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Why South Asia?
“Eastward of India lies a tract which is entirely sand. Indeed, of all the
inhabitants of Asia, concerning whom anything is known, the Indians dwell
nearest to the east and the rising of the Sun,” wrote Herodotus in 440 B.C.E.
Although there were peoples further east than India unknown to Herodotus, he
used a familiar term for the region we now refer to as South Asia: India.
The India to which Herodotus referred was not a single state but a vast
geographical region and a civilization renowned in the West for its wealth and
exoticism. It was the land beyond the Indus River, from which the name came.
Alexander the Great had briefly conquered the Indus valley in 326 B.C.E., but
died soon after.
India (as the Greeks called it), al-Hind (as the Arabs called it), or Hindustan
(as the Persians called it) was the region from the Indus River to the Brahmapu-
tra, bounded on three sides by ocean and by the snowy mountains to the north.
The people of this vast place had no single word for the region or each other.
Other names were in use: Aryavarta was the Sanskrit name for the region of
northern India where Sanskritic culture dominated. Bharat, after legendary
King Bharata of the Puranas, is another. Bharat is currently one of the two offi-
cial names for the Republic of India.Since 1947
Since 1947, however, the preferred name of the region long known as India
has shifted to South Asia, a neutral term that incorporates seven modern states:
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives.
Some also include Afghanistan and Burma (Myanmar). For perhaps obvious
reasons, people of these nations prefer not to be lumped together as “Indians.”
What happened in 1947 to change this long usage? That was the year that
Britain finally withdrew from the subcontinent after decades of the indepen-
dence struggle and the disastrous Second World War. From the earliest forays
of the East India Company in the eighteenth century, Britain had come to rule
an “India” in its broadest historical sense, including what is now Pakistan,
India, Bangladesh, and Burma (Burma, or Myanmar, is now considered part of
Southeast Asia). At midnight, August 14, 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru spoke to the people of India in his famous “Tryst with Destiny” speech
with the ringing words: “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now
the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full mea-
sure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world
sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.” In Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jin-