South Asia

• 1. Introduction

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  South Asia holds a quarter of every person alive on Earth. That single fact reshapes how you think about this wedge of land pressed between the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean. Two billion people share a territory of 5.2 million square kilometres, making it simultaneously the most populous and the most densely packed geographical region on the planet. Its boundaries are not neat. Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka form its recognized core. Afghanistan hovers at the edge, claimed by some definitions and excluded by others. Even the terms used to describe the place carry political weight. In Pakistan, the phrase 'South Asia' was considered too India-centric and was quietly banned inside the International Relations department of Karachi University until 1989. The questions this documentary will pursue run deep: how did so much human history concentrate in one subregion? What forces of religion, empire, climate, and geography shaped the people who live here? And what does the future hold for a place where the monsoon can mean the difference between harvest and catastrophe?

• 2. Land Before Nations

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  Settled life on the Indian subcontinent began roughly 9,000 years ago, along the western margins of the Indus River Basin. From that thin thread of cultivation grew the Indus Valley Civilisation, which spread across what is now Pakistan, North India, and Afghanistan between around 3300 and 1300 BCE. The Mature Harappan period, running from 2600 to 1900 BCE, produced a sophisticated urban culture that remains one of the ancient world's great achievements. The rock paintings of the Bhimbetka rock shelters push human presence even further back, to a period of 30,000 BCE or older. The Vedic period followed the civilisation's decline, lasting from roughly 1900 to 500 BCE, shaped by Indo-European-speaking pastoralists who migrated into north-western India. By about 1200 BCE, Vedic culture and an agrarian way of life had taken root across the northwest and the northern Gangetic plain. The Indian subcontinent itself began its geological journey as part of the supercontinent Gondwana, rifting away during the Cretaceous period before colliding with the Eurasian Plate about 50-55 million years ago. That collision threw up the Himalayan range and the Tibetan Plateau, the same mountains that today shelter the plains from bitter north-Asian winds and funnel the monsoon that feeds the region's crops.

• 3. Faith and Power

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  Buddhism spread beyond the Indian subcontinent through the northwest into Central Asia by the 3rd century BCE, carried by the Theravada school south into Sri Lanka and eventually into Southeast Asia. The Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan and the edicts of the emperor Aśoka suggest that Buddhist monks pushed the faith into the eastern provinces of the Seleucid Empire and possibly farther. Islam arrived as a political force in the 8th century CE, when the Arab general Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh and Multan in southern Punjab. Mahmud of Ghazni then raided and plundered kingdoms in north India seventeen times between 997 and 1030, crossing from east of the Indus to west of the Yamuna. Permanent Islamic power followed when the Ghurid Sultan Mu'izz al-Din Muhammad launched a systematic war of expansion in 1173, laying the foundation for the Delhi Sultanate. Babur defeated and killed Ibrahim Lodi at the Battle of Panipat in 1526, ending the Sultanate and replacing it with the Mughal Empire. The Mughal emperor Akbar sought religious tolerance and abolished the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims, while two Sikh leaders, Guru Arjan and Guru Tegh Bahadur, were executed under orders of later Mughal emperors when they refused to convert to Islam. By 2010, South Asia was home to roughly 510 million Muslims, about 900 million Hindus, over 27 million Sikhs, 35 million Christians, and over 25 million Buddhists, making it among the most religiously diverse regions on Earth.

• 4. Empire and Partition

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  Maritime trading between South Asia and European merchants began at the turn of the 16th century after the Portuguese discovery of the sea route to India. British traders, after defeating the Nawab of Bengal and Tipu Sultan and his French allies, came to dominate much of South Asia through divide-and-rule tactics by the early 19th century. British Crown rule formally began in 1858, following the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The colonial period was marked by an increase in famines and extreme poverty, though railways built with British technology eventually provided crucial famine relief by enabling food to move across India. Millions of South Asians began to migrate throughout the world, drawn by labour demands across the British Empire. By the 20th century, the Indian National Congress was challenging British rule under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. In 1947, the British Indian Empire was partitioned into a Hindu-majority Dominion of India and a Muslim-majority Dominion of Pakistan, amid large-scale loss of life and an unprecedented migration. A further partition came in 1971, when the eastern half of Pakistan seceded with help from India after the traumatic Bangladesh Liberation War, becoming the People's Republic of Bangladesh. The 1971 war remains the most recent instance of a new nation being formed in the South Asian region. India's nuclear test in 1974 then pushed Pakistan toward its own nuclear programme; Pakistan conducted its nuclear tests at Chagai-I in 1998, just 18 days after India's series of thermonuclear weapons tests.

• 5. Monsoon and Climate Risk

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  South Asia depends critically on monsoon rainfall. Two monsoon systems move across the region: the summer monsoon blows from the southwest and accounts for 70-90% of the annual precipitation; the winter monsoon blows from the northeast and is dominant in Sri Lanka and the Maldives. The warmest period of the year precedes the monsoon season, running from March to mid-June. Maximum relative humidity above 80% has been recorded in the Khasi and Jaintia Hills and in Sri Lanka, while parts of Pakistan and western India record figures below 20-30%. Climate change is projected to intensify these patterns significantly. Up to two-thirds of glacier ice in the Hindu Kush region may melt by 2100 under high warming scenarios, threatening the water supply for over 220 million people whose basins are fed by those glaciers. Around 2050, people living in the Ganges and Indus river basins, where up to 60% of non-monsoon irrigation comes from glacier melt, may face severe water scarcity. Sea level rise in Bangladesh alone is projected to displace 0.9-2.1 million people by 2050 and may force the relocation of up to one third of the country's power plants by 2030. Under the high-emission scenario, 40 million people, nearly 2% of the South Asian population, may be driven to internal migration by 2050 due to climate change. The 2017 Germanwatch Climate Risk Index placed Bangladesh sixth and Pakistan seventh among countries most affected by climate change in the period from 1996 to 2015.

• 6. People, Languages, and Belief

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  Hindustani is the largest spoken language in the region, followed by Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, and Punjabi. The Devanagari script alone is used for over 120 South Asian languages, making it one of the most widely adopted writing systems in the world. The Punjabi language spans three religions: Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism; its spoken form is shared, but it is written in three distinct scripts, with Muslim Punjabis in Pakistan using the Persian Nastaliq and Sikh and Hindu Punjabis in India using Gurmukhi or Nagari. Bangladesh's Language Movement, which ultimately led the country to adopt Bengali as its official language, had previously forced the use of only the Nastaliq script in the region until 1952. South Asia alone accounts for 90.47% of Hindus worldwide and 95.5% of Sikhs. Cricket binds sport across the subcontinent, with 90% of the sport's worldwide fans based in the Indian subcontinent. Regional SAARC, formally established in Dhaka in December 1985, began with seven member countries and admitted Afghanistan as an eighth member in 2007. In 2022, South Asia had the world's largest populations of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, and Zoroastrians, concentrating an extraordinary breadth of human religious practice within a single subregion.

• 7. Poverty, Wealth, and Education

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  India is the largest economy in the region at US$4.18 trillion, making up almost 82% of the South Asian economy and ranking as the world's 6th largest in nominal terms. India lifted 415 million people from multidimensional poverty between 2005-06 and 2019-21, cutting its MPI-poor share from 55.1% in 2005-06 to 16.4% in 2019-21. Bangladesh, having struggled for decades under conflict and economic exploitation, is now one of the fastest-growing countries in the region. Pakistan, by contrast, has been beset with instability: none of its Prime Ministers have completed a full 5-year term in office, and the number of malnourished people there has grown steadily from 28.7 million in the 1990s to 41.3 million in 2015. Education presents a comparable picture of contrast. In 2018-11.3 million children at the primary level and 20.6 million at the lower secondary level were out of school in South Asia. According to UNESCO, 241 million children between six and fourteen, or 81% of the total in Southern and Central Asia, were not learning in 2017. Bangladesh made the greatest progress in girls' secondary school enrolment over the late 20th and early 21st century, increasing female secondary enrolment from 13% to 56% in ten years. India had one of the largest higher education systems in the world in 2011, with about 21 million students across 700 universities and 40,000 colleges, accounting for 86% of all higher-level students in the South Asian region.