two-page spreads, or end up as insets. In this way, cartographic convenience reinforces
a hierarchical spatial awareness, highlighting certain areas of the globe and pushing
others into the shadows.
For example, anyone interested in finding fairly detailed modern maps showing
the region covering Burma, Northeast India, Bangladesh, and neighbouring parts
of China knows that these do not exist. This is a region that is always a victim of
cartographic surgery. Maps of Southeast Asia may not even include the northern and
western parts of Burma, let alone the neighbouring areas of India and Bangladesh.(10)
And maps of South Asia not infrequently present Northeast India (and sometimes
Bangladesh) as an inconvenient outlier that is relegated to an inset. Odd bits of Tibet
and Yunnan may show up in far corners merely because of the need to fill up the
rectangular shape of the map.
This is an example of a region that routinely is sliced into pieces by makers of
regional maps, a treatment never meted out to `heartlands' such as Java or the Ganges
valley. It is not farfetched to argue that cartographic peripheralisation is indicative of
marginal status of an area in area studies, not just in terms of physical distance to
some imagined area core, but also in terms of perceived relevance to the main con-
cerns and problematiques that animate the study of the areaöin this case Southeast
Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, and East Asia, four major areas that supposedly meet
here (see figure 1).(11) In other words, this region, like others, is largely excluded from
the `area imagination'. Such regions are subsumed under the scholarly rubric of an
`area' only to be ignored, othered, made illegible.