Being South-Southasian

After a lifetime of sorts in Madras, I moved to Kathmandu at the age of 42. More than anything else, this was an opportunity to understand, in practice, as the head of a regional organisation, the concept of being Southasian. Going beyond the geographical contiguity, is there a common thread that extends from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean, and from Kandahar to Mandalay? In an attempt to find an answer to this rather vexatious issue, I discovered my own position: South-Southasian. Bertrand Russell uses the idea of a 'no-man's land' to help us understand the idea of philosophy. He says: "Between theology and science there is a No Man's land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's land is philosophy. Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem as convincing as they did in former centuries." Being Southasian means occupying this no-man's land, and being subject to attack from the political-science construct called the nation state as well as the new theology of our times called the global market.

There is a reciprocal causation here. By becoming a Southasian, one is able to fight the repressive nationalism that feeds on generating the hostile 'other', while at the same time debunking the idea of a global marketplace that reduces human beings, with all their colours and crankiness, to mere consumers. Being a South-Southasian from Madras, the first thing binding thread I discovered with the other Southasians, be it from Colombo or Karachi, Cox's Bazaar or Kathmandu, was an adversarial relationship with Delhi. Though there are many scholarly works that locate this antagonism within the logic of the nation state, the key underlying resentment stems from the power equation of dominance and dependency. If the WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) remains the symbol of power in the ideology of the post-Westphalian nation states, the upper-caste male – Southasia is a wonderland in which we have managed to introduce caste into all religions, be it Christianity, Buddhism, Jainsim or Islam – is the symbol of power in Southasia.