South Asia lifted the idea of nation state from borrowed books. There is, however, another way of entering the twenty-first century.
When South Asia started its independent journey as a collection of states in 1947, it was in one sense a continuation of the project South Asians had given themselves towards the middle of the nineteenth century. The project was the modernisation of the region, and it had three clear components. We wanted to build nation states the way those who then ruled South Asia had already done in Europe; we wanted ´development´, even though the term had not yet come into vogue; and we had to inculcate in our generally "superstitious" , "change-resisting" people an appreciation of the principles of scientific and technological rationality.
All three of these responsibilities were formally vested in the growing states of the newly decolonised countries. Thus, the new South Asian states had to ensure not only national security, which states had been doing for centuries, but also carry the hopes and ambitions of millions.
Fifty years after independence, it is obvious that there was something wrong in the way South Asia imported the concept of state, as if it were a talisman. We picked it up not from life but from books. As a result, our idea of the nation state was more purist than that of colonial societies on which it was modelled. We thought we could get what we needed from Anglo-Saxon universities like Oxford or Cambridge, so we did not bother with the particulars of state-formation and nation-building in the Continent.