‘South Asian' A Term Coined To Bury Pakistanis' Crimes & Indians' Feats

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If one wanted to be historically accurate, Indian subcontinent is a more precise term because almost all of it was once part of undivided India that was broken violently into parts
Whether one should call the Indian subcontinent 'South Asia' is a debate that keeps getting regurgitated. There have been two latest triggers.
First is the coverage of the sordid Pakistani gang-rape saga in which Leftist mainstream media in the West has repeatedly referred to these grooming gangs as 'Asian', in spite of the fact that these groups almost entirely comprise Pakistani Muslim men. It is as if by hiding their real identity, these newspapers and channels are shielding these monsters' sentiments from getting hurt.
Whether you call a group of men 'Asian" or 'South Asian", you are erasing the national heritage with an obvious political motive. You are also intentionally hiding the truth. That is what led to the wokism getting the bad rap that it did. Deservedly so. pic.twitter.com/KsVjEi3Nfb — Anurag Mairal (@mairal) June 17, 2025
Second was a post by Neal Katyal, US Supreme Court lawyer who calls himself an 'extremist centrist". He posted approvingly about Meenakshi Ahamed's book titled Indian Genius: The Meteoric Rise of Indians in America. But guess what? He said the book was about the 'success of the South Asian diaspora".
Amused netizens immediately started asking Katyal where he found the reference to 'South Asia', when Ahamed's book is clearly and specifically titled Indian Genius? They asked why this attempt to dilute and nullify the Indian identity?
If one wanted to be historically accurate, Indian subcontinent is a more precise term because almost all of it was once part of undivided India, broken violently into parts as a direct aftermath of the British divide-and-rule policy. It was as if the brown, Indian-origin Neal Katyal was enthusiastically furthering the colonial project.
In case of the Pakistani rape gangs, by calling a group of men 'Asian" or 'South Asian", one is erasing the national heritage with an obvious political motive and intentionally hiding the truth, people pointed out.
I'm sick and tired of hearing the expression 'South Asian" in relation to the ethnicity of the Pakistani Muslim gang rapists of young, vulnerable, white British girls. Asia has over 60% of the world's population. Pakistan, has around 3%.
They should not be homogenised.
— Chris Davies 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🇺🇸🟣 (@justchrisdavies) January 15, 2024
Different writers have held up different motives and aspects of the 'South Asia' descriptor. Samyak Dixit, for instance, writes in The Emissary:
It's a small insight into how western academia builds consensus over topics and terminology, till the point where you as the subject of categorization are now being described using a term that you've never heard of before. The emotionless nature of the term itself (described by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal as 'politically neutral", which is a phrase worth exploring in itself), seeking to pull out any possible emotion or sentiment (that usually accompanies history) from the description of a region, also displays the American Regime's impulse towards sterility. This, of course, is an obvious extension of the impulse that renames blind people as 'visually impaired", or civilian casualties during war as 'collateral damage", or one that measures strontium radiation levels after a nuclear fallout in 'sunshine units". Like most Americanisms, 'South Asia" is cold, sterile, and designed to be so.
The imposition of the term 'South Asia' received the maximum pushback from Indian-origin Americans who took on Western 'Indologists' who propagandised it without having any relationship with India and the subcontinent beyond an academic one.
'South Asia' seeks to describe the land mass that has historically been known in English as the 'Indian subcontinent', usurping 'Jambudvipa' and 'Bharatam' in Sanskrit, and 'Barr-e-Saghir' in Urdu.
Venu Gopal Narayanan argues in Swarajya that from an ideological standpoint, it is so much easier to ensnare a pliant young mind if the old links are broken first.
'The forced popularisation of 'South Asia' over all other toponyms, including 'Bharata', was, thus, a key tool in breaking links with the past. Someone somewhere astutely understood that peddling atheism alone wasn't enough in the East, where a non-Abrahamic existence drew moral, spiritual and cultural sustenance as much from its history and geography as it did from a deity," he writes. 'East of Arabia, religion isn't the only opium of the masses; a civilizational ethos and a sacred geography too, join the list. And what better way to change that than by going to the root and changing the descriptor itself?"
Indic entrepreneur, publisher, and author Sankrant Sanu had done a Google Ngram search across many scanned books and journals tracing the use of the term 'South Asia'. Squarely blaming CIA for this, he writes in his piece, 'How South Asian is a racist trope of cultural erasure':
So, South Asia as a term is negligible till the 1940s, and really starts to be used in the late 1950s and 1960s. This is when the CIA is setting up 'South Asia Studies' departments in US universities. The premise of 'South Asia' is that India was never a nation or civilisation and is simply composed of different 'sub-nationalities' to be grouped together. This is, of course, ahistoric. Even in the Western consciousness, India has been a far more prominent term than 'South Asia'.
Shadowy anti-India interest groups took over the cause. In 2015, the South Asia Faculty Group in California brazenly sent letters to the California Department of Education arguing for several changes in the curriculum. It demanded 'most references to India before 1947 be changed to South Asia" and also asked references to Hinduism to be changed to 'religion of ancient India".
Thirty-six of these edits had to do with simply eliminating the words 'India' or 'Hinduism' from the curriculum. These diabolical changes would have sneaked into the syllabus, as the California education department was quite amenable.
But a massive Hindu backlash began. The Hindu American Foundation collected more than 25,000 signatures of professors, scholars, students and parents under the 'Don't Erase India campaign. It forced the Instructional Quality Commission to retain the word India in every instance with the curriculum framework.
While the old civilisation triumphed on that occasion, it underlined how one has to be constantly vigilant against attempts at its erasure by the Left and Islamists. Because words can sometimes inflict much deeper damage than ballistic weapons.
Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18's views.
tags :
Indian subcontinent pakistan south asia United states
Location :
New Delhi, India, India
First Published:
June 21, 2025, 11:08 IST
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