THE recent excitement about a dialogue of history teachers between two nations, discussing how to read Partition or Jinnah and the dream of a joint syllabus, raised once again in a fragment, the idea and question of Southasia. While a joint syllabus discussing contradictory histories is important, the idea of Southasia deserves a wider hearing. It cannot be reduced to an obsession between India and Pakistan, as the multiplicity of Southasia needs to be recognized, evoked and reworked. In this context, we maintain that textbook histories might be bad beginnings to a dream of plural notions of Southasia as a collection of nation states. To begin with, such a realist bureaucratic history is to foreclose possibilities at the very start. Southasia then becomes the dull and formal contract called SAARC or the half dormant version of the Southasian University in which neither dream of an alternative university or an outline of a new Southasia has been recognized.

Talking of Southasia in the present context reminds us of Cornelius Castoriadis’ distinction between the conventional idea of the imagination and the possibilities of imaginaries. Castoriadis states that imagination is a map of current possibilities, a statement articulated within the limits of current categories where our behaviour is defined by accepted definitions of the possible. For example, a nation state would be unthinkable without borders or the concept of security. The imagination confines us to conventional possibilities at a time when we need alternative histories and new experiments. Castoriads suggests, in this context, the idea of the imaginaries, a horizon of still explored possibilities, of words and worlds still to be invented. Consider playfully for a moment, the idea of a protean nation state whose boundaries are porous, which allows for the hospitality of travel, pilgrimage and where the notion of the region as culture and world view transcends the nation state. A protean nation state operates more on grounds of local filiation, memory and of hospitalities than in terms of ideas of security. A protean nation state embodies the complexity of region, religion and ecology, where a river or an ecosystem might define the logic of behaviour and even solidarity rather than the rigidity of a nation state whose boundaries, while legal, can be arbitrary. We think Gandhi’s ideas of swadeshi and swaraj were invented for such a purpose.

 

The concepts of swadeshi and swaraj gave flexibility to the corset called the nation state, allowing for local loyalties and kinship across the border. The border, for all its officialdom, is an arbitrary entity, even an artificial one cutting across ecology, memory, and even the logic of livelihood. Swadeshism allows one to transcend borders. What it creates in an ecological sense, is what C.S. Holling and other scientists call a panarchy of loyalties. It recognizes that different levels of scales operate according to a different logic. Ecolacy is as important as politics in defining the logic of decisionmaking. For example, what is called Nepal and Bihar might have filiations that run deeper than textbook history. Trade, kinship and pilgrimage might run counter to border lines demanding a re-reading of history at an everday level.

The logic of swaraj too challenges the idea of the nation state because swaraj as an act of trusteeship embraces the sense of connectivity, the sense of oceanic circles rather than the linear cartography of areas and localities. A neighbourhood gets juxtaposed to a planet and a different notion of trusteeship for a region rather than loyalty to a nation that develops. Such loyalties need not be contradictory; they can be criss-crossing, adding a richness and a complexity to the reciprocities involved.

Swadeshi and swaraj cut across nation states allowing more for a concept of region which might fit ecology, memory and language better than the history of a nation state. The reciprocities add a different texture to the conversation. This is why we argue that the idea of Southasia needs an ontology as well as an idea of citizenship. While citizenship is a formal collection of attributes, an ontology of Southasia incorporates a theory of being, becoming and belonging. It is not an official label like citizenship but a process, a rite of involvement in a lived world. What does it mean to people as a lived reality?

 

Such an ontology creates a different sense of rights and entitlement than a formal notion of citizenship. Childhood memories of the geographies we lived and the stories we heard, might become important in this context. As children, we sensed borders were more permeable, the Gorkha and the Kabuliwalah were archetypes of childhood. Pilgrimage followed rules of the sacred. The idea of ontology contoured geography in a more embedded way than a nation state. We need a different kind of storytelling beyond diplomatic history for Southasia. We need narratives that tap into the unconscious, that unravel folklore, that echo the resonances of oral history. To see Southasia as a formal contract between nations, while being indifferent to its cross-cutting encounters, is to create a stillborn creation. The region, as a commons of belonging across boundaries, offers a different logic of reciprocity than the formal entitlement of rights. For example, the access to a river becomes a different narrative in a study of regional geography than in the logic of the nation state. The Indus waters issue illustrates this logic. Geography might give us different definition of loyalties.

The current label of the commonwealth as a vestige of British colonialism might be more apt for Southasia. SAARC as an ecological commonwealth makes more sense than the costume ball we call the British Commonwealth. An idea of ontology, therefore, cuts into layers beyond politics or even geography and maps as it were the archeology and ecology of memories in a region. This essay is not creating an apology or argument for a poor man’s commonwealth. It is arguing for a richer and more meaningful alternative, where Southasia is not just a mode of knowing but a way of being and living, of relating to the other.

A critique of categories has to be translated into a ritual of livelihood and lifestyle, of trusteeship of things the worlds of development and modernity have forgotten. Southasia is a region that exists in the synchrony of linear sequences. One has to think of a new contract, even a sacramental order between (i) orality, textuality and digitality; (ii) a new contract about nature that creates a different, non-obsolescent relation between tribe, craft, agriculture and the city.

Southasia is a dream of alter-native imaginations. Here, oral narratives become central, and storytelling crucial to the narratives of a region. A nation state in that sense creates textbook history while a region is a mix of oral and written memories and metaphors.

 

In a deep sense, Southasia becomes a composite of oral, textual and digital memories, where folklore and history coexist. The history of the two Bengals or the two Punjabs would look different if contoured along an oral imagination. The region as memory, as ecology, provides a different notion of the trusteeship of a heritage as a river or a mountain than the mere definition of claims of territoriality. Trusteeship redefines the notion of responsibility differently from the way ownership and territoriality, as grammars, operate. It also provides a different idea of economy as sharing and responsibility beyond formal contract. For example, in an ecological or ontological sense we would need a Himalayan Institute as a Southasian responsibility. It is the prospect of civil society which needs to be explored more creatively.

 

One of the more tragic absences of SAARC has been the silence of civil society. The current tragedy of SAARC is that we reify the nation state as a sacrosanct category when we should have seen SAARC as a conversation of civil societies. The deeper sadness is that we rarely think of civil society as transcending national boundaries and exploring international and global issues. Today civil society needs to think beyond the grammar of the nation state to facilitate the movement and the mutual pollination of dissenting imaginations. Himal as a journal is as important for India as for Nepal. Only then does SAARC become the availability of eccentricity and alternatives that we call Southasia.

We have to recognize that SAARC is a clerical parade, a dull spectacle of nation states in uniform, while Southasia is a costume ball, a dance of plurality and playfulness where alternative imaginations in terms of citizenship, ecology and knowledge systems can come to the fore. It is generally recognized that the construction of a nation state is often an arbitrary or incomplete project, where language, religion or ethnicity are betrayed in this context. The idea of the region mellows the stiffness of the nation state, allowing for organic processes occurring for decades, even centuries, to continue.

Once we see Southasia without the corset of the nation state as a many layered reality of civilizations, cosmologies, ecologies, civil societies, the nation state in the formal sense becomes a provincial category. We need to recognize that it is not globalization that challenges the idea of the nation state but the idea of the region where plurality can obtain precedence over the uniformity of the nation state.

 

As a region seeking to pluralize the idea of the nation state, Southasia must be seen as a site for a set of critical and playful experiments, which demonstrate how the reciprocity of region and nation can be a creative process. Consider the idea of heritage. As a cynic put it, the nation as a project always leaves leftovers which some ethnic or religious groups consider precious. It is as if each nation leaves behind memories in the other. Southasia can revive the idea of the Roerich Plan. The idea was first suggested by the Russian artist, Nicholas Roerich, nearly a century ago. It was to create an equivalent of the Red Cross for culture and a Green Cross which would be responsible for the protection of historic buildings during times of war and violence. It becomes a common framework of trusteeship for a culture we all share.

A Southasian activist suggested a Roerich plan might have saved the great Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan from vandalism and devastation. We need both concepts and institutions in peace to enable us to act with speed and transparency.

The Roerich plan can become the basis of the Southasia model of culture as a radically different version of clerical Unesco, where heritage is protected not just as monument and archive but as seed and nature. Sacred groves across the region deserve protection as much as documents or monuments. When the idea of heritage sustains diversity, the concept of Southasian comes alive. The emphasis can be on language loss, where one can attempt to create a Peoples’ History of Southasia where oral traditions and folklore acquire a new vitality.

A Southasian heritage centre will seek to sustain craft traditions around weaving, carpentry, bamboo, emphasizing the little traditions of heritage, the creativity of the vernacular as a compost heap for culture. The Roerich plan can be a part of the responsibility of universities now committed to the protection of Southasian knowledge systems.

A few decades earlier, Nepal had suggested an ascetic idea of tourism as part of an ethics of tourism mainly to prevent vandalism and garbage on Himalayan treks. An ethics of tourism styling it closer to pilgrimage, might help create a Southasian style of tourism which sustains craft and prevents the explosion of kitsch as part of the tourist industry.

 

What one is proposing is that the kaleidoscope of culture and ecologies which we call Southasia become a set of filters, lenses for creating alternative forms of reading the other. For example, Southasia which has an enormous coastline and innumerable islands, often behaves officially like a landlocked entity. During disasters, these coastal areas and islands get neglected. One needs a perspective which reads from sea to land, showing how the ecological lenses of the sea can help us understand livelihoods and margins differently. Such a coastal-centric perspective which sees fishing as livelihood, cosmos, and community might help us stand up to the epidemic of nuclear plants threatening to litter India, Pakistan and other countries.

The word, Southasia, thus becomes the basis for alternative ecologies, categories and technocratic models that current policy establishment have little sense of. In a modest way, Southasia can become the basis of an alternative idea of science and technology which understands margins and minorities better.

This idea of a Southasian imagination for science and technology already builds on a non-tradition of debate where social movements and scientists in Nepal, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka have already created a tradition of critique. One thinks of C.V. Seshadri, Amulya Reddy in India, Susantha Goonatilake in Sri Lanka, Ziauddin Sardar, Deepak Gyawali in Nepal. A Southasian critique of technology can become one of the crystal seeds of the idea of a Southasian university.

 

The current idea of the Southasian University is stillborn despite the presence of creative individuals. The university follows the nation state in providing a semblance of representation to other nations, but it has no critique of the classifications of knowledge which underlie the western idea of the university. There is little sense of historical debate, of the experiments that took place during the national movement around universities as a dialogue of civilizations (Tagore), of the postmodern university as a post-Germanic university liberated both from specialisms and the pressure of the nation state (Geddes). One still operates with a nineteenth century idea of a university with a cosmetic touch of interdisciplinarity.

The Southasian University must go back to the debates on knowledge where epistemology linked life, livelihood, lifestyle and life cycle, where the university created reciprocity between an ethics of memory and an ethics of innovation. Southasia has to create a new trusteeship for a plurality of knowledges and cultures, where alternative imaginations anchored in alternative cosmologies and epistemologies create a truly plural culture which challenge the technocracies of the present and their idea of Big Science.

 

One can site the work of C.V. Seshadri, Ziauddin Sardar on Islamic Science, Amulya Reddy on energy systems, but probably as precious is the work of Matthieu Ricard, the Buddhist monk from Nepal. Ricard, a French biotechnologist who worked with the Nobel laureate, Francois Jacob, has produced a conversation between science and religion which needs to be explored. His idea of caring economies and his monograph on Altruism adds substance to the Bhutanese experiments in Gross National Happiness. In fact, a critique of economic categories is probably even more necessary than a critique of western science for Southasia.

What one needs to create is an archive of such experiments across Southasia which can provide the theories of knowledge for a Southasian University. The Southasian University is not merely a geographic location but an epistemic one, seeking to rework the current knowledge systems and their iatrogenic properties, anchored as they are on expertise whose status we need to question. To this archive as a compost heap of the imaginations, we add thought experiments which provide debating forums between traditional agriculture and biotechnology, a dialogue of medicines, and an attempt to create panarchic rather than hierarchic solutions for our cultures.

Decades ago, Patrick Geddes, the first professor of Sociology at Bombay University, claimed that no university is complete without its dissenting academics. The Southasian University has to engage with dissenting and alternative imaginations to rework the relation between knowledge and democracy in the region. The argumentative Southasian has to return to rework the dialogue of differences.

The Southasia experiment, reworking the idea of region, nation state and re-reading the university, has to go beyond institutions and look at the violence of everyday classifications. One has to look at a new theory of the informal economy, a dismissive word that includes most of us, or even the idea of citizenship which does not include most of us. As individuals and groups we suffer from temporariness. One has to question the categories, the invisible maps that create a different order of border crossings.

 

The divide between formal and informal hides the fact that most of official democracy and economics does not work. We need to look at the moral order we label the informal economy, and provide a more life-giving set of categories, which create new imaginaries unthought or unlived by the so-called free market, by security economies that have to relook at migration disorder, nomadism, in different ways. Southasia becomes another name for a new discourse on nature and the informal economy. The world of craft becomes a new geography of livelihoods, not a sunset economy of the so-called knowledge society which preaches obsolescence as its credo. In experimenting with knowledge and even being seduced by its problems, one cannot take democracy for granted, even in a definitional sense.

Talking of a democracy as an electoral or majoritarian exercise often leads to populism. What one needs is a theory of pluralism, where pluralism is seen as a pilgrimage of difference, which allows one to be more critical and comfortable with oneself and ones identity. Democracy needs to be invented again and again. One needs to rework the idea of borders, question the banality of security, rework notions of citizenship, to show how a majoritarian democracy can be coercive to dissenting, marginal, eccentric and minoritarian imaginations. One needs the latter cultures of one as exploring the idea of alternatives.

Southasia has a tragicomic problem where India does not approve of Nepal’s attempts at restoring democracy and constitutionalism. One has to go beyond such democratic envy and pluralize the tracks, the pathways to democracy. One desperately needs a conversation of democracies and democratic imaginations, and search for experiments that sustain it. The EEC has a Parliament for the idea of the region and we need to invent a tricameralism, which allows representatives from Southasia to sit in and participate in our parliamentary processes, with comment on the Nepalese blockade, or even the feasibility of linking major rivers. The SAARC imagination has to refresh the Indian debate without allowing any country to be hegemonic as an idea system.

 

We have to allow for openness by considering Tibet as part of this Southasian experiment even if China does not approve. Tibet is in fact unique as a floating hypothesis, a nation of refugees, adding to the imagination of India and Southasia, emphasizing the creativity of hospitality, of the need to constantly reinvent the idea of the stranger, so that the Southasian self remains incorrigibly plural, more particularly the Dalai Lama’s debates on science, place, compassion can serve as the basis of new models of reconciliation, with the Dalai Lama playing the Southasian Tutu, allowing for harmony, peace and non-violence to substitute security and brutality.

The very presence of Tibet as an imagination can help us rethink the idea of a Southasian peace – exile and refugee thus change from homeless aliens to new lenses to look at peace. The revival of Ghaffar Khan’s Khudai Khidmatgar can be another grassroot possibility for knitting together the strands of reconciliation. In fact, the Dalai Lama and Ghaffar Khan are reminders that the Gandhian experiments are far from complete. A Gandhi in mothballs is the last thing Southasia needs.

One also needs new sites for experimentation beyond the comedy of think tanks peddling 19th century notions of nationalism and security. New Ashrams of the mind where old dualisms fade, and new reciprocities between religion and science, knowledge and power are explored, understood and experimented upon are also needed.

 

Finally, one has to realize that the idea of Southasia has to be conceptualized as an experiment, a dialogue across a whole domain. One can outline themes as a dialogue of civilizations and cosmologies; second, a conversation of constitutions reworking the possibility of democracy; third, a reworking of the commons where ideas of nature, heritage, are thought about outside the domain of economies; fourth, an encounter of communities that goes beyond the aridity of nation states, where unity embodies plurality rather than uniformity; and finally, a blending of syllabi where knowledge is hyphenated and blended in a dialogue of universities.

These five axes provide the outlines of a new Southasia beyond the bleakness of SAARC. The South, as a future of differences and ideas, needs to be celebrated as such; one needs a different kind of storyteller unfolding new creation myths beyond nation states, obsessed with borders and security, for such a playfully democratic exercise.