How should we define a Southasian 20th century?

OUR CONTEMPORARY UNDERSTANDING of Southasia – as a region connected by shared historical, political and cultural geographies – is a product of 20th-century transformations, including the emergence of nation-states and their claims on identities. Like the concept of a bounded, discrete region, the idea of a bounded, discrete century is a human imposition, often used to construct cohesive narratives where none necessarily exist. Nonetheless, the 20th century, as a conceptual device, makes it possible to trace the consolidation of our own regional imaginaries of Southasia.

Since the turn of the 21st century, scholars of Southasian history have consistently reevaluated the previous century’s accepted chronologies. This includes reassessing the degree to which 1947, the year of the independence and Partition of India and Pakistan, served as breaking point, a “before-and-after” moment through which it is difficult to find throughlines and continuities. Scholars have also posed and complicated alternative key turning points. Many of these remain political and military in nature – such as the Bangladesh Liberation War and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, or Sri Lanka’s Black July of 1983 and the outbreak of the country’s civil war. 

At the same time, social, cultural and economic chronologies – sometimes inexorably connected to these political transformations but often also with their own distinct logics – have increasingly become the bases for historical analyses of the 20th century. How, scholars ask, does our understanding of the century – and its impact on the historical imagination of Southasia as a region – change when it is narrated through the emergence of regional film industries, economic ideologies, or labour migration? Still other historians have sought to move beyond our assumptions of a bounded Southasian region, preferring to periodise the century through the relationships Southasian states and peoples have had with transregional and global events and movements.

THREE RECENT BOOKS – a behemoth single-author history of Southasia and two edited collections – exemplify and complicate many of these trends. The first, Joya Chatterji’s Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century, centres the incomplete processes by which Southasian individuals became – and came to see themselves as – national citizens of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. 

Shadows at Noon connects Chatterji’s own prodigious research on the human experiences of “nation-making” to an overwhelming range of scholarly debates from the last three decades. In doing so, it offers both an accessible historical synthesis for the lay reader and an analytical trajectory that will be compelling for scholars of the region.