South Asia Is an Ugly Postcolonial Euphemism

There is something faintly ridiculous about how often educated people insist on using the term South Asia as if it were a neutral, hygienic improvement on an older and supposedly “problematic” word. It is neither neutral nor an improvement. It is a bureaucratic euphemism invented to manage post-Partition discomfort, and it collapses the civilizational reality of the region rather than clarifying it.

The Indian subcontinent has had a name for millennia. It was called India because it lay beyond the Indus. Greeks used it. Persians used it. Arabs used it. Medieval Muslims, early modern Europeans, and the British all used it. The word survived because it described a geographic and civilizational unit, not because it flattered any modern state. The fact that the Republic of India later adopted the name does not retroactively invalidate its older meaning. Belgium did not abolish the word “Europe,” and Serbia’s existence does not make “European” offensive.

South Asia, by contrast, is not an ancient term misused by a nation-state. It is a late–Cold War academic construction, popularised by American area studies departments that were uncomfortable saying “India” once India no longer meant a single polity. It is a word designed to avoid an argument, not to resolve one. Like “Middle East,” it describes nothing from within the region itself. No one historically lived in “South Asia.” No one spoke “South Asian.” No one cooked “South Asian food.”

The irony is that the people most eager to insist on the term South Asia often claim to be resisting erasure, when in fact they are participating in it. The civilizational unity of the subcontinent long predates 1947. Punjab was Punjab before Pakistan. Bengal was Bengal before Bangladesh. Kashmir was Kashmir before Line of Control maps. None of these regions stopped being Indian in the civilizational sense when new borders were drawn by the British on their way out.

This is where the food argument collapses under its own weight. Biryani did not become less Indian because Muslims carried it to Karachi. Wazwan did not cease to be Indian because Kashmir is disputed. Kabuli pulao being Afghan does not negate the fact that Afghanistan itself was historically part of the Indic cultural zone, just as Greece is part of Europe whether or not it sits inside every political union. Cuisine, like language and myth, follows ecology and history, not passports.

What really animates the demand to replace “Indian” with “South Asian” is not accuracy but resentment. The modern Indian state inherited the civilizational name, the branding, and the global recognition. Pakistan and Bangladesh inherited sovereignty but not symbolic capital. That imbalance is real, but pretending the civilization itself never existed does not correct it. It merely replaces history with administrative vocabulary.

The claim that calling something “Indian” delegitimises Pakistan is false. Pakistan’s legitimacy rests on political sovereignty, not on owning or rejecting a civilizational label. Turkey does not deny being part of the Mediterranean because Greece exists. Iran does not deny being Persian because Tajikistan speaks Persian. Only in the Indian subcontinent has postcolonial anxiety become so intense that people feel compelled to dissolve a civilisation into a compass direction.

Nor is South Asia analogous to East Asia, a comparison often made lazily and incorrectly. East Asia is held together by a recognisable Confucian civilizational inheritance, despite political fragmentation. China, Korea, and Japan were never part of a single continuous civilizational space in the way Punjab, Sindh, Bengal, and the Deccan were. The Indian subcontinent shared scripts, epics, pilgrimage circuits, trade routes, and court cultures for over two thousand years. Sanskrit, Persian, and later Urdu functioned as transregional languages precisely because the space was coherent. The term Indian named that coherence. South Asian denies it.

The ugliest part of this shift is that it accepts the British partition as the final arbiter of meaning. It quietly treats 1947 as the start of history, rather than a violent administrative rupture imposed on something far older. It asks the region to rename itself in order to accommodate a wound, instead of acknowledging that the wound exists within a larger body.

If anything, the honest position for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis is not to flee from the word India, but to insist on its civilizational meaning while rejecting its monopolisation by a single state. India is the continent. The Republic of India is one country within it. This distinction is not radical. It is normal. It is how Europe works.

South Asia is not precision. It is evasion. It is the language of people who confuse naming with healing and think that changing the label on a menu will repair a historical trauma. It won’t. It only makes the past smaller, uglier, and harder to see.

Call the food Indian when it is Indian. Call the regions by their names when they matter. And stop pretending that an ugly administrative term invented in the late twentieth century is somehow more authentic than a civilizational name that survived Greeks, Persians, Muslims, and Britons alike.