There is a lot of talk on the need to understand each other in South Asia, but strangely nothing is being done to promote area studies Take one instance: the low level of intellectual activity in India about Nepal.
While academics in one or another South Asian country have occasionally taken stock of their own national corpus of regional studies, they have seldom studied the obstacles that hinder a robust future for regional studies in South Asia taken as a whole. If such an exercise were to take place, the first task would be an analysis of the substantive orientations of previous scholarly research done in any particular South Asian country on any of the its neighbouring countries. Subsequently one would discuss how these orientations aid or do not aid the flowering of a good regional scholarship in South Asia and then consider institutions which can execute research on the concerned subjects. This kind of exercise is necessary because it is quite clear that without strong home bases for social science research activity in each of the South Asian countries, no region-wide South Asian scholarship can flourish. However we have not seen much of this kind of analysis.
A reading of South Asian academic journals, as well as Himal, indicates that there is not much reflection going on in the realm of area studies in South Asia. This lack is significant, at a time when much ink is being spent on the possibilities and limitations of SAARC and non-official South Asian cooperation initiatives. While there is a lot of talk about understanding each other in South Asia, one of the most reliable methods to achieve that goal, academic research about each other, remains mediocre at best. We can examine the extent of this problem by looking at the case of area studies in India, with particular focus on how Nepal has been studied there.
Area Studies in India: Focus on Nepal