South Asia: a geographical, environmental and historiographical introduction

As the subtitle of the book indicates, the narrative of this work does not place national states, their historical legitimation and their history in the foreground, but rather aims instead to accentuate the trans-regional and translocal historical aspects of South Asia. This approach has been favoured as state and national borders are, after all, drawn somewhat arbitrarily and are fleeting. The first emergence of the term “South Asia” as well as “Southeast Asia” dates from a German school atlas of the late nineteenth century.1 Following the Second World War the geographical label of South Asia gradually became vernacular within the sciences after which US military strategists defined the zone of operations east of British India as Southeast Asia. In this way political correctness has inhibited the identification of independent India embodied in the newly formed Indian Union and with that the whole geographical area.2