South Asian societies are woven not around the state, but around their plural cultures and plural identities.

Threads Older Than Borders

In February 1952, students in Dhaka marched against the decision to make Urdu the sole state language of Pakistan, and on 21 February the police opened fire on them. The state they confronted was less than five years old; the Bengali language they defended carried a literature reaching back to the Charyapada verses composed many centuries earlier. Within two decades the language movement had grown into a nation, Bangladesh, and in 1999 UNESCO declared 21 February International Mother Language Day. The episode captures a truth about the whole subcontinent. Its states are young, mostly drawn in the twentieth century, while the cultures that live inside and across them are ancient and layered. South Asian societies are held together less by the authority of the state than by a dense weave of plural cultures and identities, and the region's states have flourished when they respected that weave and faltered when they tried to cut it to a single pattern.

The statement contrasts two ways of binding people together. In the model of the sovereign state that took shape in Europe after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, and in the nationalism that followed, the state often came first and then manufactured a common identity through one language, one church and one national school system. South Asia's experience runs the other way. Its people lived for centuries within overlapping circles of caste, clan, language, sect, region and faith, and owed loyalty to many of them at once. A Tamil-speaking Muslim trader, a Nepali-speaking Hindu in Darjeeling, a Punjabi Sikh farmer and a Chakma Buddhist from the Chittagong Hill Tracts each carry several identities, none of which a state created. The social fabric is woven from these threads; the state is a frame placed around it much later.

History explains why. The region's guiding ideas of tolerance came from rulers and saints long before they came from constitutions. Ashoka's twelfth Rock Edict urged respect for the sects of others and warned that one who praises his own sect while disparaging another's only harms his own. Akbar's policy of sulh-i-kul, peace with all, and the debates of his Ibadat Khana gathered Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians, Christians and Muslims under one roof. The Bhakti and Sufi movements carried the same spirit into villages: Kabir mocked the pride of both pandit and mullah, Guru Nanak taught that before God there is neither Hindu nor Muslim, and the dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi still draws devotees of every faith. Empires rose and fell, but these shared practices outlived each change of ruler.

The cultures of South Asia flow across present borders in ways no map can contain. Buddhism, which began with a prince born at Lumbini in today's Nepal and enlightened at Bodh Gaya in Bihar, shapes the identity of Sri Lanka and Bhutan. Punjabi is spoken on both sides of the Radcliffe Line, Bengali on both sides of the eastern border, and Tamil links Tamil Nadu with northern Sri Lanka. Rabindranath Tagore wrote the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka's anthem was composed by Ananda Samarakoon, who had studied at Tagore's Santiniketan. When the Kartarpur Corridor opened in November 2019, letting Indian pilgrims visit Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Pakistan without a visa, it was faith, not strategy, that drew two wary states into cooperation. Cricket, film music, qawwali and shared cuisines keep travelling even when trade and visas freeze.

The clearest proof of the statement lies in what happened when states tried to override this plurality. Pakistan was founded on the premise that a shared religion could make one nation of two distant wings; within twenty-four years it split along the line of language and culture. Sri Lanka's Official Language Act of 1956, the "Sinhala Only" law, alienated the Tamil minority and fed the grievances that ended in a civil war lasting from 1983 to 2009. In Nepal, Madhesi groups rejected the provincial boundaries of the 2015 constitution, and months of agitation along the southern border followed. In each case a state that defined itself through one identity found that society refused to be reduced. Amartya Sen, in Identity and Violence (2006), calls this the solitarist illusion: the belief that a person has only one identity that matters, an illusion that turns neighbours into enemies.

India offers the counter-example of a state designed to accommodate. The Constituent Assembly declined to impose a single national language, and the States Reorganisation Act of 1956 redrew boundaries largely on linguistic lines, a step many feared would break the country but which instead gave regional identities a home within the Union. The Eighth Schedule now lists 22 languages, Articles 29 and 30 protect the cultural and educational rights of minorities, and the Sixth Schedule gives autonomous councils to tribal areas in the Northeast. The 2011 Census grouped more than 19,500 raw mother-tongue returns into 121 languages, a diversity no single-language state could hold. Indian secularism, understood as equal respect for all faiths rather than strict separation, mirrors the social reality the state inherited. Sen's earlier book, The Argumentative Indian (2005), traces this habit of plural debate back to Ashoka and Akbar and treats it as a foundation of Indian democracy.

Yet the statement should not be read as a dismissal of the state. Plural identities can divide as easily as they bind. The Partition of 1947, which killed perhaps a million people and uprooted more than ten million, was a catastrophe born of identity hardened into politics. Caste, the subcontinent's oldest identity system, produced an exclusion that only state action, through Article 17, reservations and anti-atrocity law, has begun to undo. Ambedkar's insistence on constitutional morality was precisely a call for the state to correct society's hierarchies rather than mirror them. Identity left to itself can also turn majoritarian, and when one community claims the nation as its own, plurality becomes a pretext for exclusion. The state is therefore not irrelevant; it is the guarantor that keeps any single thread from strangling the others.

The weakness of regional institutions confirms the argument from another direction. The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, founded in Dhaka in 1985, has held no summit since Kathmandu in 2014, after the Islamabad summit of 2016 was called off. State-to-state ties in the region remain thin. Yet people-to-people ties keep moving: pilgrims travel to Lumbini and Ajmer, students from Nepal and Bhutan fill Indian universities, and Indian films and Pakistani television dramas find audiences across borders. The region's real integration lives in civil society and shared culture rather than in its governments. Bhutan's philosophy of Gross National Happiness, drawn from Buddhist ideas of balance, shows how a state can take its purpose from its culture instead of imposing one upon it.

The way forward lies in states that reflect the weave rather than replace it. Federal design, linguistic accommodation and the protection of minorities have carried India's democracy through decades of turbulence, while Sri Lanka's long debate on devolution under its Thirteenth Amendment of 1987 shows the region returning to the same lesson. For South Asia as a whole, the cultural commons of Buddhist circuits, Sufi shrines, shared rivers and shared languages offer a softer route to cooperation than treaties alone. India's Neighbourhood First policy works best when it travels along these threads: restoring a monastery, opening a pilgrim corridor or funding a library builds more trust than a communique. A state that sees itself as the custodian of plural identities, and not their manufacturer, earns a loyalty that coercion can never buy.

The students who fell in Dhaka in 1952 did not reject the idea of a state; they rejected a state that would not hear their language. Their sacrifice is now remembered across the world, a reminder that the deepest loyalties of South Asians are woven from tongue, faith, song and memory. Tagore imagined a homeland of the mind:

"Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls."

The states of this region will endure to the extent that they become the loom on which plural identities are woven together, rather than the knife that cuts them apart.