AS Pakistan achieved its series victory in the cricket fields near the sand dunes of the Gulf, perhaps for the first time ever beating the top-ranked side in a Test series, and that too without scandal, allegation or accusation, a number of British commentators were giving us a lesson in geography.

Cricket commentators on television and subsequently in the print media, kept referring to the UAE as part of the subcontinent, or even South Asia.

Michael Atherton, Geoff Boycott and David Gower amongst others stated that England had seldom won “on the subcontinent” and this defeat was just another episode of the same. Other commentators analysing the loss of England argued, that it was their inability to solve “the mysteries of playing spin in subcontinental conditions” which caused “another humiliating collapse”, while others simply stated that England had only been able to beat Bangladesh on the subcontinent.

Had England won the Test series, Pakistan would presumably have been defeated ‘on the subcontinent’, as well. Dubai is perhaps the closest one could ever imagine what a quintessential South Asian city would look like, but to include Dubai and Abu Dhabi, or the Gulf states more broadly, into some expanded and extended notion of ‘the subcontinent’ or South Asia opens up interesting interpretations of location, geography and identities.

While the ‘Indian subcontinent’ is a region which was until some decades ago called British India, with perhaps Nepal and Sri Lanka attached — neither of which were part of the British Empire in the manner that undivided India was — the current notion of South Asia seems to be less rooted in history or geography.

Most academics and scholars limit the notion of South Asia to the five countries of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, however, more expanded notions also include the ‘countries’ of Bhutan and the Maldives. Complications of definition and limiting the boundaries of a South Asia arise, when Afghanistan is added as one of the countries belonging to an official concept of South Asia in the guise of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc). If the history of British colonialism is to play a role in defining contemporary notions of South Asia in the form of Saarc, one should not be surprised to see Myanmar become the next member of a forum in which there is next to no regional cooperation.

While British colonialism and geography may have helped craft a region to give it the name of South Asia in the modern world of the 21st-century globalisation, clearly it is culture and commerce which define regions, perhaps unbounded by history and geography. Dubai is a case in point.

Cosmopolitan, polyglot, representative of a new, crass, artificial and plastic South Asian culture, Dubai perhaps best represents what South Asia is today, with cricket, food and Bollywood defining ‘South Asianism’ better than regional trade. Dubai also allows political and underworld exiles to continue to live their South Asian lives outside of South Asia, but only better. The same applies to unskilled and highly skilled professionals from all over the countries which constitute South Asia. For South Asians, Dubai must be the most utopian of South Asian cities.

In some ways, Dubai has been taken over by a South Asian sense of identity and is home or playground for many who live in South Asia. But so are Southall and Jackson Heights. Yet, neither would ever be considered to represent ‘subcontinental conditions’ in any way. The rawness and newness of Dubai, however, gives it the advantage to lay claim to greater affinity with South Asia — of course, so does its proximity — but numerous other non-South Asian influences also challenge any singular identity.

South Asia is, of course, a social construction, and like all such constructions, is subject to interpretation and contestation and is always changing. Within the more accepted boundaries of South Asia — excluding Afghanistan and of course, Dubai — the notion of the identity of what or who a South Asian is, has changed over the last six decades when the term was coined.

From a North Indian Hindustani (stretching this to perhaps include Mumbai) hegemonic identity of a South Asian, exemplified by the then leaders in India and Pakistan, a South Asian identity today, which is still highly contested, is remarkably heterogeneous and also subalternist and non-elitist.

Yet while cricket might be one of the common features of that South Asian identity, and despite the fact that Dubai has been the home ground for many Pakistanis, including exiles and the cricket team, a boundary to mark South Asia might need to be imagined. Where that would lie would be highly contested within the region we assume to be South Asia.

Many groups forced to belong to the nation states which subsequently constitute South Asia, because of state hegemony, would prefer to opt out. The nature of what constitutes South Asia — Dubai, Afghanistan, Myanmar — is just as arbitrary and contested as is what constitutes nation states — Balochistan, the Chittagong Hill Tracts, India’s northeast, Kashmir.

Nations too, like regions, are imagined and constructed. Clearly, while one can add or exclude countries from belonging to arbitrary notions such as ‘South Asia’, the same considerations would need to apply to constituents within the nation state as well.

The writer is a political economist.