Himal Magazine has gathered the opinions of 75 people on the question of whether South Asia exists. Here are the opening lines of my contribution:

When I speak English, I am regarded as an educated Indian. When I speak Hindi, Indians always know that I am Bihari. When I use constructions such as ‘hence-it-would-not-be-wrong-to-conclude’ or, unfortunately, words such as ‘problematic’, people might guess that I’m an academic. But there is no speech act, no distinctive utterance, accent or ideology that makes people nod in recognition of something that distinguishes me from my other identities, and say, “Ah, a Southasian.”

And yet, I have presented myself as Southasian, and acted as a Southasian, and often anxiously worried that I wasn’t enough Southasian. All this happened when I travelled outside India for the first time, to get a degree in the United States. In the early years, I never came across the word. Maybe I was moving in the wrong company, splitting my time almost equally between Biharis and Marxists. The former were just Biharis, but the latter were all internationalists. Not a trace of Southasianism among them.

But then came a period of several years when I wrote poetry and became a Southasian.

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