The necessary manufacture of South Asia

The imagination of nation was necessitated by the emergence of a set of historic, economic and technological circumstances. But are there enough reasons to justify the imagining of a new entity — a regional identity? To deliberate over this and other related questions, Himal hosted a roundtable on 18-19 November 2001, just prior to the 11th SAARC Summit in Kathmandu. A summary of the proceedings was published in the January 2002 issue of the magazine. A year after the event, the need for imagining a regional identity has become only stronger.

In his classic Imagined Communities, political scientist Benedict Anderson argues that nationalism is an imagined political landscape, imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. But conflict between some of these imagined communities within a region can lead to catastrophes. To check the process that is leading South Asia inevitably towards what could be termed 'the end of imagination', as coined by the doomsday prophecy of writer-activist Arundhati Roy, it has become essential to imagine afresh an inclusive regional identity.