Part III: South Asia 145Most historians now believe that Jinnah backed himself into a corner on
creating a Pakistan, using it initially as a bargaining chip to maneuver the Con-
gress Party into conceding better terms for the Muslim leadership but the idea
got out of hand. A passion for Pakistan that he had inflamed could not be con-
tained. As the Second World War ended and many of India’s leadership were
released from jail, the idea reached into the streets where local political leaders
inflamed Muslim–Hindu feelings. Religious massacres began in Calcutta and
spread to other cities, and by 1947 everybody but Gandhi realized that India
had to be divided. To his dismay, his “nonviolent” movement for independence
culminated in a violent dismemberment that left South Asia traumatized into
the present.
This is why we now speak of South Asia, rather than India. Yet these are
new boundaries, drawn up in 40 days in 1947. As we look in the next two chap-
ters at the great civilization that is South Asia, we will find most present-day
borders meaningless. The Indus Valley civilization, whose main ruins at
Mohenjo Daro and Harappa are in Pakistan, spread across both sides of the
Indus and down as far south as Gujarat and eastward to the Ganges. When
“Muslim” invaders began entering India in the eleventh century, they were iden-
tified by the people (and remembered in the Sanskrit texts), not as Muslims, but
as Turks and Afghans. Indians knew all about religious variety—the gods were
in the millions and the details varied village by village and caste by caste—but
ethnic and linguistic distinctions were worth noticing and made a difference.
So, the term “South Asia” is important from 1947 on (e.g., Bose and Jalal
1997; Mines and Lamb 2010). In the chapters that follow, we will use the term
“India” in its older sense, as a broad, brilliant, multistranded civilization that is
the core of modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, as well as Nepal, Bhutan, Sri
Lanka, and the Maldives. However, we must admit that research on “South
Asia” overwhelmingly favors India. That is partly for reasons described above,
the status of “India” as both geographic region and a civilization prior to 1947.
The impetus for replacing the generic India with a more inclusive South Asia
largely comes from Pakistani scholars and citizens (plus diaspora descendants
of the region now known as Pakistan), and it does not seem to have promoted
more intense study of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, or the Maldives.
We also cannot forget that most South Asians are Indian; there are almost 1.3
billion Indians, but only about 192 million Pakistanis and 166 million Bangla-
deshis. The next largest nation is Nepal with almost 29 million.
These other South Asian nations stretch from the high Himalayas (Nepal,
Bhutan) to a tiny chain of 26 atolls (the Maldives) and the larger teardrop-
shaped island of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean. Bangladesh lies on the delta of
the great Brahmaputra River that crosses Tibet and then swings south into the
Bay of Bengal. Their cultures have been shaped by the influence of their neigh-
bors: Nepal and Bhutan by Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, the Maldives by Arab
Islam, and Sri Lanka by Hinduism and Buddhism from South India, but all of
them by “India.”