End-Term Examinations

Spring Semester 22’

Writing Workshop
Professor Vinod Kottayil Kalidasan
17. Sunil Kumar elucidates, the history of place names is as interesting for what it has to tell us
about the manner in which people chose to identify their own and others’ areas of residence.
This essay attempts to explore the politics, culture, norms and practices around naming. The
piece will discuss place names, exploring socio-cultural and political norms through the
discussion of naming.

The name "Southeast Asia" has been debated as either a fictitious "Unicorn" or a genuine
"Rose," as proposed by Ronald K. Emmerson. "Southeast Asia" has remained as a term applied
to this specific region through the years, ostensibly for the purpose of convenience, to address
the nations within this region together. "I began by picturing Southeast Asia as a cross between
an unicorn and a rose – partly imaginary, partly real.” (Emmerson, 1984). 
A cohesive front to the outer world strengthens identity. The Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (ASEAN) was created to bring Southeast Asian nations together in solidarity. The
ASEAN aims and objectives strive to build commonalities among Southeast Asian states, and
this endeavour to establish a regional identity must be appreciated. ASEAN's slogan, "One
Vision, One Identity, One Community," underlined the solidarity that member states are
attempting to attain in order to develop a shared regional identity. In that sense, regional
identity building becomes one of the major concerns intertwined with ASEAN's existence. As a
result, the establishment of ASEAN has enabled Southeast Asian states to collaborate toward
the formation of a regional identity.  Although there has not been a well stated notion of
regional identity with time benchmarks, there is a historical precedence for a regional
identity, it rests in the setting in which ASEAN began.  The regional identity might not even be
fully formed at this time. However, the efforts made to build one, as well as the vestiges of a
regional identity, should not be overlooked.
Many thinkers and politicians find it difficult to imagine the future in terms of long-term
political objectives. The greatest opposition comes via Karl Popper, who argued that holistic
initiatives are essentially meaningless forecasts since history is conditional, to some extent
unforeseen consequences of those very programmes, resulting in patchwork engineering of
local components of reality.
In terms of theory of action, agency is defined as the human ability to "make the possible
possible," which requires a clear and epistemic awareness of possibilities (physical, technical,
social, and moral) as well as an overt will to transcend any domestic and foreign resistance to
the possibility of possibility.

One of the main problems with political philosophy is determining where politics begins.
Politics, under the guise of communal undertakings, daily actions, speeches, and fights, is
always about possibilities and the power to choose and fulfil those possibilities. That is
essentially what social and political plans come down to: a programme is a projection of a
possibility, which must then study and implement it. Initiatives are subject to various moral
constraints, but also, and mainly, to societal limitations in carrying them out. There are
various aspects of will at work in knowledge and skill, as well as imagination and desire. In
the end, politics, like multiple other human behaviours, shapes geographies of efficiency,
placing maximum and minimum boundaries on the capacity to make the conceivable
possible.

Imagination, like creativity, is a method for individuals to escape reality. Kant was the first to
bring the question of imagination and spontaneity of human agency together in dimensions of
the theoretical, practical, and creative mind. Transcendency occurs from the first hint of a
problem: recognising that something may be done differently and contemplating the answer
is a method of transcending reality. As a result, political imagination occurs when an issue is
recognised as a problem, or when realities or markets or time are not expected to be able to
limit future possibilities.

When we tackle the issues of political imagination in terms of agency, we might ask which
models are conceivable and what the conditions of possibility are. This cannot be
accomplished as a group effort. A programme isn't just an engineering plan; it is a cognitive
exercise in transcending a society's, or regions’, reality. In this sense, beyond the limitations
of imagination entails exceeding both the outward and internal constraints of agency.

It is difficult to say who first used the term "South(ern) Asia." There is agreement, however,
that the term "South Asia" first appeared as a category to split the Asian continent with the
creation of regional studies in the US. This emergence was the result of two interconnected
concerns: the first was the advancement of academia on the ancient Indic civilization, and the
second was a tactical interest in the field of contemporary Asia, as the Second World War
highlighted a scarcity of professionals able to deal with the region's economic, social, and
political issues. According to Nicholas Dirks (2003), Norman Brown, a Sanskrit professor at
University of Pennsylvania, was notably influential in forging this confluence and defining
South Asian regional studies between 1926 and 1966. Dirks notes in The United States, India,
and Pakistan, a book published by Brown in 1953, that while Brown's effort to develop
offices of South Asian studies in the United States was based on the effort to advance
understanding and sharing between India, Pakistan, and the United States, his own sense of
Indian history was shaped by a vision in which Hinduism as well as the Sanskrit language
symbolized entirely the cementing forces (Brown, 1953). As a consequence, Brown evaluated
India's partition in essentialized terms, as seen by passages from his book: 'the root of Hindu-
Muslim communalism resides in cultural disparities.' (Brown, 1953). While this view of
Indian civilisation was to have a considerable impact on the formation of South Asian studies
in American colleges, it also suggested that the term "South Asia" was not always connected
with a notion of the area as a civilizational entity. Nonetheless, the establishment of
multidisciplinary study centers on the Subcontinent, dubbed after the phrase 'South Asia,' has
given the area some support in scholarly communities and beyond. Similarly, the
establishment of journals labelled South Asia(n), such as SAMAJ, helps to establish the area
as a cultural being. The fact that India takes prominence in most
regional studies, departments, and publications reflects a distinctive trait of the Subcontinent,
as indicated above, namely India's 'asymmetrical' position in the region.
In order to understand politically informed territorial demarcations we must first outline the
manner in which colonial rule's political framework affected the social imaginations of both
the coloniser and the colonised, leaving behind a language of social kinds and political
possibilities that haunts us thirty, forty, or fifty years later. This can be problematized by
questioning what anthropologists may gain from fresh empirical studies of South Asian
postcolonial politics. In a nutshell, we must comprehend and challenge the socio-
cultural ramifications of democracy, which appear to extend in some respects to all post-
colonial governments due to the common language of popular sovereignty and representation,
regardless of their real claim to be "democratic."

As seen in ‘Naming’ by Sunil Kumar, political aspirations and socio-cultural shifts can
greatly influence the names of places. Many places in Delhi that have retained colonial names
were pushed to be altered; Connaught Place was one of these. It has “remained as a legacy
after the disappearance of the power and symbolism of British colonialism” while bearing
little resemblance to the intention with which it was built. It being Delhi’s central commercial
complex which has become “more so than India Gate or Rashtrapati Bhawan” the centre of
the city, while the city itself is considered the centre of India. By choosing “C.P”, as has been
established through the consistent use, to alter the name of, to Rajiv and Indira Chowks the
Congress party was making a political move. The sustained use of “C.P” and “Connaught
Place” when referring to the commercial complex establishes that regions are in fact a
product of political imagination, but that of the people. (Kumar, 2002)

In the everyday constructions of South Asia, some platforms operate as cementing vectors
between countries of the Subcontinent: Bollywood movies represent an iconic example as
they provide a sense of ‘community’ through the formation of a common public that coheres
around Bombay cinema and a common language that keeps the memory of historical ties
vibrant: it enables the creation of new cultural referents, provides a common vocabulary, and
most crucially, maintains long-standing historical and cultural thematics within living
memory. The shared appreciation of Bollywood and its songs takes its roots in a common
regional imagination of love and friendship dating back to the epics of the 17th century.
Bollywood also offers a platform for interaction among artists not only across regions and
religions but increasingly across borders as well. Songs are particularly reflective of this close
interconnectedness beyond borders: songs inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry are thus part
of the repertoires of both Indian and Pakistani singers.

Some Bollywood movies directly address the issue of cross-border relations (particularly
between India and Pakistan): they either demonize the Other—which still ‘showcases the
capacity to imagine them as the Other—or they find ways, to highlight commonalities beyond
borders and try to erase lines of difference. This suggests that temporalities and media are
also important in the way South Asia is constructed, as discourses about the Other are
particularly volatile, shifting, almost overnight, from bhai bhai (such as during the
‘reconciliation’ period between India and Pakistan in 2004-2008) to sheer antagonism and
vice-versa. However, whereas tense relationships between countries used to manifest
themselves over the ways the ‘Other’ was portrayed in Bollywood movies till the early
2000s, economic considerations have since come to prevail over ‘parochial nationalism’: the
different South Asian countries and the respective diasporas of each nation of the
Subcontinent represent such huge markets that the demonization of the Other, even during
periods of tension between South Asian countries, might lead to backlash in financial terms.
Beyond the issue of imagining the Other, economic benefits at large are a main driving force
behind the circulation of cultural products (essentially from India to other South Asian
countries but reverse circulations also occur) and participate in their own ways in the
construction of ideas of South Asia.

In popular perceptions, cricket is, along with Bollywood, the other binding vector between
people of the region. While this can hardly be denied in terms of the comparable craze it
generates among people in most South Asian countries, cricket is a double-edged sword: the
similitude in emotions is observed not only in the sheer common fun of watching a match but
also in the nationalist passion aroused by the game. These nationalist feelings may come
along with an open antagonism against the rival South Asian team when two teams from the
Subcontinent meet: as if they were fighting proxy wars. But just like the demonization in
Bollywood movies implies a capacity to imagine the Other, negative emotions, such as
antagonism, expressed during cricket matches or on other such occasions, also participate in
their own ways, in making the regional idea exist as they take their roots in a shared history
of conflicts.

In sum, looking at cultural continuities not only contributes to the notion of a South Asian
cultural space but these continuities are also related to practices that generate everyday
constructions of South Asia. Socio-political, demographic, cultural and goepgraphical
changes and contraints influence the discourse surrounding nations but boundaries may not
also differentiate regions, while political discourse may. Moreover, they provide to the
builders of South Asia from below, the material and symbolic resources on which to
construct their imagination of the region as an entity. In these ways regions are a product of
political imagination influenced by economics, culture and all things human.
Refrences

1. Kumar, S., 2002. The present in Delhi's pasts. New Delhi: Three Essays Press.
2. Emmerson, D., 1984. “Southeast Asia”: What's in a Name?. Journal of Southeast
Asian Studies, 15(1).
3. Brown, W., 1953. The United States and India and Pakistan. Cambridge : Harvard
University Press, 1953.