Introduction to South Asia

by Paul Grant, ed.

Here are various resources to understand South Asia. See the index immediately below this introduction.

One in five human beings lives in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. That is 1.3 billion people. In dealing with numbers of this magnitude, it is crucial to remember these represent individual human beings, created in God's image and incomparably valuable, even the smallest, blindest and poorest of them all.

South Asia is a word used to lump hundreds of ethnic, lingual, and religious groups together. South Asia is admittedly an arbitrary division of the world. There is no definitive boundary, for example, between South and Central Asia, or between South and Southeast Asia. Roughly speaking, what we call South Asia is the frontier of the British empire at the end of WWII.

In 1947, the British set the crown jewel of their empire free, carving it into India and Pakistan. Pakistan later divided into Pakistan and Bangladesh after some warfare. Today, India is the world's largest democracy, with more registered voters than the entire population of the United States. The fact of India's survival as a democracy over a half-century is remarkable. With nearly continuous crisis in leadership, threats from all sides and an exploding population struggling with widespread destitution, India could easily have collapsed into anarchy or vehement authoritarianism.

Of the more than 25 million Christians in India, many can trace their spiritual roots to the first century. After the rise of Islam in the north, Christians in the south of the subcontinent lost contact with their bishops in the Middle East for everyday purposes, but the Christians retained their faith. Starting in the age of European expansion, when Western Christians (chiefly Portuguese and British) started sailing around the Muslim world, these Orthodox believers have been grappling with their relationship to Catholic and Protestant fellow believers. Today's concerns include following Jesus in the midst of an increasingly hostile Hinduism, handling divisiveness and myriad denominations, and, as always, the abject poverty of millions of the Christians.

Please pray for South Asia. Millions of people face the daily threat of hunger and abuse from the powerful; in today's affairs, hundreds of millions of people must reckon with nuclear weapons being brandished against them as part of brinksmanship between Pakistan and India.

In these pages, you will find several resources for learning.

Index

The Church in Pakistan post 9/11
by Urbana 03 Director Jim Tebbe

What's the big deal with India and Pakistan?
A brief overview of the hostilities

A tribute to Bakht Singh, Indian Evangelist

UESI - InterVarsity's sister movement in India

Books