been discussed in various conferences, before and just after Partition.11 It was not however until the 1980s that the first concrete proposal came up, leading to the creation of SAARC in 1985. With the formation of SAARC various agreements were established, such as the South Asia Free Trade Area, and events, such as the South Asia Youth Award or a South Asian Car Rally in 2007, starting from Bangladesh and ending in Maldives, that were meant to convert the idea of South Asia into ‘living practices’. Another major symbolic step was the creation in 2007 of the South Asian University, a non-state, non-profit, self-governing international educational institution, based in Delhi.12 As per the agreement signed by all the member states, the objectives stated in article 2 include not only the bringing together of students and faculty from all the countries of SAARC (and beyond) but also the creation of ‘a South Asian community by strengthening regional consciousness’.13 The creation of SAARC and of its affiliate institutions thus endowed the term ‘South Asia’ with an official public meaning embedded in the local context while pressing forward the regional idea. In the process, the notion that South Asia refers to a region bound by history and culture was given an official and endogenous impulsion, as attested by point 2 of SAARC’s charter.14

• 15 She was the ‘daughter of Agenor, King of the city of Tyre, on the coast of Sidon […] carried off by (...)
• 16 Hindustan had two overlapping meanings, one was the equivalent of all-India (Sara Hindustan), the o (...)

13Several decades after its appearance and increasing use in regional and international institutional circles, the term ‘South Asia’ remains however largely debated and often contested as an artificial and exogenous category. It does not have a mythical tale, such as the story of Europa who gave her name to Europe.15 Nor does the name have a ‘sentimental force on its own’ the way ‘Hindustan’ (in its broader meaning16) used to have from the 18^th century onwards (Bayly 1998: 39-44). The word exists in vernacular languages but only as a direct translation of the English term (Dakshin Asia in Hindi, Janubi Asia in Urdu, Dokkhin Ashia in Bengali, Dakunu Asiyawa in Sinhala, etc.). It is so rarely used in vernacular daily conversations that the mention of the word Dakshin Asia in a Hindi movie, Dhobi Ghat (Kiran Rao 2011), was highlighted for its unusualness in an article published in Himal Southasian (Dixit 2011a). Some even see ‘South Asia’ as an empty category, whose sole heuristic value might be that the word is politically neutral (Bose & Jalal 1999: 3), as opposed to the ‘Indian Subcontinent’ which includes the name of one of the countries of the region. In this special issue, Sudipta Kaviraj questions the relevance of the notion of ‘South Asia’ when confronted with the challenges posed by the two political processes of modernity, nationalism and state-formation: the state formations of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh thus make it difficult ‘to think of South Asia as a space of emotional inhabitance’.

• 17 See also Szanton (2004). We may also mention the (unpublished) debates about area studies that took (...)

15In addition to being perceived as an artificial or empty category, ‘South Asia’ as a term and a notion raises a number of problems externally as well as internally. I will address here only those at the core of the original project of naming and constructing the region, leaving aside for instance academia’s critique of ‘area studies’, as these debates have been well covered by scientific works (see in particular Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s notion of ‘connected histories’, Subrahmanyam 1997).17 In this special issue, Jonathan Spencer, taking the example of Sri Lanka, interrogates the very notion of place as it does not reflect the movement and connection characterizing the island for centuries.

• 18 About the different ways of spelling ‘Southeast Asia’, see Emerson (1984).
• 19 It was however during World War II that the word ‘Southeast Asia’ became popular (Emmerson 1984). A (...)

16Among the limitations of South Asia as a category is first the low intelligibility of the word. While the term ‘South Asia’ is gaining visibility in Anglo-Saxon countries, its use remains limited to academic and political circles: in the UK, for instance, which among Western countries has the greatest familiarity with India because of the colonial past, the word is largely accepted to name research centres, but ‘Asian’ rather than ‘South Asian’ is used to label the people of the Subcontinent. In France, the word is virtually inexistent (‘Asie du Sud’ made its official entry in the most consulted online dictionary, Wikipedia, only about a year ago) and is often confused with ‘Southeast Asia’. This widespread confusion, much beyond France, between ‘South Asia’ and ‘Southeast Asia’ may take its roots in the fact that the first occurrence of ‘Southeast Asia’18 appeared a century before ‘South Asia’ and included then, according to several authors, all or much of India.19 This low level of awareness about the very existence of the word and its meaning seems to be equally widespread among the populations of the region it designates. Admittedly, attempting to determine empirically the level of basic awareness, not to mention any sort of attachment or identification, about the notion of South Asia, at the level of both individual and collective representations, raises serious methodological and epistemological questions. Yet a field survey conducted in Bangalore in August 2012, among a small sample of middle-class and educated people, to gage their awareness of the category, their identification with the region and so on, did yield some interesting clues. It hinted at a fairly fuzzy knowledge of the word itself, the region it encompasses, etc.; like elsewhere in the world, the term ‘South Asia’ was often confused with ‘Southeast Asia’, some included China in the region, others Saudi Arabia and so on…

• 20 Zomia is a term coined by van Schendel in 2002. He challenged the boundaries as fixed by ‘standard’ (...)
• 21 Related to this issue, a dramatic event took place in India in August 2012, the exodus of Northeast (...)

17A second limitation is the highly fluctuating definition of the geographical extent of ‘South Asia’. Admittedly, this trait is not specific to the region as in other parts of the world debates and contestations also run high on geographical delimitations. Europe is a case in point: ‘Europe was, and always had been, a highly unstable term. No one has ever been certain quite where its frontiers lie’, thus notes Pagden (2002: 45). However, in comparison to the continents of Africa or South America, South Asia, as a Subcontinent, only has a partially immediate identifiable shape. Besides, even after the word got increasing international legitimation, its range was not fixed so much so that a general consensus over which countries ought to be encompassed in the definition of South Asia applies probably to only one country of the region… India! Even in that case, if South Asia is defined as a historical and cultural entity, the inclusion of some regions located in India’s margins, like the Northeast, raises questions among scholars, some suggesting that the Northeast should be classified in alternative entities like Zomia.20 This questioning, when coming from laypeople, can take on racial overtones as suggests the use by so-called ‘mainland’ Indians of derogatory terms against northeast people, such as ‘Chinkis’, suggesting an association with Chinese rather than Indians/South Asians.21 It is however with Southeast Asia that Indian northeast people have mainly been associated (Emmerson 1984).

• 22 I thank Hamit Bozarsalan for drawing my attention to this interview.
• 23 In any case, only two countries that were part of the SEATO were actually Southeast Asian countries (...)

18In any case, whether in South Asia itself or in international institutions or research centres outside the region, there is no general consensus over which countries the notion encompasses: SAARC has included Afghanistan among its members while the World Bank has left it out. Some research centres have included Burma, as it was a province of British India till 1937 (testifying to the role of colonization in shaping the region much before the establishment of area studies in the United States), and Tibet, but leave Afghanistan and the Maldives out. The politics of naming can also be prone to a form of competition, including in research centres and universities, between the terms ‘India’ and ‘South Asia’, the latter term progressively taking precedence over the former term or coexisting with it: the French Centre d’Études de l’Inde added to its name ‘Asie du Sud’ (South Asia) in 1970 but chose not to remove ‘Inde’ (India), and thus became the Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud. Conversely, the countries included in South Asia as per the SAARC definition may be listed elsewhere as per other classifications: hence Ceylon/Sri Lanka used to be frequently considered as part of Southeast Asia by scholars of the region (Emmerson 1984), probably as a result of colonization (the island was controlled in the 19^th century by the British who ruled Fiji and New Zealand, but not by those who governed Madras and Bombay, see Spencer in this special issue and Sivasundaram (2013); it is also worth consideration that Sri Lanka has a university called Southeastern created in the mid-1990s, see Spencer in this special issue). As for Pakistan, the Washington-based Middle-East Institute for instance includes a Center for Pakistan Studies, suggesting that it sees it as part of the Middle East. In both cases, religions, Theravada Buddhism (Emmerson 1984: 11) and Islam (Laurens 201322) have respectively been/were the uniting principle in the search for appropriate boundaries. However the perception of religious or cultural continuities has not always been the guiding principle as testifies the choice of the Pakistani State (including East Pakistan, later on Bangladesh) to be part of the now defunct South East Asia Treaty Organization (1954-1977), an organization born out of an Anglo-American initiative to counter communism: the conflicting relations with India had indeed contributed to Pakistan’s decision to join SEATO.23

• 24 And Pakistan can directly interact with Afghanistan.

20A third limitation is the perception that the term ‘South Asia’ is actually another name for India, leading thereby to political contestations at the scale of the region. The central and asymmetrical presence of India in various domains, including geography (except for Afghanistan,24 none of the SAARC countries can interact with another without crossing Indian territory) is such that India’s neighbouring countries tend to perceive the category ‘South Asia’ as Delhi-centric. The issue is probably the most sensitive in Pakistan as behind the name lies the notion that the region forms a historical and cultural entity. In a way, to consider the region as an ‘entity’ calls into question the very foundation of the country which was born as an outcome of the idea that Hinduism and Islam formed two separate civilizations, a belief also shared by Hindu nationalists in India. In this special issue, Faisal Devji discusses the notion of ‘Muslim community’, as conceptualized by the intellectuals gathered in the Aligarh movement, who were struggling to find their place in the upcoming new political space. The use of the word ‘South Asia’ was thus banned in the department of international relations of Karachi University until 1989 as it was ‘thought to be part of an India-centric thinking’ (Zaidi 2009: 61). The contestation of the notion should also be seen in the light of the Pakistani State’s own quandaries about the definition of its identity, at the crossroads of South Asia and the Middle East. The shift from South Asia to the Middle East started particularly after the breakaway of Bangladesh. Thus, one of the constant themes’ of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s regime was ‘the need for Pakistan to develop closer links with the Islamic world and to look towards the Middle East rather than elsewhere in Asia’ (Talbot 1998: 235). That said, the visibility in Pakistan of the term ‘South Asia’ is not necessarily insignificant as suggests for instance the name of a university specialized in computer science in Lahore: the University of South Asia (which uses USA as an acronym!). In any case, the perception that ‘South Asia’ is synonymous with India is, of course, not confined to Pakistan and can be encountered in other South Asian countries as well, testifying to a fear, largely shared in the Subcontinent, of the domination of India over its neighbouring countries. It should be however noted that the opposite argument is sometimes put forward, i.e. India might neglect the regional construct because it does not feel the need for it. According to Dixit, some claim that India ‘does not need Subcontinental regionalism because by itself it incorporates much of South Asia by economic strength, geopolitical prowess and miscellany’ (Dixit 2013: 32), while other countries will take greater economic and political advantages of regionalism. Whatever be the case, two countries neighbouring India have been particularly instrumental in promoting endogenous ideas of South Asia: Bangladesh, whose President, Ziaur Rahman, is believed to have initiated the proposal for the creation of SAARC; and Nepal where SAARC’s headquarters are located.

• 25 See http://www.saarc-sec.org/SAARC-Charter/5/.
• 26 According to Pagden (2002: 9), ‘a vision of a future in which ‘Europe’ would acquire some kind of u (...)
• 27 See also Biancamaria Fontana (2002: 128) who notes that, ‘with the settlements of the Congress of V (...)
• 28 Whether Europeans see the European Union as a political entity is of course another story. See for (...)

21A fourth limitation is that the abstract nature of the notion of ‘South Asia’ is reinforced by the ambiguous place of political cooperation in the institution, namely SAARC, that is supposed to embody the endogenous political project of South Asia. The organization, created mainly to ensure peace in the region that had been prey to several internal conflicts, enounces among its objectives the acceleration of ‘economic growth, social progress and cultural development in the region’ along with the promotion of ‘an active collaboration and mutual assistance in the economic, social, cultural, technical and scientific fields’.25 In that, the major objectives of SAARC are not specific to the Subcontinent as for instance they bear a resemblance with the original aim of the European Economic Community when it was created in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome, i.e. to use the unifying power of commerce as a tool to bring peace between its members in the wake of World War II. But there are key differences between SAARC and the then EEC (today’s European Union), a major one being that political cooperation has been at the heart of the European project from its inception: rooted in ancient times and in a long history,26 it found inspiration in the Duc de Sully’s ‘Grand Design’ as early as 1620, gaining further salience after Saint-Simon presented a proposal at the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) in which he stressed the need to ‘unite the peoples of Europe in a single political body while still preserving their individual nationalities’ (Chebel d’Appollonia 2002: 180).27 The European project eventually materialized through the establishment of a Parliament in the 1950s.28 As far as SAARC is concerned, although the very process of forging a project to overcome a shared history of discord and conflict is in itself an eminently political initiative, there is some ambiguity in the way political cooperation is treated in the objectives and principles of its charter. Indeed, there are only two occurrences of the word ‘political’ in the charter: one calls for cooperation within the political system of each state, and the other reasserts the respect for the political independence of each state member. Although not surprising given the post-colonial history of the region, composed of new nation-states including two born out of the breaking up of a single entity, it does not contribute to consolidating the idea of South Asia in the absence of a binding political identity. And this not only in the sense of a common representative political body (like a Commission or a Parliament) but also in the sense of a common political culture, as conversely, the diversity of regimes has been a dominant feature in the political landscape of the Subcontinent. This contrasts once again with Europe where a binding ideology defined by Pagden, as ‘some kind of republicanism’ has existed since early modern Europe (2002: 5). Secularism could have been one such common ideology but it has been increasingly undermined throughout the Subcontinent (Jaffrelot & Mohammad-Arif 2012). To further extend the comparison with Europe, the latter has institutionalized the freedom of movement through the Schengen Agreement (implemented from 1995 onwards), while in South Asia, it is rather the obstruction to movement, through travel restrictions between state members, that has been institutionalized, thereby thwarting any notion of South Asian ‘connectivity’.

• 29 For a brief but beautifully written summary of these encounters from 750 to 1947, see Manan Ahmad ( (...)
• 30 Bayly (1998: 38) suggests for instance that in order to give legitimacy to his Empire, the Emperor (...)
• 31 Not only are most marriages arranged but, even on the affectual level, if we are to believe the rec (...)
• 32 There are however variations along regions and classes about the parts of the fingers that can be ‘ (...)
• 33 Afghanistan shares some historical and cultural commonalities with the Subcontinent, particularly w (...)
• 34 See http://old.himalmag.com/component/content/article/794-being-south-southasian.html.

24Commonalities in social and cultural practices find their roots in centuries-long cultural encounters,29 but also in quests for status and power.30 Such commonalities are numerous and varied, ranging from marriage customs31 to material culture and culinary habits (such as eating with fingers32). Cultural continuities may not be observed throughout the whole Subcontinent (although there are a few exceptions such as the emblematic shalwar kameez, some common blend of spices, like garam masala, some common dishes—notwithstanding the different recipes—such as kichdi and kheer prepared and consumed from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka33), but largely cross the national borders between, for instance, both sides of Punjab, Sindh and Rajasthan, West Bengal and Bangladesh, Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, and so on. Cultural similarities are thus shared by segments of regional populations. Similitudes are also observed in the social realm as people from the Subcontinent also share analogous hierarchical conceptions of society, with the caste system largely replicated by non-Hindus as its epitome: ‘Southasia is a wonderland in which we have managed to introduce caste into all religions, be it Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism or Islam’, writes Panneerselvan (2008).34

• 35 I will restrict myself to the two major religions of the Subcontinent although there would certainl (...)
• 36 While the Tablighi Jama‘at has spread worldwide, the Jama‘at-i Islami has remained a purely South A (...)

25On the religious level,35 the situation is peculiar for Hinduism as it is both so consubstantial to the region, and internally so diversified, that there would not be much relevance in pinpointing South Asian specificities across nations. Nonetheless, common practices, related to specific traditions such as Tantric practices and Bhakti, observed across the Subcontinent, could be meaningfully mentioned here. As far as Islam is concerned, similitudes in practices across nations relate both to inclusivist traditions, like Sufism, which, integrating features from other religions (as shown by the dargah-related practices), has spread to the whole Subcontinent from the medieval period and continue to be followed in various forms in the contemporary period; and to more exclusivist traditions, such as the Indian born and flavoured reformist Islam (e.g. Deobandi movement and its affiliate, the Tablighi Jama‘at, the Jama‘at-i Islami,36 etc.), which has expanded to most countries of the Subcontinent, including Afghanistan (as is well known, the Taliban are ‘products’ of Deobandi seminaries), influencing the socio-religious practices of the followers across the region. So much so that despite the great internal diversity of Islam the phrase ‘South Asian Islam’ would not be a misnomer as it remains both specific to the region and has spread throughout the Subcontinent.

• 37 With a difference though between Nepal and Bangladesh in the fluidity of the borders with India: wh (...)

27Borders are among the most emblematic and visible symbols of the delimitations of a nation-state. In that, the Subcontinent represents a real laboratory as political frontiers have been a major, and often tragic, issue in the history of the region. Their crossing represents another form of everyday constructions of South Asia. It can occur on an almost daily basis, as shown by the circulation of Bangladeshi and Nepali workers between India and their home countries, erasing the very idea of nation-bound delimitations.37 Beyond physical circulation as such, the Subcontinent is a very interesting case-study of transborder populations that are not only numerous but spread across different regions of this part of the world: Punjabis, Pashtuns, Kashmiris, Baloch, Bengalis, Assamese and so on. Their interest lies not only in the fact that the very existence of a few of these groups contributes to the debate on the question of the geographical extent of South Asia (like the Baloch who live across Pakistan and Iran), but some of these communities (such as the Tamils for instance) also form family networks through matrimonial practices, while others, who are separated by uncrossable boundaries, have recourse to other vectors like poetry to keep the memory alive of their common cultural and historical heritage: in this special issue, Radhika Gupta thus examines through the example of the Baltis of Kargil the circulation of cultural forms between India and Pakistan, ‘sustained by shared linguistic and religious histories’. Worth mentioning is also the intriguing phenomenon of chhitmahal, the series of enclaves situated along the India-Bangladesh border, studied by Jason Cons in this special issue: focusing on Dahagram, the largest of these enclaves, Cons emphasises the need to reconceptualize the postcolonial territory of South Asia which, in its present form, does not faithfully reflect the lived realities at the margins, characterized by everyday negotiations that challenge nationalist and communal geographies.

• 38 See in particular Mir (2012) on practices binding communities across religions.
• 39 See in particular Matringe (1992).
• 40 See Tiwari (2013).
• 41 See https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.189113434445210.38678.148938045129416&type=3.

28Art is another case in point. Some genres in music and dance (qawwali, bhangra, kathak, bharatanatyam, etc.) have endorsed a pan-South Asian character as they are practiced and appreciated much beyond the national scale. Similarly, a rich literature in vernacular languages, far from being confined to a single region/nation, is part of a poetic and literary culture transcending communities and state boundaries, from Amir Khusrau’s iconic poetry and ballads (14^th century) to the Kabir Panth (16^th century) and to Waris Shah’s Heer Ranjha³⁸ (18^th century) and Bullhe Shah’s poetry.39 As Manan Ahmed (2013: 49) notes, these narratives and stories ‘combine orality, practice and daily rituals where various strands of spiritual knowledge make new forms—deeply-rooted in the local, from Punjab to Awadh to Deccan, to Bengal’. Modern literature also offers scriptural illustrations of a cultural heritage that bind people of the Subcontinent, through their shared appreciation and ‘consumption’, beyond frontiers. Remarkable examples include Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955), one of the iconic writers on Partition whose 100^th birth anniversary was celebrated in 2012 in Lahore, Karachi, Bombay and New York40; Allama Iqbal (1877-1938), the spiritual father of Pakistan, whose Saare Jahan se Accha Hindustan Hamara is the national marching song for India; Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), whose songs have been used as the national anthem in two countries, India and Bangladesh, and have inspired a third one, Sri Lanka’s; Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), the national poet of Bangladesh, who is the only person to appear on the stamps of Bangladesh, India and Pakistan41 (Mohaiemen 2012); or Subramania Bharathi, ‘whom Tamils in India and beyond [i.e. Sri Lanka and the diasporas] continue to look upon as the nationalist bard par excellence’ (Mangala-Frost 2006: 150).

• 42 For instance, a few Nepali, Pakistani and Sri Lankan actors and singers can be seen and heard in Bo (...)

29In the everyday constructions of South Asia, some platforms operate as cementing vectors between countries of the Subcontinent: Bollywood movies represent an iconic example as they provide a sense of ‘community’ through the ‘formation of a common public that coheres around Bombay cinema’ (Ahmed 2012) and a common language that keeps the memory of historical ties vibrant: ‘it enables the creation of new cultural referents, provides a common vocabulary, and most crucially, maintains long-standing historical and cultural thematics within living memory’ (Ahmed 2012). As Manan Ahmed (2013: 51) emphasizes, the shared appreciation of Bollywood and its songs takes its roots in a common regional imagination of love and friendship dating back to the epics of the 17^th century. Bollywood also offers a platform for interaction among artists not only across regions and religions but increasingly across borders as well.42 Songs are particularly reflective of this close interconnectedness beyond borders: songs inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry are thus part of the repertoires of both Indian and Pakistani singers.

• 43 See movies like Mission Kashmir (Vidhu Vinod Chopra 2000) or Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (Anil Sharma 2001 (...)
• 44 The Indian film-maker-cum-journalist, Kabir Khan, excels in that: in Kabul Express (Kabir Khan 2006 (...)
• 45 To remain with the example of cinema, some Pakistani movies for instance were able to make their wa (...)
• 46 The issue of cross-border relations, and the subsequent construction of South Asia, is also address (...)

30Some Bollywood movies directly address the issue of cross-border relations (particularly between India and Pakistan): they either demonize the Other43—but, as Manan Ahmed (2012) states, demonization still ‘showcases the capacity to imagine the Other’—or they find ways, sometimes amusing ones, to highlight commonalities beyond borders and/or try to erase lines of difference.44 This suggests that temporalities are also important in the way South Asia is constructed, as discourses about the Other are particularly volatile, shifting, almost overnight, from bhai bhai (such as during the ‘reconciliation’ period between India and Pakistan in 2004-2008) to sheer antagonism and vice-versa. However, whereas tense relationships between countries used to manifest themselves over the ways the ‘Other’ was portrayed in Bollywood movies till the early 2000s, economic considerations have since come to prevail over ‘parochial nationalism’: the different South Asian countries and the respective diasporas of each nation of the Subcontinent represent such huge markets that the demonization of the Other, even during periods of tension between South Asian countries, might lead to backlash in financial terms. Beyond the issue of imagining the Other, economic benefits at large are a main driving force behind the circulation of cultural products (essentially from India to other South Asian countries but reverse circulations also occur45) and participate in their own ways in the construction of ideas of South Asia.46

• 47 Before the 26/11 Bombay attacks, India and Pakistan used to play regularly in Test Matches which we (...)

31In popular perceptions, cricket is, along with Bollywood, the other binding vector between people of the region. While this can hardly be denied in terms of the comparable craze it generates among people in most South Asian countries, cricket is a double-edged sword: the similitude in emotions is observed not only in the sheer common fun of watching a match but also in the nationalist passion aroused by the game. These nationalist feelings may come along with an open antagonism against the rival South Asian team when two teams from the Subcontinent meet: as if they were fighting proxy wars (except in Test matches47). But just like the demonization in Bollywood movies implies a capacity to imagine the Other, negative emotions, such as antagonism, expressed during cricket matches or on other such occasions, also participate in their own ways, in making the regional idea exist as they take their roots in a shared history of conflicts.

• 49 See http://www.peoplesaarc.org/index.php/publications.

35Beyond the rhetoric, the core agenda of these individuals and groups includes the promotion of cross-border practices along with appeals for regional cooperation at the grassroots level, as an alternative to compensate for the perceived failures of top-down initiatives (by SAARC in particular). In their view, the deflation of political tensions and the promotion of peace and demilitarization are closely interlinked with the social, economic and political advancement of the region. These groups occasionally undertake collective mobilization through the Internet or regional meetings. They take place around a vast array of issues of common concern, across borders, such as democracy, globalization, food sovereignty, debt cancellation, trafficking of women and children for prostitution, gender-based violence, caste discrimination, religious extremism and communalism, environment, basic health needs, etc.49 Admittedly, these initiatives have been largely hampered by cross-border travel restrictions (Ramachandran 2012). Yet these discourses and practices remain essential elements in the creation of emerging ‘ideas of South Asia’ from below.

• 50 See also Dixit (2004).

38Another group, which connects the construction of South Asia with social struggles and which includes people hailing mostly, if not from the elite, at least from educated backgrounds, goes a step further by addressing the category as such, and by doing so in a way that ideologizes ‘South Asia’. This is not to say that other constructions of South Asia (strategic ones for instance) are deprived of ideology, far from it; this is not to say either that imaginations of South Asia can only take form in the minds of the elites. But we do observe specific forms of endogenous ‘ideologization’ from below initiated by people comprising mainly intellectuals (academics, journalists, writers and artists) based in the Subcontinent or in diaspora, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries. Their major mode of expression is online media (blogs, journals, listservs). The names of the websites are in themselves revealing, and partake of a politics of naming from below: Himal Southasian (Mani Kanak Dixit, the editor and one of the leading and most committed supporters of the idea of South Asia as an entity, explains, in this special issue, how the name of his magazine was changed from Himal to Himal Southasian in a single word in order to indigenize a name given by outsiders),50 One South Asia, TheSouthAsianIdea Weblog, South Asian Citizens Web, TVSouthasia, PanosSouthasia, and so on. It is as if the questioning of the existing borders represented their very raison d’être, and as if there was a rethinking of the region along pre-Partition borders. This can also be inferred for instance from the title of an issue mentioned above and published in the journal Seminar in April 2012: A country of our own: A Symposium on Re-imagining South Asia. The issue gathered several academics from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, with the following objective stated by Ananya Vajpeyi (2012):

• 51 As mentioned in the introduction, I use the singular form as I mean here people who endorse the ide (...)
• 52 Quoted in Khilnani (1997: 198).

39These ideological constructions of South Asia, challenging existing borders, raise a series of questions. The first set is related to the mental geography of the supporters of the idea of South Asia.51 Are ideas of South Asia confined to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, leaving aside other countries which were not part of British India, and which hence did not go through the painful process and experience of partitions? The idea of a reunification, different from that of an ex-nihilo unification (such as the project of the European Union), is indeed a major aspect of these constructions of South Asia, although its supporters do not necessarily dream of a territorial reunification but rather of an ‘ideational’ one, to quote from Tagore.52 The issue of Seminar mentioned above partakes of this logic as it only addresses questions related to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

• 53 See Pagden (2002).

43What kind of political principle is pervading the goals and initiatives of the activists? The answers are not easy to provide as we lack thorough research on these questions. Moreover, the phenomenon is fairly difficult to analyze as it is not embodied in an organized movement; neither does it have ideologues formulating ideas or projects for the region comparable to the European philosophers or political writers who laid down the ideological grounding for the construction of Europe.53

• 54 Patriotism can be translated by wataniyyat.

50In order to frame this ‘sensibility’ in the language of social sciences, we may formulate here a few hypotheses by briefly drawing comparisons with, on the one hand, processes that have been historically at play in the Subcontinent, and on the other, with similar projects that have emerged in other regions of the world, such as Europe. Is this a new form of nationalism without nation-states? Or, as embryonic as it might be, is this a new kind of post-colonial patriotism presenting some similarities with the patriotism of the pre-colonial past which went ‘beyond simple chauvinism’ and was characterized by ‘cultural mixing and the forging of hybrid identities’ (Bayly 1998: 54-55)? In keeping with Bayly’s conceptualization of pre-colonial patriotism, it is as if South Asia had replaced ‘Hindustan’, ‘as a value-laden word which afforded an ideological symbol and a historical memory […]’ (Bayly 1998: 44; see also in this special issue Kaviraj, who examines the notion of South Asia from a ‘vestigial pre-modern’ perspective). In this ‘watanization’⁵⁴ process, the scale has changed, encompassing a vast region with fluid geographical boundaries.

• 55 Not as much as in nationalism though, as Romain Gary (1965: 371) puts it: ‘le patriotisme, c’est d’ (...)

51The mention in Dixit’s text of ‘overseas players’ is also worth noticing as in the formation of patriotism the reference to the ‘Other’ or to ‘Others’ is usually energizing.55 However, there is no formation of a common outside ‘enemy’: it can be the West for some and/or at times, China for others and/or at other times, with a different rhetoric accordingly: resistance to domination (anti-imperialism has replaced anti-colonialism, except that ‘the outside enemy’ remains the same) vs. collaboration-cum-competition for domination in the larger region (Asia).

• 56 See Rimal (2011).

53So much so that this may suggest a conflation between the idea of India and the idea of South Asia. In any case, the salience of the notion of composite culture can also be inferred by the type of ‘cultural heroes’ that the activists mobilize or refer to: Ghalib (1797-1869), Tagore, or writers from the Progressive Writers Movement such as Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911-1984).56 However, while these poets used vernacular languages as vehicles of expression, the language that the activists mostly use to convey their ideas about South Asia is English. Unlike Hindustani, English may not be endorsed with an ideological meaning (see Bayly 1998), and has a function of neutrality in a region characterized by a huge diversity of languages, which even compete at times. Yet English is ‘the link language’, to borrow from Bayly’s analysis of Hindustani (1998: 43), which allows cross-border and cross-region dialogues and interactions, with the difference, however, that there is no conflation here between language and ethnicity, as there might have been at some point between Hindustani language and ‘a latent Hindustani identity’ (Bayly 1998: 40). But it does remain that if the idea of South Asia has a language, it is probably English, all the more so as English websites represent a major medium of communication for the activists. This implies that such constructions from below remain confined to elite circles. As if they were forming an avant-gardist enlightened community of postcolonial intellectuals, journalists and artists, based in the Subcontinent or in diaspora, and united by the basic principle of believing that the region, loosely defined as per one’s mental geography, forms an entity (‘Read against this long history—of intersectarian, interreligious politics, rooted languages, nested stories, entangled everyday lives—civilizational difference is impossible to argue,’ writes Manan Ahmad (2013: 50)), while acknowledging altogether the variety of the peoples, histories and cultures that coexist in the Subcontinent: ‘unity in diversity’ in other words, but at a larger scale than pre-colonial and post-colonial India. It is worth consideration that, with all the nuances such an assertion requires given both the difference of contexts and influence at this stage, this phenomenon is somewhat reminiscent of the République des Lettres in Europe, composed of ‘educated aristocrats, writers and scientists’ (Fontana 2002: 118-119), who emerged as a proto-European community during the Enlightenment period and laid the intellectual foundations for the future European Union.

• 57 For other such ideas, see in particular the August 2008 of Himal Southasian.

54However, among the supporters of the idea of South Asia, there can of course be considerable variation not only in their mental geography of the Subcontinent as mentioned above but also in their imaginations and priorities, their ideas and projects for the region. Some, expressing their ‘sensibility’ in their writings, stick to viewing the region as an ‘enchanting abstraction’; others formulate more precise viewpoints. Let us mention a few examples. Tariq Ali (2008) imagines a South Asia ‘based loosely on the model of the European Union’. Conversely, Partha Chatterjee (2008), who does not see Europe as ‘a proper model for emulation’, believes that only ‘collective, non-official, cultural’ efforts will help ‘a shared regional consciousness’ to emerge. As for Dixit (2013), he goes a step further by proposing a federalist project at the scale of the whole Subcontinent through devolution of power within each country (see interview in this special issue).57

• 59 See Mehta (2008).

58Beyond the multiplicity of constructions and meanings of South Asia, the very notion can be called into question, highlighting a number of stakes and underpinning debates, some covered in this introduction, some in the papers and some others that have not been dealt with in this special issue. As in a mirror game, counter-arguments are used by multiple actors invoking various reasons: socio-cultural (the notion does not reflect and leave much space to the strong heterogeneity of the region—an argument also used by some ‘progressists’, see Carsignol in this special issue—; it can be perceived as an attempt at reviving British Empire (see Spencer in this special issue); economic (e.g. if the notion is correlated to the idea of regionalism, it is eschewed by the Indian middle-classes as they do not see any benefit in helping the ‘impoverished neighbourhood’59); political (South Asia is another word for India or the notion only addresses the relationships between India and Pakistan); scientific (critical vision of the very concept of area studies); essentialist (reluctance to see the region as a civilizational entity, shared by a section of the so-called Orientalists, the supporters of the two-nation theory, the defenders of Hindutva, and stemming from the belief that Hinduism and Islam form two incompatible civilizations). It should be noted however that the detractors of the notion of South Asia as a ‘coherent’ region may not necessarily oppose South Asia as a category defining regionalism: the academic critics of area studies, and hence of South Asia as a (well)-delineated region, may not for instance object to regionalism as such, if understood as a political project designed to ensure peaceful relations between the countries of the region and to contribute to its socio-economic development.