Liminality of South Asia

Observations made at the plenary session of the conference, 'Reimagining South Asia: Explorations in the History of Ideas' organized by the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi, 17th February 2017:

The Audience. Photo: Romy Ahuja, MA Program in Political Science, University of Delhi

I wondered for quite some time over the last few days what to say in this session which is focussed on ‘Thinking South Asia.’ I don’t think I had much success. But I hope what I have to say would be in the very least minimally coherent. My anxiety and relative confusion comes from the fact that South Asia is such a flippantly used and blatantly abused term like terrorism, fundamentalism, anti-national and health food, all of which have far more discursive meanings linked to them which defy their basic English language sensibilities.

Besides, I am often invited to seemingly South Asian gatherings to offer these events some exotic flavor given the fact that I do not carry an Indian passport or the privileges of Indian citizenship, which invariably offer these events some sort of simple and simplistic plurality of citizenship by virtue of what I lack and in the same sense, what I have – citizenship of another country in South Asia. All this by virtue of my accidental, and in the case of conference organizers, serendipitous and inexpensive presence in Delhi.

Plenary Session. Photo: Romy Ahuja, MA Program in Political Science, University of Delhi

Similarly, the the idea of ‘regional consciousness’ often stressed by my own university, euphemistically called the South Asian University and established by South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, is anything but regional in its outlook or the way in which it works. Besides the name and and the matra-like deployment of the term, it is very much like any other university in the country. 

What is more shocking is the banality with which the words ‘South Asia’ are used by everybody from students to colleagues to administrators and bureaucrats beyond the university. That is why, very recently, in this liminal existence of South Asia that the Board of Studies of the Faculty of Social Sciences insisted that our research should ideally attempt to stay within a South Asian perspective.

So I think, given my institutional and personal locations and the experience which comes from these, I am very well within my rights to be skeptical of what South Asia means in the way it is deployed today in most hegemonic discourses. 

Peter De Souza at the Conference. Photo: Romy Ahuja, MA Program in Political Science, University of Delhi

However, it seems to me, it is precisely this undefined perspective that our Board of Studies was trying to articulate, which I think has considerable potential that one needs to embrace, and take over, if one needs to fathom a kind of South Asia not too closely linked to the shackles of its cartographic imagination mandated by the limiting logic of nation states. But in my mind, this can only be achieved if one has the personal intellectual ability and institutional freedom to be adequately subversive with ideas. 

on 'the liminality of South Asia.' Photo: Romy Ahuja, MA Program in Political Science, University of Delhi

It is in this scheme of things that I was pleasantly surprised when I realized this workshop is organized by a mainstream political science department with a clear International Relations presence as well. The concept note of the workshop says this is an “attempt to find out possibilities for the creation of new episteme in order to understand the idea of South Asia.” It further notes, “The search for new episteme is impelled by our disenchantment with the existing parochial definition of the idea of South Asia which is often confined within the colonial/post-colonial bounds of a cartographically marked region.”

I stress the words, our disenchantment, new episteme and bounds of a cartographically marked region. But if you are serious about what all these lofty ideals mean, then it is necessary to take the venture you might begin today way beyond the confines marked by the traditional understandings and disciplinary domains of political science and international relations, and for that matter sociology as well. In fact, one will need to cultivate closer proximities with cognate disciplines such as anthropology, cultural studies, literature, dance, music, film and theatre studies and so on if one were to embark on this journey more meaningfully. 

This might seem messy, but I think such a seemingly messy beginning is the only option to think South Asia more inclusively and closer to the experiential and historical realities of people as opposed to the anticipations of those who govern nation states and the work of those who simply document such statecraft, which almost clinically remove the messy and muddy realms of what may broadly be called 'culture' from these reckonings. 

To me, in today’s dominant academic discourse, South Asia is often seen as a concrete reality, imagined primarily in geo-physical or cartographic terms, which the conference organizers also readily flag. I think this limitation in thinking is mostly due to our inability to transgress what might be called ‘nationalized’ domains of knowledge production, which hinders the possibility of comprehending the region across both disciplinary and national borders. This is because whatever knowledge we produce, some of which can be serious, tend not to transgress beyond the borders of the nation. 

In general, my concern is, when all of us take South Asia for granted, as does SAARC and much of contemporary academic practice, do we get a fuller and a nuanced perception of the region and its political and socio-cultural complexities? Or in other words, does South Asia as a modern finished entity communicate its latent as well as manifest incomplete personality? Is our knowledge of the Maldives for instance, comparable to that of India? Or, to take a less extreme example, do we know at least as much of Maldives as we do of Sri Lanka? 

Or, does our perception, understanding and knowledge of the region remain merely at the level of rhetoric? 

Despite incessant meetings, cultural events and conferences, where South Asia seems to be clear, why is it so difficult for some of us to imagine it, and even more difficult to achieve? Providing a partial answer to this question, Asish Nandy has described South Asia as the only region in the world where most states prefer to define themselves, “not by what they are, but by what they are not”. According to him, “Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal try desperately not to be India” while Bangladesh “has taken up the more onerous responsibility of avoiding begin both India and Pakistan.”

Despite Nandy’s exaggeration of regional politics, it seems to me that at some level, he is referring to these countries’ established practice of being the antagonistic ‘other’ of each, based on the manner in which contemporary political compulsions of nation states unfold locally, rather than with reference to some of the shared cultural practices that no longer take centre stage in regional or national-local politics. More insidiously, these practices and histories are no longer within recallable collective memory for most people as well. 

In this context, what if we try to take a different route? What does it mean when Bhartha natyam is so popular in Sri Lanka when most young people hardly know anything of Indian history in general or its cultural history more specifically? What does it mean when Bollywood music and cinema touch people in such distant places as Colombo, Dhaka, Katmandu and Lahore despite enmities authored by actors of nation states, which flow across international borders? What is the kind of cartography created by Sri Lankan Buddhist pilgrims who annually come to India? Do they see the Indian nation state as it exists today or the land of the Buddha they have learned of from books, or do these two worlds meet, and if so, how?? 

What is the nature of the cultural cartography that was created when Binaca geetmala broadcast popular Bollywood songs all the way from Non-Hindi speaking Colombo to the Hindi heartland of India from 1952 to 1988? What is the kind of South Asia the well-connected contemporary artists of the region create today in their work? 

These are simple examples of the possibilities that can be opened up if we take sociology, political science, international relations and other disciplines to places where one least expects to find them in our explorations for South Asia.

I think what I have said so far should make it very clear that I prefer to see ‘South Asia’ as an incomplete idea or as a problem we have inherited from the way modernity and its intellectual and political practices have manifested in our region, and from the ways in which the nation states in the region have interacted with each other, rather than as a concrete and coherent reality. 

It should be self-evident however, that this incomplete picture of the region, with its inherent contradictions and uneven play of politics, and the difficulties these situations throw out, are not taken into account whenever South Asia is invoked in both political and academic rituals of our time.

My hope is that this conference might open some space for such obvious, necessary and subversive thinking. But one must have the will to do so. It is in such a context that Nandy has noted, “the more the scholars, artists and writers talk of the common heritage of the region, the more the functionaries in the region nervously eye their neighbours as enemies planning to wipe out their distinctive identities.” 

My conviction is, much of these limitations in understanding South Asia are conditioned by modern cartographic strategies, as I have already suggested. Some effort to broaden the discusrive framework by factoring in the not so obvious realms of culture, which may not be conducive to dominant academic practice could bring about the possibility of starting a discussion of a different sense of contemporary South Asia. 

For me, what is important is this sense of embedded subversiveness in the acts of people like all of us. But I am not sure if many of us have invested as much time in these possibilities as we could and should. In fact, when it comes to the issue of South Asia, I have very little confidence left in my own generation of scholars barring a few exceptions like Imtiaz Ahmed, Shiv Vishvanathan, Ashish Nandy, Kanak Dixit and so on. That is because we are satisfied merely with intellectual output as opposed to intellectual output tempered by a passion, an imagination and a sincere ideological and intellectual commitment to South Asia.

I hope the next generation such as the young people who are presenting their ideas today have better sense and much more entrenched passion than their predecessors.

Thank you for your time.

From 'On Uncertain Ground' to Research Across South Asia

Photo: Joyashree Sarma, Department of Sociology, South Asian University 

The forum offered by the launch of my colleague, Ankur Datta’s book, On Uncertain Ground: A Study of Displaced Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu and Kashmir (Oxford University Press, 2016) on 24th February 2017 and sponsored by the Department of Sociology, South Asian University, Society and Culture in South Asia, India International Centre and Oxford University Press saw the exchange of crucial ideas which were addressed in the book. These are perhaps the first formal commentaries on the book as it enters the world of intellectual circulation. Personally, it was good to see a book written by one of my own colleagues getting into the public discourse. It was not simply a matter of personal credit for himself alone but also a matter of further establishing our intellectual presence in the city as a department in a very new university.

For those with an interest in research in South Asia,the following are some of the brief comments I made in the evening of 24th February 2017:

Photo: Joyashree Sarma, Department of Sociology, South Asian University

--- Though I will say nothing about Ankur’s book today, as I read it over the last two weeks, I also re-read Prof TN Madan’s classic ethnography, Family and Kinship: a Study of the Pandits of Rural Kashmir. I could not help but feel that both books indicate the two ends of a very sad story, which has unravelled over fifty years or so. That story would make additional sense if one were to read Agha Shahid Ali poems such as his collection, The Country Without a Post Office rather than regular sociology on the region. In fact, this is what I did.

But I must confess I am a reluctant chair as I am exterior to both Kashmir and the sociology of India as well as to India, the nation state and Delhi itself. But Ankur did not seem to see it that way. I guess his point was if one comes from a place wracked by violence and has worked on violence and its consequences in one messy place in our region, that should be good enough to handle a discussion on yet another place currently consumed by violence and displacement.

Photo: Joyashree Sarma, Department of Sociology, South Asian University 

In this specific context, I want to make one final comment, not about Ankur’s book, but about what these kinds of texts suggest for scholarship in our part of the world. Ankur, Prof Roma Chatterji and other colleagues have produced serious scholarship on violence and its consequences in India. All of us are familiar with this textual tradition. 

Others have done the same for other places ranging from Sri Lanka to Bangladesh and Pakistan. That is, in our own 

comfort zones demarcated by the borders of nation states, we have narrated quite well the stories of our collective unhappiness. And I think the study of violence and its consequences is one of the most obvious contributions to global scholarship, particularly in anthropology from South Asia. And there are many other similar themes.

But almost none of us, including myself, have moved beyond the comfort zone of the nation to see how thematics such as violence, migration, displacement, nationalism, being anti-national and so on might seem and mean across these borders. Intriguingly, even those amongst us very critical of the nation state as a specific formation due to its own limitations, have opted not to go beyond its borders in their work. By itself, this is not a problem. But for me, it is a missed opportunity. I hope Ankur’s generation might be more adventurous in the possibilities of this scheme of research, of the possibilities of coming up with a theoretical and methodological framework for research across South Asia than my generation has been ---

Climate Terror: A Critical Geopolitics of Climate Change

Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle; Climate Terror: A Critical Geopolitics of Climate Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. xvi; 247. ISBN 978-0-230-24961-5 (hardback); ISBN 978-0-230-24962-2 (paperback)

When I started reading Sanjay Chaturvedi’s and Timothy Doyle’s book, Climate Terror: A Critical Geopolitics of Climate Change, the discourse the book generates immediately took me to a specific set of discomforting memories and my present circumstances on the planet, both of which are enmeshed in issues of climate change. On one hand, the authors’ lucid and sometimes apocalyptic prose reminded me of the climate-change-related haunting images that are crystalized in my mind ever since watching Davis Guggenheim’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth and Jeff Orlowski’s 2012 documentary, Chasing Ice. On the other hand, the second location this reading took me is the suffocating and poisonous environment of Delhi, its citizens, its industrialists and politicians have collectively created for themselves and have thereby ushered in a kind of grey, unhealthy and environmentally compromised present, of which I have become an unwilling prisoner.  

These kinds of unpleasant realities documented in the book as well as what was circulating in my own mind are amply captured by book’s haunting cover of a temporally frozen moment of stillness devoid of life, which offers a kind of visual indication of what is to be expected in the book. Obviously, this is not a pleasant theme, and it is certainly not of the future. It is about the potential lack of a future, where all of us are centrally implicated.

In intellectual terms, the book is located squarely in the midst of the relatively new disciplinary domain, ‘critical geopolitics’ which emerged in the post-1980s period. But self-consciously, the authors are offering a perspective on and from the global south (2015: 5-7). In doing so, they are actively pushing the convectional boundaries of their own disciplines, Political Science and International Studies, which in my mind is clearly a necessity in the context of 21st century academic practice. Early in their text, Chaturvedi and Doyle suggest, “critical geopolitics needs to pay far more serious and systematic attention to how imaginative geographies, anchored in fear, are deployed at the service of objectification, embodiment and instrumentalization of abstract risks, threats and dangers” (2015: 10). What they urge is for the systematic scrutiny of the strategies used for this abstraction, and the politics embedded in them. Partly, it is in this discourse and the system of camouflage it throws up much of the crucial issues of climate change are often made invisible and exiled from public collective consciousness. 

Through the eight chapters of their book, Chaturvedi and Doyle have weaved a master narrative on how climate change transpires in the wake of global warming and where these processes and politics might lead, without the rhetoric and the noise of fear, but with evidence as available and theoretical postulation as necessary. Their emphases vary from ‘Terrorizing Climate Territories and Marginalized Geographies of the Post-Political’ to ‘Violence of Climate Markets’ and ‘Climate Security and Militarization: Geo-economics and Geo-Securities of Climate Change’, which specifically captured my attention.

For me, the eight chapters in the book work as stand-alone explorations of specific and often under-discussed issues of global warming in our part of the world. Through these chapters, the authors explain the highly charged politics in the context of which global warming actually works across various geographies. Their investigation presents illustrations of the unsettling conditions upon which we sit at present and not too often seeing what the future holds in the midst of global warming and resultant climate change. The image of the world they create is truly disheartening. But at the same time, Chaturvedi and Doyle warn quite earnestly that fear itself has catastrophic possibilities as fear-driven discourses on climate change can easily lead to new kinds of dependencies and new forms of domination. Above all, they bring to our attention the ways in which understandings of 'climate security' could become militarized, which itself creates multiple scenarios for global insecurity. 

Particularly in the global south and more so in South Asia, issues of environmental security and climate change are hardly core concerns of public discourse. In this context, the two authors present some of the most significant environmental issues people face in the global south by bringing to the stage of discourse specific cases, where they acquire performative value, which narrate stories that can affect large populations. Precisely due to their exploration of specific cases, which after all affects real people, the book at times employs a clear register of ‘anger.’ But how else can one discuss climate change without a sense of anger, angst and urgency on one hand, but also in the backdrop of rational theoretically informed thinking, all of which the two authors employ in weaving their text.

What is crucial in any discussion on climate change today is to understand how a vocabulary of terror is often used to address issues of climate change as a quotidian practice. This is most obvious in discourses of politics and media practice. The authors deal with this issue in considerable detail referring to how technologies of control, systems of regulation and domination comfortably existing within the present global system dominated by a neoliberal and post-political sensibility, which end up reproducing untenable asymmetries with regard to economic growth and human development within which people in the global south often become unwitting victims. 

As they progress in their narrative, what Chatuvedi and Doyle basically ask is weather the dominant discourse on climate change and global warming could be re-configured in such a way as to formulate a more legitimate and responsible forum where issues of environmental justice and sovereignty would be taken more seriously as they deserve, rather than eclipsing them in the din of neoliberal political arguments on both climate and nature, which are necessarily lineally bound to a reductionally perceived idiom of simple profit. In this context, they also pose the question if the discourse on climate change could somehow provide an audible voice to global peripheries, which includes our own region, and in this new configuration, if this idealized forum could offer more nuanced and reasonable avenues for emancipation. 

The propositions they make as concerned academics and the hope these propositions offer make sense to me at the level of both ideology/idealism and necessity/survival. But core issues in this discussion should also revolve around how receptive the global periphery itself is to these concerns. After all, the poisonous air that I breathe today in my treelined suburb of Delhi is not necessarily merely a product of neoliberal profit-making from the global north. More realistically, it is the result of unbridled and unregulated industrialisation and urbanization, which the Indian nation state itself has allowed within its own discourses of nationalism and as by-products of fantasies in becoming an industrially-enabled regional supper power. And two of the most obvious casualties in this state of affairs are the people within the boundaries of the nation state and the natural environment in which they live. In this context, I wish the book paid more attention to the enhanced ‘messiness’ of climate change and environmental degradation authored by states in the global south itself within their own parameters and concerns of nationalism and regional contestations of hegemony and profit.

Overall, the picture of global warming and climate change that Chaturvedi and Doyle paint is not a pleasant one. It is is fearful and truly unpleasant. But it is also real. But they are not in the business of generating fear and rhetoric. In the midst of the tragedy of human-made climate change the two authors have presented, they also offer possibilities of hope arguing for an increased and more reasonable understanding of the environment, not simply as an entity that could be changed at will as power politics and profit ventures might perceive, but as a multilayered system of living which includes people as well as other living beings which together construct our bio-system. For them, that ideal place should have the ability to provide secure access to global citizens irrespective of their national location to basic nutrition, reasonable health-care and shelter, and the necessary security to practice their livelihoods, which are not detrimental to themeless or the planet in which they live.

For me, what Chaturvedui and Doyle have attempted to do is to provide a script for both the history of climate change as we understand it now and possibilities for the future if reasonable people might be able to capture the momentum. As the sun refuses to shine upon my garden due to a smelly layer of fog and as the flowers in my garden are reluctant to blossom, their script metaphorically offer a moment of hope amidst hopelessness. But I am not sure if the time for hope has already eluded us.

Sasanka Perera
Department of Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi

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(Initially published in India Quarterly 72(4) 423–430, December 2016)