A new belonging

My forefathers came from southern Gujarat, and settled further south along the western coast of India. With no kin across the newly formed border, and living in Bombay at the time of Independence, my family was insulated from the ravages of Partition and its aftermath. My closest encounter with the Southasian neighbourhood came through the charged atmosphere of the 1971 war between India and Pakistan – a memory of blackouts and suspenseful nights, followed by self-congratulatory headlines regarding a new country that we, Indians, had helped create.

My counterparts elsewhere in Southasia would surely have different memories of the event. I am also sure that my view of India may not coincide with theirs. Be that as it may, I am willing to hazard a guess that, for all of us members of the post-Partition generation, the concept of Southasia during those tumultuous times, not as a geographical unit but as a collective, would not have been a very persuasive one.

Indeed, the concept had not even crossed my mind till I was in my early twenties, when I met the 'Southasia correspondent' of an international newsmagazine. Increasingly thereafter, I was made aware of the widespread use of the term as a political category in the international context. I also remained acutely uncomfortable with it, perceiving it to be a unity forced upon us disparate and divided nations of the region by what appeared to be the West's need for simplification.

More than two decades later, in 2008, one could say little has changed in this regard, the emergence of SAARC notwithstanding. A nuclear race, a near war, internal conflict and militancy present no logical rationale for expecting an increase of goodwill among Indians, Bangladeshis, Nepalis, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans towards each other, or of their experiencing a greater sense of identification with the region as a whole. And yet, oddly, this is exactly what seems to be happening.

Admittedly, it is not a widespread phenomenon – some may even call it elitist. But a strong whiff of change is indeed in the air. Consider the fact that over the last decade, in Delhi alone, several initiatives or proposed initiatives have taken the subcontinental neighbourhood rather than the country as its arena. For one, the research centre Sarai, established in 1998, calls itself "South Asia's most prominent and productive platform" for a certain area of research. Another, the South Asian Literature Award for the Masters, an award instituted by the publication The Little Magazine (established in 2000), also claims it to be "the first and only professionally chosen honour to treat South Asia as a single cultural region without borders". The SAARC-endorsed South Asian University was recently flagged off by Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee, with a promise to spend INR 300 crore in order to inculcate "a spirit of fraternity and friendship". And the South Asian Design, Arts and Technology Centre (SADAK), the brainchild of the Indian crafts designer Rajiv Sethi, is aimed at paying tribute to Southasian artists and their skills.

Of course, a few swallows do not a summer make. But what is significant about these initiatives is not so much their size or success, but the attitudes they represent. They appeal to commonalities rather than differences; they look to the future rather than the past; and most importantly, they start from an assumption of Southasia as an existing, bonded unit, and not as one to be hoped for at some future date. This last point is a particularly striking shift from the sentimental wishfulness of the past. How did all this come about? And why now?

Power of youth
There are many possible explanations. However, I would like to focus on one in particular: the change in the global environment. Migration, satellite media, the Internet and increased mobility have, singly and collaboratively, set in motion a chain of events that have had unexpected consequences with regards to the relevance of the Southasian regional amity.

Take, for instance, the redefinition of territory and location, the fact that large groups of people can move between countries, through the facility of television programming, and recreate a sense of being at home. Or consider the substitution of national allegiances with new transnational loyalties: the use of the Internet to create a spectrum of individual online communities. Or the surge of humanitarianism, a 1960s, anti-Vietnam-style idealistic response to world disasters that has been backed by the fast-growing volunteer sector, an impulse that perceives human beings first and last as victims.

By atomising and reshaping society, these trends have opened up the possibility of re-imagining space and belonging in hitherto unforeseen ways. Along with the growing Southasian traffic to American universities, they have also served to boost levels of self-confidence among the region's educated youth. This development, if the Indian experience is an indicator (ie, the success of the interstate Indian Premier League; the substitution of the Queen's English by a polyglot called Hinglish), should bring about a greater ease with one's provincial roots. Some evidence of this is available in the emergence of a growing body of Southasian writing in English, more so in the emergence of books by young writers from all over the region examining aspects, often painful, of their national histories.

The snowballing impact of globalisation and youthful creativity may not be powerful enough to combat the chauvinistic forces opposed to regional cooperation in the short term. But for the long term, the time for an idea of Southasia seems to be finally here.

~ Amrita Shah is a Bombay-based columnist and writer.