On Dec 4, 2011 3:23 AM, "ss" <[email protected]> wrote: > The name South Asia has been cooked up by a bunch of spineless apologists of > the Sarmila Bose/Sagarika Ghose genre in collaboration with the fake liberals > of Pakistan and a bunch of stupid and ignorant western historians and "South > Asia" scholars.
If you are disagreeing with the idea of nation states, I'm with you. However when the nation state of India was created in 1947 the term could no longer be used to describe the subcontinent as well without some confusion. I prefer the term Indian subcontinent as more accurate than South Asia, however in an era of insecure nation states who were/are trying to mould a national identity that doesn't include the entirety of history, but only the romanticized past, their discomfort at overt reminders of origins is natural. "America" most commonly refers to the United States of America. Now, hypothetically speculating, if India had chosen to most commonly refer to itself as the RI or Republic of India, then 'India' could have in common parlance meant the nation and the subcontinent, similarly. Every country needs a cogent and commonly agreed upon national narrative. India has not made it easy for Pakistan to offer this up, but neither did Pakistan lack in silliness and pettiness. America has the apple pie, not the totem pole or the wigwam as the symbol of Americana. This would have been hard to accomplish if the USA had been carved out of a nation of 'native Americans' (oh, how I dislike that pejorative and dismissive term) several times the size of the US, and they were forced to exist side by side. The irony and falsehood would be rather uncomfortably obvious. The entire idea of nation states is based on drawing artificial lines and pretending that history is immaterial. Britain, England, United Kingdom, I can't keep the nuanced differences between those terms straight in my head, nor can most British. Give Pakistan some allowance, they aren't alone in attempting to deny history. Even in India, even if the Indian nation appears to be comfortable with its mixed history, its constituent states, drawn on absurd linguistic lines are engaged in the same nonsensical denial of history as Pakistan. China style 'Panda nationalism' (a phrase of my coinage) based on non-partisan aperiodic ahistoric symbols is just as funny and failure prone. (composing long emails on tablets is rather painful)
