Since the 1980s, when the idea of South Asia emerged as a meta-nationalistic category — aspiring to hold its own with other ‘basket' geographics like ‘West Asia', ‘Central Europe', Pacific Rim' and ‘South-East Asia' — every effort has been made to obliterate the fact that concept ‘South Asia' is, in fact, an illegitimate offspring of colonialism, nurtured strategically to further the hegemonies of surrogate regional supremacy of former colonialists and present-day neo-imperialists.

It is quite different, for example, from the pan-Asian-ism that was conjured up by Rabindranath Tagore, as a counter to the colonial Western paradigm. This dealt with a leap of the imagination, which compelled us to rethink the region outside of the limitations of national borders.

The idea of the ‘region', though, is not all that new or unique. The sheer geographic bounding of the sub-continent with mountain and oceans made inevitable the evolution of an inward looking civilisation, largely self-conscious of its own location. In fact, it dates back some two millennia to the period of that wondrous poet Kalidasa and his inspired celebration of the ‘region' in his long poem Meghadootam (The Cloud Messenger).

This colourful, romantic bird's eye-view, however, is of at least two thousand years vintage. Contrarily, the recently confected post-colonial nation states of the region provide us the worm's eye-view. The assorted bundle of inchoate and mutually colliding South Asian nationalisms, have rapidly set up some of the most brutal, backward-looking, violent and anti-people democracies imaginable, successfully undercutting and over-riding the emergence of scores of radically new political and cultural formations.

The plural and parallel twentieth century national movements of the sub-continent, in fact, threw up diverse imaginaries of ‘the nation', which were repressed and, sometimes, co-opted within dominant tendencies. By the 1920s, the first OBC-led Dravidian movement had begun in the South, which would lead on to the demand for a separate Dravidasthan, a demand which continued into the 1950s as a secessionist DMK party burnt the national flag and into the 1980s by the as yet unsolved Tamil Eelam issue in Sri Lanka.

The Communist Party too had been formed in the 1920s and galvanised in to a grand politico-cultural movement by the 1940s. Post-Independence, Left ideology became a significant part of the political impulse in the sub-continent and has led to three states electing Communists to power in India, even as a larger chunk of territory and popular sentiment swings towards extra-Parliamentary Leftist affiliations. In Nepal, it led to the overthrow of the Monarchy and the swearing in of the first Maoist government in the region.

Within the nationality struggle, the Dalit movement was galvanising into the demand for a separate Dalitsthan. This demand keeps manifesting itself periodically after every caste atrocity against Dalits and, the ascension to power of the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh and her recent role in the trust vote tamasha, puts such an eventuality beyond the pale of mere speculation.

Tribal movements since the late 19th century were projecting a unified Gondwanaland, stretching as a horizontal tribal belt from the Aravalli ranges of Gujarat and Rajasthan in the West, through Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Bengal, Assam and the North Eastern states, well into Burma, Kampuchea and Thailand.

Today, nurtured in the womb of South Asian-ism, the sub-continent is poised to embrace a rapid Hinduisation or Islamisation of the region, bull-dozing every other political nuance. Political nationalism returns to plague us as cultural nationalism.

The South Asia paradigm, thus, has little on offer to the majority of the region's populations. It certainly is a talisman for the elite, exclusive and prosperous regional bourgeoisie, for whom it constitutes a ‘new market'. In the high profile game of ‘security' — regional security, food security, energy security, etc — all sorts of ill-thought out global adjustments and compromises are being made (like the infamous Indo-US nuclear deal), which are only destined to push the region further into a war theatre whose scenes and acts are scripted elsewhere. The cloak of South Asian conviviality hides the collective impotence of failed governance, rapid mass pauperisation, minority exclusions, crumbling edifice of education, ecological devastation and the spectre of mutually assured nuclear destruction.

If Kalidasa's cloud were to float over South Asia today, it would hardly wax poetic on what lies below and ahead.