Twenty-three years after its creation, SAARC remains hostage to a state-centric understanding of Southasia, and continues to operate as an inter-governmental body engaged in functional cooperation on specific issues. Civil-society actors' attempts to carve out alternative Southasian mechanisms have also not made much headway. The explanation for this perhaps lies in assessing the far-reaching impact of realist traditions on the understanding of international relations in Southasia, which lack the intellectual tools to fashion such an understanding.
The study of international relations in Southasia is hemmed-in by three sets of 'givens': the infallibility of the respective states modelled after the Westphalian nation state; a thorough internalisation of the philosophy of political realism; and a 'positive' faith in the wisdom of modernity. Bound by these assumptions, academics have been unable to come to terms with the region's pre-Independence past, or to comprehend the contemporary realities that go beyond the statist framework. The study of international relations in Southasia is underpinned by two critical unstated assumptions: theorising in this field means producing scientific knowledge; and as the Bengali historian Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, Europe remains the theoretical basis of all histories. With its constitutive ideas and practices rooted in Eurocentric experiences, international relations is bound in a manner that Southasia's various 'traditional pasts' became de-legitimised as a possible source of knowledge creation in the field.
The positivist enterprise has precluded debate on what issues of inquiry could be included in international relations, and how its key concepts of nation state, nationalism, sovereignty and territoriality could acquire different meanings. For instance, several conceptualisations and critiques of nationalism by Mohandas K Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore, M S Golwalkar, V D Savarkar, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Sri Aurobindo Ghosh were at play in the political arena in pre-Independence India. Ghosh visualised the nation as a mighty shakti, comprising all the shaktis of the millions of units that make up the nation. Savarkar argued that the Hindus are not only a nation but a jati, meaning a brotherhood, a race determined by a common origin, possessing a common blood. He rejected the idea of a nation state based on an abstract social contract with individualised citizens dwelling within administrative frontiers. From a very different vantage point, the Gujarati text of Gandhi's Hind Swaraj makes a significant distinction between a genuine nation formed as praja, and a nation of individuals merely held together by state power, characterised by the rashtra.
Many of these ideas, especially the spiritual connotations of nationalism, could be dubbed as metaphysical formulations that have no place in the rational and scientific world of international relations, and thus be dismissed. This illustrates the 'epistemic violence', to borrow a term from the literary critic Gayatri Spivak, of political realism. "The episteme", Spivak quotes Foucault to point out, "is the apparatus, which makes possible the separation not of the true from the false, but of what may not be characterised as scientific." A positivist enterprise deploys this kind of 'apparatus' to exclude various understandings of Southasian-ism from the domain of international relations. Unlike other social sciences, which study their 'traditional pasts' to understand their respective notions of the 'present' and as a legitimate source of learning, international relations takes the state as a given starting point of all of its scholarly endeavours. It has no 'pasts' to look into because they have been discredited or rendered irrelevant.