The notion of Southasia is not a cartographic grid of a specific geographic region, but an India-centric approach that dominates the region as a whole. For a resident of Northeast India, this vision of Southasia is frustrating. This narrow approach has emerged out of a Big Brother-type mentality of dominant state perspective on history, politics and people in the region. Although the Northeast seldom appears outside the security-and-insurgency framework in India, it is one of the most diverse areas in all of Asia, where groups speak a different tongue every 30 kilometres, and which shares boundaries with five countries (China, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Burma). Yet what ultimately dominates the region's imagination is the 22-km 'chicken's neck' strip that connects the Northeast to the rest of India, or the New Delhi security analysis.
While the possibilities of extending the SAARC trade-and-commerce project in the Northeast have been highlighted, the area will occupy only a marginal position in the national imagination of states and regional forums such as SAARC if we fail to question rigid and dominant notions of history, politics and spaces. In essence, SAARC is a state forum to oversee economic cooperation in the region and, for that reason; it represents exclusive and hegemonic history and politics, where real people are relegated to the margins.
Meanwhile, the university system has engaged with Southasia in a different manner. Within the 'area studies' regime, scholars and researchers have been trained as 'Southasianists' for decades, especially in Europe and North America. For those so-trained, intellectual cliques, area-studies conferences and seminars have established a firm academic ground. But while the depiction of Southasia as an exciting and vibrant intellectual playground is legitimate, the geographical boundary of Southasia has also produced an insular approach towards studying the region.
In academia, Southasia has meant a huge concentration on India, with very little space for the rest. Like the state, the pursuit of knowledge has seldom overcome the geographical boundaries. Accepting spatial limits as normative, the academy has often remained incapable of imagining the region as a fluid, mobile space where people's histories, politics and geographies meet. While there are state restrictions and regulations about conducting research, universities, considered as a bastion of knowledge production, often do not challenge such restrictions. For instance, the National Archive of India in New Delhi has strict regulations about granting access to students seeking post-1914 archival documents. Researchers credentials are checked on an individual basis, prior to granting access to documents said to be "of interest to national security" by an unimaginative bureaucracy. Many students working on Northeast India and Kashmir have been denied access to archival materials crucial to their research.