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Monday, March 4, 2019

The Bogey-Man of Area Studies: Reading South Asia in Contemporary Times

(Guest lecture delivered at Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies, University of Heidelberg on 6th February 2019 organized by the South Asia Institute and Professorship of Global Art History at University of Heidelberg)

Good evening. Thank you for being here at a time your semester is almost over. 

What I have to say today were initially penned by myself and my colleague, Dev Nath Pathak under the title, ‘In Defence of ‘Area Studies’ in South Asia.’ This was in response to a specific cluster of experiences in our immediate academic circumstances in the recent past. That essay will be included in a collection of essays co-written by him, myself and another colleague, Ravi Kumar. We have called this collection, Against the State: Thinking Like South Asians. That academic-polemical exercise is a more emphatic elaboration of what I have to say today. 


Also, my words are a self-critical reflection deeply rooted in our personal as well as collective intellectual histories and experiences, which at times would not adhere to conventional academic practice. This is simply an explanation, but not an apology. 

All anthropologists are also expected to be good storytellers. So let me begin with two real life stories from the recent past that would place what I have to say in context. Or, they would be a kind of problematic from which I can outline what we would prefer to see as a ‘kind of area studies’ in our own contexts, and in relation to our intellectual politics. But we have never had any reasons to call what we do ‘area studies,’ and also do not see any need to do so. But without a doubt, our focus is South Asia, and it extends beyond the nation. 

When the book, Sociology and Social Anthropology in South Asia: Histories and Practices edited by Ravi Kumar, Dev Nath Pathak and myself began its circulation in October 2018, a colleague in a passing reference in what may be called ‘corridor talk’ dismissed the book as a work in ‘area studies.’ 


Similarly, in 2017, when the Board of Studies of the Faculty of Social Sciences at South Asian University strongly suggested that MPhil and PhD research at the Faculty must have a strong South Asian approach, a colleague from the International Relations Department warned me in private that ‘we must be careful, so that we do not succumb to the area studies model.’ 

What our Board of Studies -- which decides on pedagogic issues with regard to our courses and research proposals of graduate students -- meant however was that Mphil and PhD research as well as teaching programs in the Departments of Sociology and International Relations should ideally move away from being restricted to research within a specific national location. Instead, we were advised to explore how the region might be implicated in the thematics of research and teaching, be that migration, violence, nationalism, caste, ethnicity, visual cultures, relations between states, issues of security, human rights and so on. 

In these kinds of rhetorical statements, what was flippantly thrown around, as ‘area studies’ is seen as a demon that was somehow slain by a group of unnamed academic superheroes in what appears to be an epic battle some time in the recent, but somewhat hazy and undefined past. This assumption does not seem that different from Heracles’ slaying of Geryon in Greek mythology. 


And that demon or bogeyman, it seems must somehow remain entombed in its unmarked coffin. However, invariably many of us partake in one or other version of ‘area studies’ in what we do. Seemingly, the ghost of the entombed area studies demon possesses everyone in so called postcolonial South Asia. One can see a variety of area studies at work in the work of a sociologist working on caste relations in India, and within India, in Punjab or Uttar Pradesh, or Haryana, or even in the famous ‘village’ of the doyen of Indian sociologists, M. N. Srinivas, namely Rampura. Similarly, Srinivas’ counterpart in Sri Lanka, Gananath Obeyesekere initially came to be known as the person who had ‘studied’ the village, Medagama in Sri Lanka’s central hills. 

Area studies also find expression in the work of many scholars in International Relations, and Political Science too. It is in that context they might talk of Nehruvian foreign policy or India’s relations with Pakistan and so on. In a fundamental sense, the idea of ‘area’ and the deeper logic of ‘area studies’ are intact in most, if not all studies, which would however claim, if the need arises, to have entombed the demon in the unmarked coffin, as it were. 

But that ghost is truly more powerful than the seemingly rationally configured intellectual reality many of us comfortably adhere to. Following this self-proclaimed distancing from area studies, in our teaching roles, we often brutally advise our young scholars not to engage with it. Similarly, we may reject academic papers in the ‘rigorously’ quality-controlled journals based on our collective fear of area studies. But the demon plays tricks in our minds like all self-respecting demons from any mythological world ought to do, and often sits in the corners of our academic practices where no broomstick of any South Asian Harry Potter can ever reach. 

This is particularly so when our academic training does not allow many of us to practice reflexivity in any real sense, even though we speak highly of it in classes and in our quotidian rhetoric. 

Who’s Area Studies? 

What appears from our colleagues’ rhetorical and negative judgements referred to earlier is that our recent emphasis on South Asia as an idea, a place of interest and a framework for research is very easily thrown into this unmarked coffin, and equally as easily subsumed in what appears to be the monolith of area studies of the past. But at no point, no one is curious enough to work out what all this means in our own context for us politically, experientially and intellectually. 

Are area studies as a concept so easy to fathom, and equally as easy to condemn? And in any case, why would our interests in South Asia as a framework for research that supersedes the boundaries of nation states as well as disciplinary borders of sociology be so easily equated with area studies, as it was commonly understood on the basis of conventional intellectual histories? 

Are the past interests in area studies and our own the same? Is a focus on South Asia, which we have never called area studies in our own conception, such a terrible thing anyway? 

The intention of my presentation today is not to offer conclusive or defensive answers as such. Instead, my interest is to reflect on these polemics and academic politics linked to the older idea of area studies on one hand, and secondly to think of how to explore South Asia from the perspective of the work undertaken recently by a group of colleagues in South Asian University, of which I am a part. 

But then, if what we have been seeking to build under the mandate of South Asian University as well as within our own intellectual interests is seen by some people as ‘area studies,’ so be it. 

Older Understandings of Area Studies 

In any event, what exactly is the bogeyman or demon known as area studies which everyone seems to enjoy beating? At a basic level and as an approach, area studies can be understood as a multidisciplinary approach in social sciences with a focus on areas defined either by geography or culture, including language, literature, performance and various written as well as unwritten traditions. Seen in this basic sense, everything from African Studies to South Asian studies or Francophone studies could be examples of area studies. 


Let us not hesitate to say that a renowned scholar such as Sheldon Pollock is also an area studies scholar in the ultimate analysis given his focus on Sanskrit, and what may be broadly called Indic studies. There need not be any qualms about it, as long as it delivers to the terrain of scholarship something relatively unfamiliar up to that time. As we know well, many domains of scholarship today are saturated with the reproduction of the known, the familiar, the comfortable, and finally the politically correct and the rhetorical. 

Speaking in a historical sense, European colonial expansion from the 18th century onwards, straddled with the thirst for the kind of knowledge, which had a market in the imperial capitals prompted by post-enlightenment disciplinary expansions, marks the initial genesis of area studies. That is, area studies came about as part of the need for colonial rulers and their sponsors to ‘know’ about the places, peoples, and cultures across which the uncivil thrust of their ‘civilizing’ missions were let loose. This clearly had to do with interests in domination with regard political power, commerce, cultural transformation as well as faith. 

We can’t deny the sinister objectives in the backdrop of these early endeavours of area studies that ranged from classifying and controlling the Biblical ‘benighted heathen’ to romancing with the ‘pristine exotica’. After all, Louis Dumont’s Homo Equalis needed a counterpart, Homo Hierarchicus for official as well as intellectual purposes. 

In this sense, if anthropology of the 19th century was the handmaiden of colonialism, area studies was the favourite child of the expanding empires. What Edward Said later critiqued as ‘orientalism’ at least in part emerged from this colonial politico-commercial approach to global exploitation that also led to the initial emergence of area studies. This global reality evolved in much the same way in colonial South Asia as well. 

The second genesis of area studies is located in the relations of global political power in the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars. The division of the world into convenient areas of study, which includes South Asia, occurred soon after the end of the Second World War and the clear emergence of the United States as a superpower. In this context, it became imperative that the world was more clearly dissected, studied and situated which went beyond the older areas of study made necessary as a result of colonial expansion. 

More specifically, this required the production of knowledge on areas of the world about which American policy makers knew very little.[1] This was not a simple intellectual curiosity. More importantly, it was a political imperative that also fed into schemes of global security, intelligence and politics of carving out spheres of influence in the emerging Cold War. It is in this context that the interest in the idea and category of ‘South Asia’ made political sense to the United States’ Department of State. 

In these larger intersections of meanings, politics and sensibilities, the study of specific world areas including South Asia expanded rapidly in the US university systems with the establishment of centres of expertise with funding allocated via the National Defence Education Act of 1958.[2] This also shows the security prerogative in understanding these kinds of global areas as specific political ‘curiosities,’ rather than cultural areas or interconnected social systems through which ideas, memories, histories, objects and people flowed over a considerably long historical period. 

Clearly, seen in this sense, knowledge was an established cognate of sustainable power, for which there was rivalry in the then bi-polar world. Such knowledge was necessary not merely as a matter of intellectual curiosity, but also as an important basis for the projection of power. And particularly in the context of the Cold War, US military and political planners found it necessary to know more about societies and countries in world regions, including the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and also South Asia. 

In fact, the word South Asia itself was initially coined by the US State Department[3] in the context of these global power dynamics. The Cold War-related interests in area studies was also seen in Europe in addition to the continuities from the colonial experience. It is in these general circumstances, various centres of study focused on specific world regions were established in universities in the US, France, UK and later in courtiers like Japan, China and even India. 

Area studies of this kind were replete with contradictions, which varied from the often-problematic designation of specific areas to the political ambitions of such studies. For instance, the term South Asia itself can be a problematic terminology when its official geographic mass is juxtaposed with its cultural territory. Taken in this sense, Myanmar would have been a far more sensible component of South Asia culturally, than Afghanistan. But historically, the relationships with present-day Afghanistan were crucial as even an obvious but often forgotten fact such as Buddhism’s cultural reach into that region prior to Islamization is taken into account. The matter gets even more complicated when we ask ourselves, why Maldives is in the official fold of South Asia, and Tibet is not? This is despite the fact there is a live and throbbing religio-cultrual proximity, spanning the past and the present, though in the midst of considerable political upheavals. 

In any event, area studies conventionally understood in the way I have briefly outlined have been critiqued for their internal contradictions in approach and attitude over a considerable period of time. These criticisms have come both from the areas that were studied as well as from the more enlightened elements within the Euro-American academic zone itself from where areas studied emerged in the first place. 

Perhaps the best known critique of the area studies approach is Edward Said’s seminal book, Orientalism published initially in 1978, which offered a nuanced deconstruction of the ways in which the so called ‘orient’ was constructed in the Euro-American imagination and perception. 

In a sense, post-colonial studies can be seen as a kind of a response to these issues of power and perception in the studies of the ‘other’ that emanated from the discourses of knowledge production in Europe and North America. Interestingly, Said discussed the perpetuity of orientalism in the latter part of his book, and underlined university education, course curricula, teaching practices, research and training as the areas in which orientalising practices could be seen. In a way, he was right since most university content maintained the framework of area studies in real terms, despite the overt and often rhetorical fight against the phantom, the ghost in the coffin. 

Our Approach to Politics of Knowing South Asia 

The issue however is this: can our present interest in South Asia in a completely different temporal moment and in radically transformed social and political circumstances be so flippantly subsumed within these complicated and hegemonic histories of pre-existing area studies? Would we wilfully entangle ourselves in such an approach given its less than desirable political and cultural baggage? 

But, we recognize that South Asia as a term, emanated from the area studies discourse of the post-Second Wold War period. We also see that a focus on South Asia necessarily means an emphasis on a world region in geographic as well as socio-cultural and political terms. This makes it a kind of area studies for sure. 

But does that, by itself mean that we need to become prisoners of earlier understandings of area studies? In the Preface to the volume, Sociology and Social Anthropology in South Asia: Histories and Practices (Orient Black Swan, 2018), Ravi Kumar, Dev Nath Pathak and myself clearly emphasize our “passion and an ideological commitment to the idea of South Asia” borne out of a very specific set of experiences as well as what we consider the “academic necessity” of focusing across South Asia in teaching and research.[4]

However, our version of exploring South Asia, or if one insists -- area studies -- is self-consciously exorcised of the ramifications of colonialism, neo-colonialism, the expansionist and self-centred logic of nation states, and power relations of hegemonic socio-cultural practices usually enacted across borders. We also tend to provide a kind of contemporariness with inherent complexity to our endeavours, though this also may sit uncomfortably with the conventional understanding of area studies. 

It is specifically in the realm of the contemporary that we bring in issues of civilization and history, culture and politics, literature and poetry, visuality and performance, biography and memory and so on and so forth into what we do. 

And no, this does not lead to any sense of repackaged exotic or bizarre museum materials that an area studies scholar of the colonial period or soon after would have lusted for. 

We consciously seek to let it be the kind of ‘area studies’ that differ from the older versions of that genre. Instead of being part of the archaeology of knowledge that area studies once upon a time performed for their masters, rulers, colonizers and rivalling power blocks, our version of ‘area studies’ unravels that archaeology, and shows its pitfalls. In this process, the objective is to dismantle that archaeology of knowledge, and prevent any possibility of neo-orientalism in contemporary scholarship. And in that spirit, we tend to evaluate the history and practices pertaining to our own areas of study, in sociology and social anthropology, too. 

To state it more clearly, instead of being driven by the power and hegemonic considerations of area studies as outlined earlier, our emphasis on South Asia as an ‘area’ is motivated by our position that “South Asia might be understood beyond the more predictable cartographic understandings of the region” by focusing on its cultural terrains, travel histories, folklore, popular politics and so on.[5] Ours, is “an intellectual position unabashedly in favour of a nuanced understanding of history as well as how culture works in the region over time and at specific moments.”[6]

We also find it extremely problematic to be imprisoned within the notions of ‘nation’ and nationality in terms of research, thinking and theorizing as well as in understanding things like cultural flows and the circulation of ideas. These difficulties have become more pronounced and their contradictions more apparent in our classrooms, where there are ‘representatives’ from all the ‘nations’ in South Asia bringing with them the political baggage they were socialized with. And much of this political socialization is based on an idiom of mutual hostility. This is the kind of socio-political reality that Ashish Nandy has referred to as ‘garrison states’ in South Asia where most states prefer to define themselves, “not by what they are, but by what they are not.”[7] 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 being both India and Pakistan.”[8] Our students often carry these burdens. 

In these contexts, we have found it necessary to transcend these imposed parochial borders informed by the limited imagination of the nation. We are not calling for the dismantling of nationhood or nationality. Instead, we are suggesting that it might be intellectually useful to explore what lies beyond as much as what lies within the nation. This is particularly so at the present time in South Asia when the idea of the nation has become a divisive tool of populist and violent politics within national borders as well as in relations with other nations. Unfortunately, research and thinking also tend to be subsumed, conceived and conducted within these same confines as if it is an absolute pre-condition for intellectual activity as well as cultural life. 

By its very nature, it should be self-evident that this kind of approach cannot be restricted to either a single discipline or to a single country. It has to transgress disciplinary borders within social sciences and humanities as well as the borders of nation states. 

This is precisely what we have attempted in other works, opening new avenues towards understanding South Asia. For example, our attempt to initiate a discourse along the line of performative politics in South Asia sought to put together themes running across the region. In Culture and Politics in South Asia: Perforamative Communication, Dev Nath Pathak and I have underlined that performance and politics are intricately related in South Asia, as elsewhere in the world. The collapse of power and culture is not peculiar to the United States or the former empire; it is also a crucial realization in the political domain of our own region. To say so, we adopted a framework of themes of regional significance instead of areas, such as nation states. 

Likewise, our scheme of discussion did not settle down with a haphazard and helplessly formulated conglomeration of nation states collectively called South Asia. We do not count India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Afghanistan, the way a SAARC meeting would do, in order to fulfil the quorum. The appearance of the names of these nation states is only due to sheer lack of alternative intellectual traditions and nomenclature. Just by naming these nationalities or nations, or by using the words, South Asia, we do not subscribe to the vulgar simplicity of post-World War Two area studies or the way to understand our circumstances through the reductionist geo-political semantics suggested by SAARC. 

To be more precise, our quest for ‘another’ South Asia, is thoroughly determined by the themes of discussion, which brings in even those parts of the world which may not have anything to do with the contemporary cartographic entity called South Asia. In all the deliberations on South Asia, we pack the region together, with such looseness that it transcends the preoccupation with the idea of area in particular and the narrow logic of conventional area studies in general. This approach is evident in the book, Another South Asia! in which we critically depart from the overly simplistic yardsticks of conventional area studies. 

In our forthcoming book, Against the Nation: Thinking Like South Asians (2019) we have attempted to take our approach of reading South Asia culturally to interested people beyond academia as well. Sugata Bose at Harvard University notes that our approach has “rescued the idea of South Asia from its statist straitjacket and infused it with new and rich cultural meaning”. Similarly, Faisal Devji at University of Oxford notes this is the “first serious attempt to move beyond an artificial and policy-driven definition of South Asia.” He sees what we have tried to do as a matter of “analyzing the many ways in which the region has assumed an autonomous cultural, intellectual, political and economic reality” through which reading the region has been offered “a strategic and historical weight that points toward a new kind of future for its peoples.” 

But as we have already noted, many colleagues “perhaps due to their lack of enlightenment and lapses in imagination” may consider our approach “rhetoric or propaganda.”[9] While we have not called our approach ‘area studies,’ we have no hostility in others calling it as such, as long as its contemporary manifestations and its rupture from the area studies of the past is clearly understood. 

Seen in this sense, we can steadfastly defend our kind of area studies borne out of our politics, our experiences, our intellectual needs and our pedagogic agendas. And we would also promote this way of seeing our circumstances in our work and in our institutions. This is because our efforts are clearly borne out of our experiences and needs, and not anchored to others’ experiences, expectations or anxieties embedded in histories and politics exterior to our own. But it is not a dogmatic and unchanging position as an all-encompassing ultimate truth. 

People are welcome to experiment with it or not; they can adopt it or not; they can engage with it or not. But we will continue to engage with it until we see a more sensible alternative. 

Thank you for your time. 

End Notes

[1]. Arjun Guneratne and Anita Weiss, eds., 2014. Pathways to Power: The Domestic Politics of South Asia. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield; pp. 4. 

[2]. Arjun Guneratne and Anita Weiss, eds., 2014. Pathways to Power: The Domestic Politics of South Asia. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield; pp. 4. 

[3]. Arjun Guneratne and Anita Weiss, eds., 2014. Pathways to Power: The Domestic Politics of South Asia. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield; pp. 4. 

[4]. Ravi Kumar, Dev Nath Pathak and Sasanka Perera eds., Sociology and Social Anthropology in South Asia: Histories and Practices; pp. xvii-xxi (Orient Black Swan, 2018). 

[5]. Ravi Kumar, Dev Nath Pathak and Sasanka Perera eds., Sociology and Social Anthropology in South Asia: Histories and Practices; pp. xvii-xxi (Orient Black Swan, 2018).

[6]. Ravi Kumar, Dev Nath Pathak and Sasanka Perera eds., Sociology and Social Anthropology in South Asia: Histories and Practices; pp. xvii-xxi (Orient Black Swan, 2018). 

[7]. Ashish Nandy, 2005. ‘The Idea of South Asia: A Personal Note on Post-Bandung Blues.’ In, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 541. 

[8]. Ashish Nandy, 2005. ‘The Idea of South Asia: A Personal Note on Post-Bandung Blues.’ In, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 541. 

[9]. Ravi Kumar, Dev Nath Pathak and Sasanka Perera eds., Sociology and Social Anthropology in South Asia: Histories and Practices; pp. xvii-xxi (Orient Black Swan, 2018).