When faced with a magazine called `The South Asian’, it would be singularly unreflective to not ask, right at the outset: but who is a South Asian?

The answer might seem to be obvious: a South Asian is somebody from South Asia. And South Asia is at the very least the countries that are part of SAARC— Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Yet this kind of explanation is always inadequate. South Asia, for example, arose as a name fairly recently, in a Cold War context. It has no longstanding equivalent in the languages of the region that we call South Asia; its life is still primarily amongst English-speaking elites, even though it has been steadily expanding its reach.

So we need to ask: Is South Asia simply a new name for a place that has always existed, or does the emergence of this name South Asia itself signify some change? If so, what changed so as to make South Asia emerge as a name? What work does that name do? What is the claim that this name makes on us, and how do we respond to this claim?

To understand the distinctiveness of South Asia as a name, contrast it with, say, the name ‘India’.

Etymological derivations for India can be found in many languages of the subcontinent—as, for instance, Hind. And even if no such derivation is posited, the word India itself is often thought of as simply a translation of other equivalents—Bharat, Bharatvarsha, and so on. Understood this way, India is not only a nation-state; it is rather a cultural zone which includes Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, … Hence the idea of an ‘Indic civilizaton’ or culture—a culture does not simply hold a region together but produces that region.

The thought of an Indian culture or Indian civilization affirms the existence of something substantive that is shared in common, of a substantive commonality—Indian food, Indian art, Indian dress, and so on.

But the problem with any substantive commonality is that there are always those who do not participate in it despite being claimed by it. The moment, for instance, that we examine a substantive entity called Indian culture, it breaks down into regions—Gujarati, Maharastrian, and so on. And this breakdown continues infinitely—Gujarati culture is Surati, Amdavadi, Kathiyavadi, Kutchi….

My point is simple: any process of aggregation that builds a substantive Gujarati culture or Indian culture out of this multiplicity will necessarily do so by rendering some elements minor or marginal. Effectively, for example, all attempts to produce a comprehensive account of Indian culture have effectively excluded both non-Hindus and lower castes. Effectively, what we think of as Indian culture is upper caste Hindu culture. Within Gujarat, for example, most substantive definitions of Gujarati culture would focus on what is shared by middle class Hindu Gujaratis: the Muslims, Dalits, or adivasis are unlikely to be considered to be typically Gujarati, or to have a typically Gujarati cuisine.

This is why those who are marginal and minor are often troubled by the claim to a shared substantive commonality. In the shared Indian culture that is sometimes claimed to unite the subcontinent, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis will necessarily be secondary participants, and India will necessarily be dominant bearer of culture.

Now, contrast South Asia with India. The name South Asia emerges from quite a different history—that of the Cold War. In this history, South Asia is not the name of any substantive commonality. Rather, it is the name of an empty abstract space produced in maps. For Cold War strategists, this empty space simply had to be filled by the jockeying for power of the two blocs.

But this was not what it meant for the countries of the region it designated when they took up the name. Perhaps it was in part the very emptiness of the name that made `South Asia’ attractive to them, that made them take adopt it when SAARC was set up in mid eighties, slightly before the end of the Cold War Era.

Because of this emptiness, ‘South Asia’ did not necessarily designate a pan-Indian association in which India was dominant. Rather, it was an abstraction, an empty space on a map, an entity that was open to being organized by various principles. To say `South Asia’ seemed to be a way of leaving open to debate what South Asia was.

In the decades since then, we seem to have thought ‘South Asia’ in three broad ways.

The most state-centered (and the most dominant) way of thinking of South Asia is as simply that inert space on the map where nation-states joust to secure their interest. Here, there is nothing that unites South Asia—it is principally a local theater that the nation-states of the region have to take account of. Most of the time, it seems fair to say, SAARC has effectively operated with this understanding of South Asia. In this way of thinking of South Asia, there can be no serious connections between peoples and places that are heterogenous to the states that constitute South Asia.

Thus, for instance, an Indian who claimed that she or he loved the place (not the nation-state) that is Pakistan would soon face an ultimatum from Indian nationalists: you cannot love only places, you have to choose between the nation-states. To claim to love both India and Pakistan as places and not as nation-states is to be thought a traitor. In this sense, Gandhi was India’s first prominent traitor—Nathuram Godse, after all, killed Gandhi because Gandhi insisted that he loved Pakistan too, and Godse could only understand this as a betrayal of India.

A second way in which we have thought South Asia is again in terms of culture. At its most sincere, the idea of a South Asian culture is an attempt to move out of the boundaries of nation-states, to emphasize what the region shares.

But how to think of this sharing? When used carelessly, South Asian culture simply becomes a new name for Indian culture—thus extending an Indian dominance. When used more carefully, an effort is made to ensure that South Asian culture is a composite of the elements of the culture of each nation-state. Yet, again, as with the idea of an Indian culture, any idea of South Asian culture, composite or otherwise, will necessarily exclude and render marginal some groups—usually the least powerful.

In this magazine, and in many other everyday initiatives, perhaps we can also discern a third way of thinking South Asia. We may call this the way of the neighbor.

What has this way involved? To begin with, it is founded on agnosticism about the state—not a rejection of the state, but circumspection about it. While it does not necessarily or always reject the nation-state, it insists that the state cannot completely represent the community; that the community is beside the state, rather than subsumed within it. Thus, this way of thinking South Asia seeks to conduct a conversation and an argument that refuses the bonds of national interest or commonality. It seeks to conduct a conversation between neighbors who are not defined by their nation-state.

But this raises the question: if we are rejecting these bonds, why stop at only neighbors? Why not adopt instead the perspective of the cosmopolitan citizen of the world, the citizen who belongs everywhere and nowhere. Why not say that we are committed exclusively to human welfare and human rights, and that national interests cannot be allowed to override such a humanitarian perspective?

For two reasons, one negative, one positive. The negative one: the `humanitarian perspective’ itself depends on a universalized notion of the human. This universalized notion effectively ends up justifying the practice of violence. A particularly stark example of this is the brutalities practiced by the United States in other parts of the world—all in the name of human rights, of a humanitarian perspective.

The positive one was well laid out by Gandhi when—after rejecting the perspective of the citizen of the world, the humanitarian perspective—he sought to develop a concrete ethics for political action. Such an ethics, he insisted, had to center on the figure of the neighbor. `A man’s first duty is to his neighbor…. If every one of us duly performed his duty to his neighbor, no one in the world who needed assistance would be left unattended. Therefore one who serves his neighbor serves all the world. …. Indeed it is the only way open to us of serving the world’.

What can be at stake in infusing the spirit of the neighbor into the name `South Asian’? It is our peculiarly modern conceit that we choose our names —Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Nepali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Sinhalese, Hindu, Muslim, South Asian; that we can discard or embrace them as we wish. But, strictly speaking, we do not and cannot choose these names. These names are given to us. We can only dwell in them. To infuse the spirit of the neighbor into `South Asian’ is to dwell in a particular kind of way in that name which chases us, which continues to make claims on us even if and as we deny these claims. To convoke the spirit of the neighbor is to conduct conversations and arguments that are both local and yet not limited to the boundaries of the nation. Such conversations and arguments are scarcely new. We have conducted them whenever and wherever we have been skeptical of our nation-states’ claims over us. The greatest achievement of `The South Asian’ will be if it becomes one more site for conducting these conversations and arguments about our entangled histories; for conversing in such a way that we rethink the term `South Asian’ itself, and perhaps even make it irrelevant.

- Prof. Ajay Skaria is a professor at the University of Minnesota with joint appointments in the Department of History and the Institute of Global Studies