The “fault lines” in South Asia include a volatile Pakistan-India relation with regards to Kashmir, crisis of national identity in Sri Lanka, political and migratory issues in Nepal, and the unresolved questions of 1971 pertaining to Bangladesh-Pakistan relations. These conflict zones are such that national borders cannot contain the troubles that are often international. The perils in South Asia are often transnational in nature because “an outrage in one place,” as Aamir Mufti (2007) puts it, “[has always] brought out a worse response in another” (1). We should also note India’s self-designated role of a neighborhood watch, or what we might call “big brother” that has incarnated itself as a colonial-minded power. This self-styled Indian hegemony has contributed to the aforementioned diplomatic impasse with Pakistan, as well as conflict with the other nations of the region in the past few decades. The two-month long economic blockade of Nepal by India in 2015, which brought a humanitarian crisis in Nepal, is an example of India’s aggressive policies in its neighboring countries. Such unequal and often contested relationships between India and other countries in South Asia have been shaping literature and culture of the region too. As a result, South Asia has become India-centric, relegating other nations and cultures to the periphery. Anglophone South Asian literature, the dominant form of literary expression, also tends to think and represent the human conditions in the region and its diaspora through the lenses of Indian cultural hegemony.
We have selected four presenters, strictly limiting each to 12 minutes, and a major South Asian literary scholar as respondent, who will speak for 5 minutes. The panel explores what mostly remain silent in the discussion of South Asia in literature and cultural studies. They attempt to recast the region by emphasizing the heterogeneous projections of the crisis of the nation in the globalized world. In a place where nations often define the parameters of home and belonging, the depictions of the marginalized and the homeless must consider intra-nation, caste and communal squabbles, as the panel does. Thus, the panel addresses the challenges of being human as well as re-imagines the human as outcast by questioning citizenships, nationalities, religious, class, and caste identities and gendered existences.
The first panelist Rituparna Mitra discusses Arundhati Roy’s Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) and Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator (2011) to analyze the faultline intersecting India and Pakistan. She argues that the novels “calibrate a politics that emerges on the margins of the human/inhuman and the citizen/other,” where the state perpetrated violence cannot penetrate the resistance of the people. India’s use of violence is counteracted by the transformative power of “mourning and subversion” in both Roy and Waheed.
A similar concern with the state’s use of violence in Sri Lanka is presented by Maryse Jayasuriya, who investigates the depiction of post-war milieu in local and diasporic Sri Lankan Anglophone writing. She argues that Sri Lanka remains at the center of a crucial set of moral, ethical, and political questions that affect displaced persons inside and outside of the country, despite its relative obscurity in an India-dominated region. The paper analyzes the war’s impact on the human/environment symbiosis, the plight of the civilians caught up between the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil rebels, and the lingering effect of the conflict on the diaspora of different generations.
The idea that India’s hegemony can overwhelm an entire nation is reflected in Binod Paudyal’s paper on Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006). Arguing that the Nepali migrants and the Gorkhas are dehumanized in Desai’s novel, Paudyal identifies the work to be belonging to the ensemble of Indian cultural expressions in which Nepalis are portrayed as the “other” of Indianness. The novel becomes synonymous with such Indian objectification of the Nepali, which functions by perpetuating their existing stereotypes as soldiers, coolies, servants, and watchmen.”
In the final paper of the panel, Asif Iqbal explores the question of humanity by going beyond the Indian context, as it focuses on the troubled postcolonial past of Bangladesh and Pakistan. His reading of Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim (2011) focuses on the encroaching religious orthodoxy in Bangladesh to argue that the experience of 1971 has shaped the conflicts between the seculars and the fundamentalists during the military dictatorships of the 1980s. Violence, gendered or otherwise, has left a dehumanizing effect on a society that attempts to seek justice for the crimes committed during 1971, while at the same time grapples with the state-sanctioned religious orthodoxy that encroach upon everyday human rights.
Thus, the panel is concerned with the idea of the human existing in the fault lines of the South Asian nations. In the context of an India-dominated region, locating the human involves understanding the fault lines of the other South Asian nations, which the papers included in the panel aim to do by focusing on literatures giving voice to the human resistances to the forces of power. “The Other South Asia” panelists will thus suggest that there is more diversity in South Asia than what is made visible by competitions among the nations and between regional and extra-regional forces.