International institutions are facing an aridity of ideas. If one looks at the United Nations, one sees a certain reification at a time large ideas and large institutions seem to have met defeat. Whether through globalism or internationalism, these institutions have been desiccated.
At one level, such institutions are seen as cosmopolitan and necessary, while regional institutions are seen as parochial and unnecessary. The latter are also seen as anti-democratic at times. It’s this that we have to challenge—the very idea of the region. When one talks about a region, one talks about the vernacular. But one has to understand the region by going back in history to the works of leading scholars like Ashis Nandy and Ziauddin Sardar.
For Sardar, the region of South Asia is one of the most inventive, charming, life-giving one can possibly think of. The example he gives is that of a certain kind of nostalgia. He said, whenever migrants from this region meet, whether Pakistani or Indian, there’s a sense of conviviality, warmth of memory and a certain kind of storytelling.
Nandy has also pointed that out to a certain extent—when one thinks of united Bengal, one thinks of a certain kind of organic togetherness, a certain power and creativity to the idea of language.
Regionalism adds a sense of myth and literary imagination to the very idea of democracy. So in reinventing the idea of South Asia, we are reinventing the idea of democracy as something more than an electoral or political imagination. It is an attempt to look at the region as an epistemological, ecological, ethical fact.
Let me give you a few examples. One of the institutions we need to build in the South Asian region is an institute of human ecology. Let’s call it the Salim Ali - Abdul Salam Institute of Ecology. The Himalayas today face a bleak future and need to be reworked beyond the tourist imagination. To dream of South Asia should be about reinventing Himalayan ecology all over again.
The second idea is more sombre—an institute of river ecology. In this context, one has to point out that China’s development has become cannibalistic and genocidal. Its series of dams in Tibet can virtually destroy the Northeast as we know it. The idea of riverine ecology has to challenge the idea of dam-building as a genocidal concept at the international level. It’s no longer a local problem.
The third example is about a new kind of politics, in which the region becomes an act of reconciliation. The nearest example one can think of is the relation between regionalism and indigeneity. Together, they can create a powerful pluralistic imagination. It’s to create a new kind of morality, to invent a new kind of justice.
The region, with its multiplicity of languages, can also give birth to another kind of imagination. For this, one needs a new relation between translation, dialogue and interpretation. For this, we have to try to create a new Unesco for the region.
Thus the ideas of the region can become life-giving for democracy, which today has been built around electoralism. The reason, to a certain extent, is that the celebration of difference is important for democracy. That difference itself is invigorating.
That region is not a parochial idea, but it’s a celebration of the local and the vernacular. In a Gandhian sense, the region combines both swadeshi and swaraj. It takes the best of the local and it understands the best of the cosmopolitan. And it builds these two into a holism that is both an understanding of the local and thoroughly conversant with the universal.
That’s why the idea of the region also becomes crucial for ecology. It tends to show that politics without a sense of epistemology and ecology is blind. That’s why the idea of South Asia becomes absolutely crucial. It is not just a revival—what one needs here first is a revitalisation of epistemic memory.
Memory is not just text. It is not just a set of archives in a museum. Memory, in a deep and fundamental way, is orality. And it is this orality of memory that one has to understand to capture the power of South Asia as a region. Today, it has to be revived from being a debacle of storytelling.
In this context, Sardar points out that migrants are the best representatives of a region. They capture its nostalgia, they know its divisiveness. Yet migrants understand in a deep and fundamental way that seeing it as whole is a celebration of difference.
One wants to emphasise this because, in a certain way, it’s only the idea of the region that can help save democracy. Democracy in India has become either too parochial or too empty. Indians have lost their sense of internationalism as a powerful myth. They today emphasise regionalism in its purely vernacular, debilitating sense. What one needs is a combination of the two.
So, the idea of South Asia as a region becomes essential at two levels. It revives an idea and creates an approach movement within India and Pakistan. It is healing. The region, in that sense, can be seen as a healing institution. And regions that heal can create kinds of rapprochement that go beyond the border and the nation-State.
The idea of South Asia today would combine the memories of everything from Myanmar to Bangladesh to Pakistan. We need the idea of the region. We need the poetics of difference. We need the mythology of storytelling to create in South Asia a more life-giving set of institutions. The idea, in this contemporary sense, belongs to the future.
I am accentuating the power of region in order to bring it to the fore on questions of democracy, for which one needs a new sense of ecology. A region is an ecological and epistemic idea, too. It is not a conflation of levels, it distinguishes among them. Thus the region becomes a powerful possibility of creative imagination.
One must realise that over the last few decades, social science concepts have been frozen—they have become tedious or utterly official. Life needs to be breathed into it. One needs to begin with the works of people like Nandy and Sardar to rediscover the power of region as something creative, as something dynamic, as something playful. It is one of the great responsibilities of democracy.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)