It was during the Cold War that some Americans academics began to construct the category of "South Asia Studies". Subsequently, the influx of South Asian students in western universities boosted the demand for courses in South Asian culture as well as politics. A new generation of scholars then took over the term coined by the Cold War intellectuals working with an "Area Studies" outlook in mind adopted earlier to give it a new currency dependent on the value that would be accruing to it because of the large number of South Asians living and working in North America from the seventies onward.

The nineteen-eighties were the years of the brouhaha created by the Satanic Verses controversy and the belated acknowledgement in the continent of the burgeoning South Asian presence in North America. Bharati Mukherjee, one recalls, had received the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for her The Middleman and Other Stories, the first South Asian-American writer to be so honored. Already in her preceding collection of short fiction, Darkness (1985), she had chronicled with distinction the experience of South Asian immigrants in contemporary North America. Writers like her and Anita Desai, Bapsi Sidhwa and Vikram Seth could now join earlier writers like R. K. Narayan, G. V. Desani, Raja Rao and Nirad Chaudhuri who had attracted the interest of at least a few academics in North America and England since the fifties, to form a body of literature well worth analyzing.

But for someone working in this area in the Indian subcontinent itself, the term "South Asian Writing" has to be reconceptualized so that it means more than the writers of the South Asian Diaspora now residing in the west and much more than the English language productions of writers who originate directly or indirectly from the subcontinent. After all, South Asia is home to at least twenty languages, including English, each of which has its unique and vibrant literature. And notwithstanding the outrageous claim made by Rushdie in The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-57 that "the new, and still burgeoning 'Indo-Anglian' literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books" (x), few who knew any one of them really well would agree that it represented the Indian subcontinent anywhere as vividly and solidly as they did.

The term "South Asian Writing", in other words, should not be confined to the expatriate writing being produced in the west or merely literature in English produced by South Asians. It is very much a trans-South Asian phenomenon even though it has resurfaced in a new context in the North American continent and Great Britain. Its claim to fame should be in its ability to represent the subcontinent as a whole and not any one part of it not regionally as well as internationally.

As for South Asian writing in English, the term connotes all writing produced by South Asians in the language from the time of its introduction into the subcontinent as an administrative and "link" language by English colonizers at the end of the eighteenth century. Partly because of colonial policy but partly also because many Indians saw the advantage of learning and using the language, English started gaining considerable currency in British India throughout the nineteenth century. It was thus that South Asian writing in English manifested itself embryonically in the sub-continent with the colonial encounter. This ultimately led to a literature that would have a trans-India dimension even as the counter-flow resulting from colonization began.

Seen thus, the first published South Asian writer was Sake Deen Mahomet, an Indian who had found himself transplanted to England via Ireland and who published Travels of Deen Mahomet, a Native of Patna in Bengal, through Several Parts of India (1794) in England. As is so often the case, prose was the first branch of the literature to flourish, and it did so in this case with Raja Rammohun Roy's essays on religious and social topics. As is also often the case, there were several false starts: poets like Michael Madhusudan Dutt and novelists like Bankim Chandra Chatterji, tried their hands in writing in English before deciding that they would do better to write in Bengali, their mother tongue. Not surprisingly, the initial output was meager and not particularly distinguished. For sure, the verse of Toru Dutt showed promise and the prose of Swami Vivikenanda was inspirational but their works did not have a lasting impact. Inevitably, and initially, the earliest writers of the region to make a lasting impression internationally were those who published in the west: Rabindranath's Gitanjali (Song Offering) or Ananda Coomoraswamy's works on the art and craft of India and Ceylon.

It is surely no accident that the real beginning of South Asian literature in the Indian subcontinent itself coincided with the struggle for independence. Key works here were Gandhi's Indian Home Rule (1919, dictated into English by Gandhi himself); Tagore's Nationalism (1917) and essays he wrote like "The Spirit of Freedom" collected in his Creative Unity (1922); Nehru's Autobiography (1936 but retitled significantly for the American edition of 1941 as Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru) and The Discovery of India (1945). In such works the colonizer's language was being used effectively by this time not only to write back but to propel a discourse that would lead to freedom. It is also no mere coincidence that the ferment of nationalism registered in English would also lead to the emergence in this period of the writers who would truly consolidate South Asian writing as a literary tradition within the region but who would also attract a small but loyal following in the wider world: R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand and Ahmed Ali would pioneer the South Asian novel in English, showing in the process nationally and internationally how the English language could be used to depict the reality of life in the subcontinent effortlessly and in a stream that could run parallel to the vernacular literatures. It is germane too to note that these writers were at that time writing about an India that they saw holistically and not one about to be truncated. When freedom did arrive in 1947, however, the partitioning of India had two consequences for writing in English in the region that would delay its consolidation in the region. One was that with the splitting of India it became difficult for the next little while to even conceive of South Asian writing in English as a category.; how could one not talk about Indian writing in English or Pakistani writing in English for the next three decades or so from this point onward? The second thing that would happen from now on is that state policy about English would differ considerably from country to country, affecting the course of the literature produced in English in them.

It is pertinent here to note here that the countries of South Asia would adopt quite different policies regarding the English language. These policies inevitably impacted on the development of the literature written in English in each country. India, to take the most important example, originally planned to have English as an official language for only fifteen years. At the end of the period, however, its use in offices was extended indefinitely by parliament which made it an "associate official language" of Hindi. It has ever since grown gradually in importance, also because it has been perceived as a "link" language, the language of higher education and now of "globalization". For all these reasons Indian Writing in English has developed slowly but surely since independence (but spectacularly since Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981). Pakistan, on the other hand, had never stopped using English in higher administration. But because it simultaneously pursued a policy of asserting Urdu as the state language, only students educated in a handful of elite schools would get to a position where they could use it creatively. Here, too, the writing would get a fillip with the process that is now identified as "globalization". In Sri Lanka, as well, the increasing emphasis on Sinhalese after it was made the state language in 1956 meant that there would be a considerable time lapse before Sinhalese writing in English could surface solidly; for a long time expatriates tended to be in the forefront in producing almost all the quality work in the language. As for Bangladesh, because the country's independence is closely linked to linguistic nationalism, English almost disappeared from higher education; for a while not even elite schools were allowed to use English as the medium of instruction. Consequently, and as was the case in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and in contrast to what was happening in India, there would be only dispersed and tentative attempts to write in English in these three countries. Therefore, nothing that could be confidently categorized as South Asian writing in English could be conceptualized for a long, long time.

What, then, led to the reappearance of the category in the eighties and its consolidation? It now seems possible to talk of South Asian writing in English after the nineteen eighties at least partly because more and more writers from all across the subcontinent had begun to use the language spontaneously and inventively from this time onwards. Owing to greater international mobility, many of the newer generation of writers were now crisscrossing the globe or had been educated primarily in English. Moreover, there were enough of them in the subcontinent as well as the west to ensure continuous interest in this kind of writing. It must also be said that the international flow of capital, including that associated with major multinational publishing companies such as Penguin as Oxford had a lot do with the spread of South Asian literature in English. Consequently, recent South Asian writing in English has a lot in common regardless of whether the writers are from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan or Bangladesh. Also, themes, settings, communities and characters have proved to be distinctly "South Asian". One cluster of themes they depict has to do with colonial encounters, the advent of nationalism, the consequences of partition and nation-building in the nascent decolonized state. To put it somewhat differently, the traumas associated with political upheavals and violence and the depiction of pitfalls encountered when one set of oppressive rulers are replaced with another set of repressive albeit local ones became an easily identifiable theme of the English language literature of the region. Another cluster of themes has to do with endemic poverty and the persistence of religious, class and caste prejudice as well as patriarchal injustice. Still another has to deal with the plight of underprivileged, marginalized or steadily disappearing communities. The alienated consciousness of the writer using English and cut off from mainstream life in the region or existing in an ironic embrace of it also became more and more visible in this body of writing. On the other hand, the alienation induced by immigration and the trauma of the uprooted and the diasporic are themes treated quite often in expatriate South Asian writing from the seventies onwards, although at least a few writers also celebrated immigration and assimilation in the new world. Concepts such as "hybridity" and "mimicry" seem to be particularly suitable for the creations of these expatriate South Asian writers who also often wrote about the trauma of coming back "home".

Politically, too, developments in the region meant that it would now be possible to think of "South Asia" as a category that could have a future. Let us remember here that it was in December 1985 that a summit was held in Dhaka which led to the formation of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). Although in the two decades that have passed since then, there has been little progress in making this organization viable, and although some might be tempted to discuss it and its offshoots such as the creation of a South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) in 2001 non-starters, it has to be acknowledged that enough people in the region felt that the time for such political, economic and cultural linkages had come by the nineteen eighties. Tentative attempts were thus made to have conferences on South Asian writing in the capitals of the region and books such as Post Independence Voices in South Asian Writings (2001)-- edited by two scholars located in the subcontinent--Malashri Lal and Alamgir Hashmi) and one based in Canada (Victor J. Ramraj)--were now being published ever so often Nevertheless, is it really possible to talk of South Asian writing in English as a body of works that can be considered as a whole or is it a construct of critics working in a niche of English departments in North America and Europe? Is there anything of lasting importance in the term for someone working in the region itself as well as in the western academy, especially if he or she is from a country that is in the periphery of South Asia? The Indian scholar Ramachandra Guha argues, in fact, in an essay titled "The Ones Who Stayed Behind" that the nineteen-eighties saw the emergence of "a parallel discourse on South Asia", one "driven by the preoccupations of the American academy", that is to say people outside India, and "apparently on India" and the other of which was "conducted within India" (167). Guha specifically identifies the South Asian slant to the western "chapter" of this scholarship as something responding to "the debates current in the American academy" (168). In contrast, the preoccupation of the writers of the second group, he claims, would appear to be with issues of class, caste, race and communalism and of the former with migration, hybridity and mimicry. Additionally, perhaps, many in the latter group could be seen as responding to a new call for transcendence, nationalism being now perceived by not a few people of the region as constricting and even something of a dead end.

Theorists situated in the subcontinent have by now initiated a discourse on South Asia that surely is destined to make it a trans-national, truly subcontinental and international phenomenon and not an exclusively Indian or expatriate South Asian or "global" one. One thinks here of Ashish Nandy in particular, whose intellectual claim to fame surely is not only in his location as a critic of the west and "globalization" but as someone who has consistently and for decades now been writing about reviving a notion of the subcontinent that is greater than the concept of India that has seemed to have reified in the imagination too many Indians, Pakistanis, or Bangladeshis. Bonfire of Creeds: The Essential Ashish Nandy contains essays that can give us the ultimate rationale for South Asian studies/writing. In the long and provocatively titled essay, "The Illegitimacy of Nationalism" (1994), for example, he admires the intrepidity of Rabindranath Tagore for carrying out a "critique of nationalism" and for refusing to accept the "nation-state as the organizing principle of the Indian civilization and as the last word in the country's political life" even at a time when the nationalist movement was gathering momentum in undivided India (155). Nandy stresses that neither nationalism nor globalization are central to Tagore's moral universe for the great poet and humanist had "denied moral and cultural relativism and endorsed a large, plural concept of India" (225). Nandi looks forward to a South Asian scholarship where its practitioners "rediscover that South Asian societies are woven not around the state, but around their plural cultures and pluri-cultural identities" (247). Surely, the category of South Asian writing in English that we should imagine at this point of time is one that will see itself as part of "plural cultures" and as participating in a discourse aiming to articulate "pluri-cultural identities". Surely, too, the claim of the English language literature emanating from the sub-continent to be a field worth studying has been accentuated and not diminished by the kind of tendency that Nandy epitomizes.

In his thoughtful and timely Introduction to A South Asian Nationalism Reader, S. Dasgupta, a professor of comparative literature at Jadavpur University, regrets "the erasure of our identity as 'South Asians' that has been effected primarily by the hegemonising claims of national identity" (xxi). He suggests that national identity has been gained at the expense of "commonalities" and that such identity was consolidated after partition at the cost of a millennia old "shared history". According to Dasgupta, what is truer about the region is that: It is this very shared history of colonialism-imperialism and its repercussions--social, economic and political--along with that of its response, this shared historical location as the object of the search for new markets, as well as, of course, shared traditions and practices that regularly defy the diktat of national boundaries, that perhaps best define South Asia" (xxi-xxii). What Dasgupta does in his compilation is to showcase the shared history through a juxtaposition of texts from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal as well as India. That his selections from English language texts produced in these countries are seamlessly woven into his anthology and interspersed with selections from texts produced in vernacular literatures confirm to me what is crucial in my evolving notion of South Asian writing in English: I see it now as an intrinsic part of the plural cultures of the region. Dasgupta's Reader also shows that like the literatures produced in the vernacular languages South Asian writers in English have been and are articulating deeply felt views about boundaries, colonialism, communalism, class, caste, freedom, nationalism, partition and race and religion through their works. His work is a timely reminder of the "commonalities" this body of writing shares with vernacular literatures even as it underscores the forces of division that have been insidiously splitting the consciousness of the people of these countries.

Certainly, for those of us working and writing in English from the periphery of the South Asian subcontinent there is an even more urgent need to insist on the viability of the category of South Asian literature. There can be no doubt that ultimately South Asian writing in English can only survive as a category because of its ability to represent all South Asians, whether in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal or in the many countries of the world where people from the region have dispersed. That it will be South Asian writing in English--including the best work from the vernacular languages translated effectively into this indispensable "link" language--that can most effectively perform this function can hardly be doubted. It should be the burden of those working in South Asian writing in English to adopt a comparatist, a regional and, in the end, an internationalist perspective, utilizing the spread of the language in the subcontinent and in the diaspora of our people to study original texts in English produced in the language as well as quality texts adeptly translated from our vernacular literatures.

Fakrul Alam is professor of English at Dhaka University.