Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book expands the discipline of South Asian studies, which has for a long time tended to exclude India’s neighbors, making the discipline a euphemism for India studies. It discusses the mingling of community memory and advances in the print and visual media producing new linguistic and cultural idioms that have the potential to forge ideologies of the region and nation. The book explains the cultural spatiality of Goa, the erstwhile Portuguese colony, and the location of the conference. A space with several controversies and contestations rooted in its histories and in its present geopolitics, Goa becomes a site of inquiry through its representation in the visual art of Mario Miranda, one of its most celebrated cultural ambassadors. The book explores twentieth-century Bengali fictional and cinematic texts that represent the transnational region of Bengal to probe the concepts of ‘region’, ‘nation’, and ‘border’.