If I bristled at what I took to be a canine comparison, many of India's neighbours would find it galling that everyone "with ethnic origins in the Indian Subcontinent" is regarded as Indian.
To ensure that no one escapes the net, Singapore's National Registration Department lists no fewer than 15 categories of Indian; and to be doubly sure, it includes Sinhalese as well as Sri Lankan along with Tamil and Bengali. But any Indian who might gloat over this terminological conquest is brought down to earth by the local university's indulgence of Sikh students, who are allowed to opt out of the Indian label.
Defining nationality is always difficult in old societies reborn as modern states. We live at many planes but the core identity—the one that matters—is clan, religion or language. The national concept is so remote that no Indian language, including my native Bengali, has ready words for India and Indian.
A continental identity is unthinkable, which explains why the political scientist Benedict Anderson calls Asia a Western invention. "People in Western countries believe in the massive existence of 'Asians,' but very few people in 'Asia' share this curious idea," he says.