ABSTRACT
The current geopolitical character of modern South Asia was forged out of its pre-Independence demography, its religious geography and the political structures left in place at the end of British colonial rule. At Independence in 1947, South Asia was one of the most densely populated regions in the world. However, population was very unevenly spread, from the very lightly inhabited desert regions of the northwest to the extremely densely settled deltas of the east and south. The diverse demography was mapped onto political systems that had all been shaped by the ways in which British colonial rule expanded over territories that had had centuries of successive Hindu and Muslim rulers. From the late eighteenth century, the East India Company, succeeded from 1858 by the British Raj, gave a wholly new shape to South Asia’s political landscape.
