The Indian subcontinent was once a separate landmass that crashed into Asia
The land south of the Himalayas began as a fragment of Gondwana that drifted north and slammed into Eurasia, closing an entire ocean and pushing up the world's greatest mountains. Even its name is contested: some call it the Indian subcontinent, others insist on South Asia, and the choice says a lot.
Geographically, the subcontinent is the wedge of Asia that pokes into the Indian Ocean between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, bounded to the north by the Himalayas. Politically it is shared by India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. South Asia is a broader, more political label that usually adds Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, and sometimes Afghanistan, which does not count as part of the subcontinent at all.
Before the Indian plate split from Gondwana, smaller microcontinents such as the Lhasa terrane had already fused onto Eurasia. As the ocean floor in front of India sank beneath Asia, molten rock built the Gangdese batholith in the Tibetan trans-Himalaya, and a volcanic island arc now found in Ladakh and Kohistan was swept north and welded on too. When India finally arrived, the Neo-Tethys Ocean vanished. The seam where the two continents joined, the Indus-Yarlung suture zone, runs north of the Himalayas, and the Indus and the Yarlung Tsangpo, which becomes the Brahmaputra, flow along it, marking the range's western and eastern ends.
The word subcontinent means a distinct division of a continent, or a landmass a bit smaller than one. Its use for this region dates from the early twentieth century, when it neatly covered both British India and the princely states, and it stayed popular across the former British Empire. Historians still use plain India for the whole region before the Raj.
Since independence and Partition, many in Pakistan and Bangladesh find the phrase suspect because it puts India first, so it is fading there, while many Indian analysts favour it for the region's shared culture. Cricket, brought by the British, keeps it alive in sporting slang, where touring teams face subcontinental conditions.
Source: Indian subcontinent
