South Asia, according to World Bank data, is home to roughly 1.7 billion people which is about a quarter of humanity. Yet it remains one of the world’s least integrated regions. Borders drawn in blood, nuclear rivals locked in permanent suspicion, and a regional bloc that has spent almost four decades achieving very little. This is the political inheritance of a landmass that was never given a name of its own choosing. 

I have a proposition that argues that the region’s failure to come together is not just about politics or economics. It is about identity, or the lack of one.

In a paper published in the Journal of Political Science (Prithvi Narayan Campus, Tribhuvan University, Nepal), researcher and Assistant Professor Md. Rashidul Islam Rusel of the Department of International Relations, Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, puts forward a striking proposition: rename the region “Himalayasia,” anchoring South Asian identity to the mountain range that towers over it. The full paper is available via DOI and is worth reading in its entirety for anyone interested in South Asian regionalism.

A Region Without a Belonging

The paper opens with an uncomfortable diagnosis. Despite the existence of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) since 1985, the region has produced little of the institutional cohesion seen in blocs like the European Union or ASEAN. Rusel notes that regionalism, properly understood, requires a State-led project to reorganize political and economic space. And by that yardstick, South Asia has barely tried. 

The persistent rivalry between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed neighbors, has repeatedly spilled into military conflict and poisoned the wider neighborhood’s prospects for cooperation.

What makes the argument distinctive is its focus on naming. Rusel contends that “South Asia” itself is a borrowed, bureaucratic label, coined largely by American policymakers in the 1950s and 60s for their own strategic convenience, as scholar Sudipta Kaviraj has previously observed. A term with no mythology, no emotional pull, and barely seventy years of use, the argument goes, cannot be expected to generate the kind of belonging that older regional names, like “Europe,” carry effortlessly.

The Cost of Disunity, in Numbers

The scale of South Asia’s non-integration is not just a talking point; it shows up starkly in the data. According to the World Bank, intra-regional trade accounts for barely 5 percent of South Asia’s total trade, compared with roughly 25 percent within ASEAN and around 60 percent within the European Union. 

South Asian countries currently trade only about $23 billion among themselves each year, well below an estimated potential of at least $67 billion. The same World Bank analysis notes the almost absurd result of this fragmentation: it is about 20 percent cheaper for an Indian company to trade with Brazil, on the other side of the planet, than with next-door Pakistan.

Security spending tells a similarly lopsided story. Data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) show that India’s military expenditure reached $86.1 billion in 2024, nearly nine times Pakistan’s $10.2 billion, making India the world’s fifth-largest defense spender. Pakistan, for its part, channels close to 14 percent of total government spending into its military, nearly double India’s roughly 8 percent share, a reflection of how deeply threat perception vis-à-vis its larger neighbor shapes national budgeting on both sides of the border. These are resources that a genuinely cooperative region could, in theory, redirect toward the poverty reduction and infrastructure building that the paper’s diagnosis says the region badly needs.

Why “India” No Longer Works

Before 1947, the closest thing the region had to a shared name was India, or its older variants, Hind and Hindustan. But the violent partition of British India, and the later separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971, permanently changed what that word could mean. Using “India” today to describe the whole region would be not just politically unworkable but genuinely offensive to Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, given the trauma of Partition and the decades of mutual distrust that followed.

Rusel also highlights a peculiarity that sets South Asia apart from most other regions: its modern States were not carved along ethnic or linguistic lines, as happened in much of Europe or Africa, but along religious ones. That has embedded a communal edge into inter-state rivalry itself, most visibly between India and Pakistan, making any regional identity built on national frameworks especially fragile.

The Case for the Himalayas

If the political vocabulary of South Asia is broken, Rusel argues, geography may offer a way out. The Himalayan range stretches across India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Nepal and Bhutan. Even Bangladesh, though it has no Himalayan peaks within its borders, sits atop the delta built from Himalayan sediment carried down by the Ganges and Brahmaputra, making it, in the paper’s words, a Himalayan country in every meaningful sense.

The mountains are not just a physical backdrop. The paper traces how the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra river systems, all Himalayan in origin, nourished some of the world’s oldest civilizations and made the region’s soil among the most fertile on Earth. That fertility, in turn, drew waves of migration over millennia, producing the genetically and culturally mixed population that defines South Asia today. 

Genetic research cited in the paper, including work summarized by science journalist Lizzie Wade, traces most of the region’s ethnic and linguistic groups to a blend of local hunter-gatherers, Middle Eastern farmers and Central Asian herders, underscoring just how deeply intertwined the region’s peoples already are, whatever their national borders suggest.

That Himalayan-fed fertility still shapes the region’s demography today. Roughly 63 percent of South Asia’s population remains rural, according to World Bank figures, a far higher share than in most other developing regions, and one rooted directly in the river-fed agricultural plains the paper describes. It is a reminder that the Himalayas are not a remote backdrop for South Asians but an everyday economic fact, sustaining the farmland that most of the region’s population still depends on.

The Himalayas also carry enormous religious and literary weight, revered in Hindu cosmology as the abode of the gods and immortalized by poets from Muhammad Iqbal to Rabindranath Tagore, who reportedly drew personal inspiration from the mountains during visits to present-day Uttarakhand, India.

Borrowing From Constructivism

Theoretically, the paper leans on constructivist international relations theory, particularly the work of Alexander Wendt, who argued that state identities and interests are not fixed but are built through shared understanding and repeated interaction. Rusel’s innovation is to combine this with what he calls a “geographically grounded” approach to identity formation, the idea that a shared landscape can supply the common ground on which social bonds, and eventually political ones, are built. On this reading, a regional name rooted in a shared mountain range does more work than a name rooted in a passing Cold War-era policy convenience.

A Deliberately Unfinished Proposal

Rusel is careful not to oversell the idea. He acknowledges that “Himalayasia” sits awkwardly with island nations like Sri Lanka and Maldives, and that the Chinese and Central Asian stretches of the Himalayas complicate any tidy regional boundary. Citing IR scholar Andrew Hurrell, the paper concedes that all regional identities are, to some extent, “imagined communities” resting on selective mental maps. And Himalayasia is offered as one such map among several possible ones, not a finished blueprint.

Why It Matters Beyond Academia

The proposal is unlikely to appear on a foreign ministry letterhead any time soon. But it speaks to a real gap in South Asian regionalism: the absence of a story that ordinary people, rather than governments, can rally around. 

SAARC’s stagnation has often been blamed on “high politics,” the entrenched suspicions between capitals, and the numbers back up the diagnosis: a bloc covering nearly a quarter of humanity still trades among itself at levels closer to those of far poorer and less connected regions than to its similarly populous Southeast Asian counterpart. Rusel’s bet is that a people-centered, geography-based identity might work around that obstruction rather than through it, gradually building the kind of bottom-up solidarity that preceded, and arguably enabled, deeper integration in Europe.

Whether or not “Himalayasia” ever catches on as a name, the underlying question it poses is a serious one for a region that houses a quarter of the world’s population, spends tens of billions of dollars a year arming itself against its own neighbors, and still trades more easily with the far side of the globe than across its own borders: can shared geography succeed where shared politics has failed?

This article draws on research by Md. Rashidul Islam Rusel, Department of International Relations, Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, published as “‘Himalayasia’: Reclaiming Regional Identity in South Asia” in the Journal of Political Science, Vol. 23 (2023).

(The author is a master's student, Department of International Relations, Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at anwargop499@gmail.com. )