Barriers big and small

What a strange request: asking someone from the UK to comment on the value or otherwise of a concept such as 'Southasia', when we struggle with our own regional identity crisis – that of thinking beyond our tiny nation state (itself now fracturing) and imagining ourselves to be 'European'. When it comes to feeling an emotional tie, to be part of something greater than the UK, we remain for the most part Colonel Blimp, the 1930s cartoon character – dithering as to whether we are prepared to be seen outside, or still cowering inside the closet. We in the UK have not been geo-physically attached to the mainland of Europe since prehistoric times, and in intellectual terms our thinking about Europe remains worse than prehistoric. Europe means unwarranted interference with our sacred sovereignty by a distant and unelected bureaucracy – or even worse, tampering with the composition of the British sausage! We remember Agincourt as a significant historic event, not Maastricht. The only thing we grudgingly accept from Europe is the weather – thunderstorms in summer, bitter east winds in winter.

We in the UK have no conception of what it is to be a continental European, slipping smoothly and swiftly across open, apparently insignificant borders, and embracing multiple languages along the way. Leaving the UK actually means something – flying over, sailing on, or tunnelling under an expanse of sea. Moving between France and Belgium means about as much as moving from one Persian Gulf state to the next: the local licensing laws may be different, but not much else. Admittedly, leaving Austria for Italy may be more noticeable due to the multitude of mountains and tunnels, but it cannot compare with crossing the English Channel! That strip of sea represents a mental and temperamental fault-line that simply cannot be overcome. Does the Palk Strait exert the same effect, I wonder, on Sri Lankans? Or does the fact that several major languages – Tamil, Urdu, Punjabi, Bangla – straddle and blur the geopolitical borders within Southasia make a difference?

We Brits sit pretty on our island in the sure knowledge that our linguistic imperialism continues its worldwide conquest unabated, even if today this is largely due to the economic and cultural influence and energy of the United States (and, now, Southasia as well) rather than ourselves. If anyone had suggested in 12th-century Europe, when Arabic was the language of modernisation, of cutting-edge scientific research and technological innovation, that English – that barbaric, fringe-island dialect – would one day supplant it, he would have been put in a straitjacket and whisked away to a secure hospital before you could say 'Ibn Sina'. Will it now fall to Southasia's dynamism to preserve the global position of English, and stave off the global linguistic inevitability of Mandarin? Isn't it already said that writers of Southasian origin are in the vanguard of developing English literature, or am I the all-too-gullible victim of publishers' hype?

Let's face it: when it comes to Southasia, we are all terminologically challenged. If we turn to Wikipedia, the lazy academic's friend, we see that, geo-physically, Southasia can be clearly defined as those areas lying on the Indian tectonic plate. But there is no agreement over its constituent parts in geopolitical terms. Is Afghanistan included or not? Some United Nations agencies even include Iran in their definition of Southasia. The G8 includes Pakistan as well as Afghanistan in its definition of the 'Greater Middle East'. Is Tibet part of Southasia, Central Asia, East Asia? Let's not even talk about Burma. In the end, if there is so much confusion over its basic definition, is Southasia really any more than an artificial construct?

SAARC-chasm
In the UK, we rarely use the term 'Southasia'. This is surprising, perhaps, when you think of the astonishing success of Brits of Southasian origin in recent years. But don't despair, for in the UK, Southasians have hijacked the entire continent when it comes to nomenclature. They are everywhere referred to as British Asians. The Mittals, Hindujas, Jatanias, Bilimorias and Noons are 'Asian', not 'Southasian', entrepreneurs. The BBC Asian Network caters almost exclusively to those of Southasian origin – hip-hop, Bollywood, bhangra. It is not clear where all of this leaves the Chinese, Vietnamese or other Asian communities.

If we turn to the history of publishing in Southasia, we see that modern geopolitical boundaries have meant very little, and that there has been a considerable amount of regional interdependence. For instance, prior to the Nepali general Jung Bahadur Rana bringing back a printing press from England to Nepal, Nepali printing and publishing centred on Benaras, Darjeeling and even as far away as Bombay. On the other hand (and one does not want to introduce a note of SAARC-asm, or SAARC-chasm, here), today there is a distinct lack of regional cooperation on the publishing scene. I remember attending the Delhi World Book Fair some years back, and seeing Pakistani publishers standing by bookless stalls. They had been allowed into the country, but their books had not been able to clear customs. Book piracy is still rife between certain countries within Southasia. When will a totally free and unfettered regional book trade become possible?

Meanwhile, if we turn from books to archives, the picture is one of great and damaging regional inequality. In London, the British Library houses the records of the India Office and the East India Company. In the National Archives of India, in New Delhi, there is a partly overlapping but equally rich documentary resource. In comparison, however, the National Archives collections in Islamabad and Dhaka are puny. Might we now work together to restore some regional archival equality – perhaps through digitisation? Sharing a vast documentary heritage may be one small step towards building a true meaning for the region as an entity, beyond the academic research paper or foreign-policy-briefing document.

~ Graham Shaw is head of the Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections at the British Library, London.