In the last pages of Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, the master artisan Ananda Udugama is tasked with chiselling a new Buddha from the ruins of a colossal statue that had been dynamited in the midst of a bloody civil war. Ironically, the Buddha had not been bombed in the immediate dynamic of the war, but rather in an attempted theft of treasures that were thought to be buried in his torso – the bombers were trying, Ondaatje says, "to find a solution for hunger". Yet even as they were reconstructing the Buddha's body, Ananda and his artisan cohorts were unearthing bodies that had been disappeared across the country. That landscape of violence and loss that was scarred from clashing political projects regarding statehood and militancy also bore the scars of different struggles against hunger and poverty. Working in this brutalised ground, Ananda examines the artistic vision that produced the ruined Buddha, as he takes on a (re)construction that also gives the Buddha a new perspective. Ananda's expertise is in eye-painting, and he chisels out eyes facing north, pondering the "figure of the world the statue would see".
The very act of creating the Buddha is also about this Buddha seeing differently; he remains rooted in the ruins that are the ground from which he sees, but his vision is not confined to yesterday's landscape. In some sense, exploring what it means to be Southasian is a parallel endeavour: it is to interrogate the invocation of 'Southasia', to lay bare that inherited landscape and the different visions of justice and collective life that have been buried in the political cartography of the region. It is to unearth the distributive stakes in that landscape, and examine what became normalised and legitimised in different visions. However, as with Ananda's Buddha, against and from the ground of those past visions of Southasia, this interrogation is also about (re)construction and new perspectives – reclaiming that ground for different visions and different investments in our intersecting and overlapping futures. What, then, are the projects that have been inherent to the invocation of what it means to be 'Southasian'?
There are many Southasias that we need to strain against here. There is the Southasia that was inscribed into the region through the geographies of the British Raj and the technologies of colonial governance. There is the Southasia that has emerged through the production of the postcolonial state and its attendant national mythologies embedded in institutions of governance. There is the Southasia that is about notions of security and territorial integrity that are mobilised from Kashmir to the Nepali terrain, from Balochistan to Batticaloa – notions of 'security' that are invoked by those deploying the sepulchre of statehood and those aspiring to it, those acting in the name of territorial integrity and those acting in the name of self-determination.
There is, of course, the Southasia that underscores notions of 'authentic' regional culture that have emboldened differentiated citizenship and a violent majoritarianism on the one hand, and sepia-coloured, corporatised multiculturalism on the other. There is also the Southasia that is utilised in the invocation of 'tradition', in order to insulate ideologies and practices predicated on caste, gender, sexuality or other social axes from dissent, seeking to place these beyond the ambit of political contestation. There is the Southasia that emerges in Cold War geographies of Southasian 'area studies', from the corridors of the CIA to the academic hallways of 1950s US social sciences. There is the Southasia that emerges in the world's business papers, with the financial mapping of the region as an investment opportunity of emerging markets and trading zones. The list is longer. These are but a few ground markers of the invocation of 'Southasia' that we need first to explore in order even to begin the project of (re)construction. We have to unpack how the invocation of 'Southasia' is invested in the 'projects' already mentioned, and their implications for the distribution of resources and meanings, to see whether we can open up that ground for counter-hegemonic possibilities.