A release from majoritarianism and multiculturalism

In the last pages of Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, the master artisan Ananda Udugama is tasked with chiselling a new Buddha from the ruins of a colossal statue that had been dynamited in the midst of a bloody civil war. Ironically, the Buddha had not been bombed in the immediate dynamic of the war, but rather in an attempted theft of treasures that were thought to be buried in his torso – the bombers were trying, Ondaatje says, "to find a solution for hunger". Yet even as they were reconstructing the Buddha's body, Ananda and his artisan cohorts were unearthing bodies that had been disappeared across the country. That landscape of violence and loss that was scarred from clashing political projects regarding statehood and militancy also bore the scars of different struggles against hunger and poverty. Working in this brutalised ground, Ananda examines the artistic vision that produced the ruined Buddha, as he takes on a (re)construction that also gives the Buddha a new perspective. Ananda's expertise is in eye-painting, and he chisels out eyes facing north, pondering the "figure of the world the statue would see".

The very act of creating the Buddha is also about this Buddha seeing differently; he remains rooted in the ruins that are the ground from which he sees, but his vision is not confined to yesterday's landscape. In some sense, exploring what it means to be Southasian is a parallel endeavour: it is to interrogate the invocation of 'Southasia', to lay bare that inherited landscape and the different visions of justice and collective life that have been buried in the political cartography of the region. It is to unearth the distributive stakes in that landscape, and examine what became normalised and legitimised in different visions. However, as with Ananda's Buddha, against and from the ground of those past visions of Southasia, this interrogation is also about (re)construction and new perspectives – reclaiming that ground for different visions and different investments in our intersecting and overlapping futures. What, then, are the projects that have been inherent to the invocation of what it means to be 'Southasian'?