Indian subcontinent

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Indian subcontinent is a physiographic region of Asia, a vast landmass that juts south from the Himalayas and pushes deep into the Indian Ocean. To the east lies the Bay of Bengal; to the west, the Arabian Sea. Those two bodies of water frame a peninsula that today contains three sovereign nations: Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. What does it mean to call this place a subcontinent rather than a country, a region, or simply South Asia? The answer turns out to involve geology hundreds of millions of years old, the political inheritance of the British Empire, and a naming dispute that still carries emotional weight in Pakistan and Bangladesh today.

• 2. A Name Contested

  ›

  Historians still routinely use the word India to mean the entire subcontinent when they write about any period before the British Raj. That older, expansive sense of the name persisted for centuries, and it only began to narrow as India emerged as a distinct political entity and eventually a nation-state. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subcontinent as a subdivision of a continent with a distinct geographical, political, or cultural identity, or a large landmass somewhat smaller than a continent. Written evidence for using the term to describe this particular region dates from the early twentieth century, when most of the territory was either part of the British Empire or allied with it. It was a convenient shorthand for the combination of British India and the princely states. Historians Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal have noted that the region has come to be known as South Asia in more recent and neutral parlance. Indologist Ronald B. Inden argues that South Asia is gaining ground precisely because it clearly distinguishes the region from East Asia, rather than placing one nation's name over the whole.

• 3. Political Fault Lines

  ›

  Pakistan became independent of British India in 1947, and Bangladesh became independent of Pakistan in 1971. Citizens of both countries have increasingly come to perceive the phrase Indian subcontinent as offensive, objecting to the dominant placement of India in the term. As a result, the phrase is used less and less inside those borders. Many Indian analysts, by contrast, prefer the term because it acknowledges the deep socio-cultural connections shared across the region. The phrase South Asia has become the more common choice in Europe, North America, and, in many cases, within South Asian countries themselves. The region has also been called the Asian subcontinent, the South Asian subcontinent, and, in classical and pre-modern usage, simply India or Greater India. Cricket offers a telling example of how the older term still circulates: introduced to the region by the British, the sport is popular in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan, and sports commentators frequently refer to those countries collectively as the subcontinent, saying things like Australia's tour of the subcontinent or describing subcontinental conditions.

• 4. Deep Time and Drifting Plates

  ›

  Long before the Himalayas existed, the Indian plate was part of the supercontinent Gondwana. Before it broke free and moved north toward Eurasia, two smaller landmasses had already completed that journey. The Qiangtang terrane and the Lhasa terrane were both part of a string of microcontinents called Cimmeria, whose ancient pieces form parts of what are now Turkey, Iran, Pakistan including the Karakoram, China, Myanmar, Thailand, and Malaysia. These fragments closed the Paleo-Tethys Ocean above them as they moved, opening the Neo-Tethys Ocean between themselves and Gondwana. When they finally collided with Eurasia, they produced a mountain-building event known as the Cimmerian Orogeny. After the Lhasa terrane had joined Eurasia, an active continental margin opened along its southern edge, and the Neo-Tethys oceanic plate began to subduct beneath it. Magma rising along that margin produced the Gangdese batholith, a massive body of igneous rock that today sits in the Tibetan trans-Himalaya.

• 5. The Collision That Built the Himalayas

  ›

  A separate subduction zone opened to the west, above what is now called the Kohistan-Ladakh island arc. Island arcs form when one oceanic plate subducts beneath another; the rising magma builds new continental crust. That arc drifted northward, closed its own ocean basin, and eventually collided with Eurasia. Ladakh today lies within the Indian-administered region of Kashmir, while Kohistan falls within the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. When the Indian plate itself finally collided with Eurasia, it closed the Neo-Tethys Ocean entirely. The seam left behind by that collision is called the Indus-Yarlung suture zone, a line of ancient crustal material pinched between the two continental plates that now lies north of the Himalayas. Two great rivers trace the eastern and western limits of the Himalayan range along this zone: the Indus to the west and the Yarlung Tsangpo to the east, which becomes the Brahmaputra lower in its course. Both rivers were continually pushed off their original paths as the Himalayas kept rising, making the mountain range itself an ongoing force reshaping the waterways that define the subcontinent's edges.