‘South Asia’: Construction and Deconstruction of Spaces and Institutions. Part I

Abstract

‘South Asia’ in its present meaning was coined in the late 1940s following a reinterpretation of previous approaches to the study of the (ancient) Orient, which proved to be ill-suited under the conditions of the Second World War. The author of the concept was the American Indologist W. Norman Brown (1892–1975) who thus designated almost the entire territory of British India and founded the Department of South Asia Regional Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. This innovation led to the institutionalization of the modern socio-political disciplines essential for the familiarization with the area of the languages studied. Later this model spread to the educational institutions of the New World and reached the Old one. In the mid-1970s, the Chair of History of India, Pakistan, Nepal and Ceylon of the Institute of Countries of Asia and Africa of Moscow State University was renamed the Chair of History of South Asia, and 40 years later several units under the heading of ‘South Asia’ sprang up in several Russian academia. Part I sheds light on Brown’s activities in the US Office of Strategic Services and his contacts with the Institute of Pacific Relations, as well as the US reaction to the launch of the first Soviet satellite, the passage of the US National Defense Education Act, and the ‘cold war’ contest between the US and the USSR in the field of training specialists to be engaged as an instrument of influence on the post-colonial world structure within the South Asian countries.