The Sovereign Lives of India and Pakistan : post-partition statehood in South Asia / Atul Mishra

An excellent book on an important and topical subject. Atul Mishra incisively reveals how, and why, the assertion of sovereignty has become an end in itself for the post-colonial states of India and Pakistan. The Sovereign Lives of India and Pakistan lays bare the destructive effects of rigid conceptions of sovereignty, rooted in anxiety, on the two countries and on the relationship between them. * Sumantra Bose, London School of Economics and Political Science * Atul Mishra's work presents an intriguing proposition-that for both India and Pakistan, pursuit of sovereignty has remained an end in itself. Traversing the fields of political history and theory of international relations, The Sovereign Lives draws our attention to how the perception of statehood of both countries is predicated upon ideas of minority, national identity and territoriality. The importance of the book lies in its ambitious attempt topresent alternative ideas of nation-state and community in the context of South Asia. * Suhas Palshikar, Former Professor of Politics, Savitribai Phule Pune University *

The Sovereign Lives explores what it has meant for India and Pakistan to act as sovereign states entangled at birth by an unsatisfactory partition.