We all know how the fuddy duddy term ‘Commonwealth Literature’ was supplanted by the new bright buzzword in the Western academy, ‘Postcolonial Theory/Discourse/ Studies’ only a few years ago (see ‘From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial?’, IACLALS Newsletter, Jan 1994). Given the ever shrinking attention-span even among academics and scholars and the rapid turn-over in brand-equity, we knew even then that the days of the ‘Postcolonial’ must be numbered, but that it is already dead may come as a bit of news to some of our readers. The Postcolonial, it seems, has been disseminated and interrogated quite enough already; it now waits to be terminated and interred.

The signs had been evident for some time. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, writing in Interventions in 1999, spoke of the ‘postcolonial’ as being already ‘residual.’ It had come up in the 1980s when she used it, she explained, and in the 1990s ‘it tended to fade away,’ while in her book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), she noted that postcolonial studies were becoming a ‘sub[/?]stantial subdisciplinary ghetto.’ Meanwhile, Homi Bhabha was seen to be turning away from his interstitial ‘transnational translational’ to focus on the most local and uncosmopolitan of all discourses, the dalit. Robert Young has been engaged in writing a history of postcolonial thought, and Vijay Mishra, co-author of that definitively definitional essay, ‘What is
Post(-)colonialism?’, said earlier this year, for once not joking, that he was now planning a sequel, ‘What was Post(-)colonialism?’

All this while, wherever we postcolonials gathered, we tried to speculate and guess, with understandable professional anxiety, what might succeed the postcolonial, what might be the name of the next rose. And one possibility beginning to loom up is that it may be the lotus. Our sister association, the Sri Lanka ACLALS, chose for their biennial conference held in December 2000 the theme ‘South Asian Literatures and Languages,’ thus confirming and extending a small trend which became noticeable with a SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation) Literature Conference held at the Banaras Hindu University in 1998, a bigger and glitzier gathering of writers and academics from the SAARC countries held in New Delhi in April 2000, and the publication of the first of its two special issues on ‘South Asia’ by The Book Review in October 2000.

But what is South Asia? Long before the still creaky SAARC came up as a would-be regional buffer, ‘South Asia’ had been invented as a geopolitical unit at the Pentagon, in the wake of the panic caused by the Red Russians putting the Sputnik in space in 1957. The USA decided, for the sake of its own national security and pride, to invest more money and attention not only in the ‘space race’ but also in far-flung parts of the world, of which ‘South Asia’ now has its own Assistant Secretary of State. The ten or twelve Departments of South Asian Languages/Literatures/Cultures to be found in US universities (and only there so far, with a rare exception or two in Europe) were promptly set up as a felt security need; they continue to be funded by the US government Department of Defense.

But then, the ‘Commonwealth’ and the ‘Postcolonial’ were equally foreign impositions on us, as indeed is the very name ‘India.’ The new term ‘South Asia’ appears to have some clear advantages over both, in that it is not restricted in its focus to colonial rule and its after-effects, is a geographically contiguous and culturally cohesive entity, and signals a civilisational collectivity emanating from a common source and running right through our longer and deeper precolonial history. The eighteen ‘national’ languages of India, for example, happen to include all the national languages of the rest/whole of South Asia (while the one major exception, Sinhala, too is descended from Sanskrit/Pali). Similarly, our literatures, with all their differences, constitute a common discourse of echoes and allusions going back to Sanskrit and partially Arabic and Persian, just as writing in English now serves as a narrow strip of band-aid binding the whole region.

Above all else, ‘South Asia’ prioritizes location in a way that ‘Commonwealth’ and the ‘Postcolonial’ invidiously and disablingly failed to do. There is more for us in it, because we are more in it. The vast centrality of India, however, may be a dominant issue here. Let us be sensitive enough to ensure that South Asia does not become Big Brother India by another name, and we shall all find much in it to enrich and strengthen us. Welcome, South Asia!—if only as a shovel with which to bury the neocolonial Postcolonial.