Once it was the Jewel in the Crown of the British empire. But, fifty years after declaring independence from the British Raj, South Asia -- one fifth of humanity -- has become the juicy horsefly in the American World Wide Web of consumer culture. PNS correspondent Andrew Robinson is a writer based in Bangladesh whose forthcoming book on the subcontinent will be published by HarperCollins in 1997. (First of two articles from Bangladesh).

DHAKA -- This week, the one-fifth of the world's population that lives in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh enters their fiftieth year of independence from the British Raj. But far from becoming independent, South Asia has divided into two camps -- those who are part of the modern American empire, and those who long to be.

"How much longer can your country rule the world?" asks S.M. Shafiqul Amin Ferdausi, News Director at Bangladesh Radio, as we drink tea and watch CNN tell us what's important in the universe (indoor amusement parks). "Nobody in Asia likes CNN. One hundred people die here, and nobody covers it."

Yet for better or worse, the former Jewel in the Crown has become a fat and juicy horsefly in America's new World Wide Web of consumer culture.

To wit, American English with its whiny nasalities is already conquering the more peppy British phonemes of yesteryear, and such emotionally hollow Americanisms as "a blast", "cool" and "like" are already pushing aside the Indian-English hip phrases like "freaked-out", "bloody" and "zapped."

Other imports: Aerobics, rollerblades, night clubs, pizza, game shows, public affection, the TV show Baywatch (dubbed in 13 Indian languages) and the American concept of multi-culturalism -- a strictly epidermal affair in which representatives of various flesh-tones make love and music videos together without knowing a thing about one another's ancestral customs. Let alone their own.

The billboards which once wooed young Indians into petty administrative service throughout the British Empire are up again, now advertising money-minting computer training institutes as "tickets to America." Meanwhile, magazines have started advertising phone sex and Pepsi has stolen the cigarette companies' marketing strategy, addicting impressionable youth to their product by sponsoring fashion shows, rock concerts and "Cool Contests" in high schools across the subcontinent.

Unlike most of Asia, the three largest South Asia countries -- Pakistan, India and Bangladesh -- remain faithful supplicants to donors of foreign aid. This week the World Bank announced a $2 billion aid package for Bangladesh, on condition the country expedite its process of free market reform.

India's fast-growing computer industry, touted as a vital factor in the country's leap toward economic modernization, has more to do with India's subjugation to Western trade demands than with the country's technological independence.

"The Americans say we are good engineers, but poor designers," says Sudhakar Rao, a Hyderabad-based computer engineer. But that's hardly surprising since the majority of today's Indian-programmed software is designed for foreign use. It's quite common for Indian companies to buy Indian-made software from America, just as Indians once drank their own tea imported from England.

And the Internet, better known here as the World Wide Web, is proving to be an excellent mechanism of control over South Asia, not unlike the British bureaucratic system that grew out of the East Indian Company. The trade routes that once led to London now all lead to America, and as a result, international connections actually cost less than domestic links -- a throw-back to the "inland duties" that so troubled Indian merchants under the Raj.

As with its Mogul and British predecessors, this Empire, too, will one day be overthrown. And the South Asia that bubbles up so incessantly through the thousands of remote villages which CNN and the Internet can never reach will one day celebrate its demise.

But for now, the Empire is firmly intact in the minds of both the aggressive businessmen and their passive subjects. In the 1860s, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote about the people of the subcontinent: "Ev'n the black (Indian) dying hopes he shall return, a white." A modern rhymed rendition offers itself easily: "Ev'n the most humble (Indian) boasts of ambition, success, the mastercard's might."