It is perhaps a cliché to argue that South Asia is a potpourri of different influencing societies, nationalities, ethnic traditions and cultural heritages. South Asian culture is rich and varied underlining the complex relationship between its myriad common traditional cultures. The nations share an ethnic background and most of the territorial divisions have come up only in the recent past. Therefore South Asia is today an essential part of our everyday global reality and cannot be studied and understood in isolation. South Asia is of critical importance in the world economy, South Asian communities and professionals are a significant presence in many parts of the world, and South Asian cultural production and aesthetics are firmly embedded in the global imagination and in the global marketplace. South Asia today is indeed geo-politically significant not only because of its strategic location but also due to its burgeoning economic growth rate and development.
However, the region home to nearly 1.4 billion people South Asia is still a place where half of the world’s poor live. The South Asian regional grouping is also perhaps the weakest in the world marked by complete absence of any firm commitment and institutional mechanism towards promotion of equality, justice, and democracy. The region today is marked by the rise of extremism and intercommunal violence, primarily religious but very often ethnic and caste too.