Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

South Asian studies, like its other geographical area counterparts, is largely an artifact of the North American and European academy's approach to scholarship in history, economics, linguistics, and the social sciences following the 1939-45 war. As the most senior of the colonial projects to extend into the twentieth century, the Indian subcontinent is the subject of a broad and well-established body of literature in a variety of disciplines constituting what is now understood to be South Asian studies.In the period immediately following the 1939-45 war, scholarly inquiry and writing relating to non-Western cultures tended to be departmentalized as reflections of changing colonial groupings and political structures. As the colonial era collapsed in Asia, Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies became Southeast Asia; China, Japan, and Korea became East Asia, with India, Pakistan (and later Bangladesh), and Sri Lanka becoming South Asia.Contemporary scholarship in South Asian studies is the academic heir to the earlier discipline of Indology which, from its eighteenth-century origins, focused primarily upon historical and literary subjects. As the British imperial administrative structure grew through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indology expanded beyond its historical and linguistic-literary foci into a broader range of social science disciplines, often in response ... log in or subscribe to read full text