This volume has taken shape during my sojourns at various academic institutions in the United States since 1987, all of which share the credits in different measure. Intellectually it forms a bridge between my earlier monographs and current research on multiple identities and theories of sovereignty in South Asia. The inspiration for it was provided by my students at Wisconsin-Madison, Tufts and, above all, Columbia and it is largely for them that I decided to undertake a work of this level of generality and, hopefully, accessibility.

While teaching South Asian politics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I was struck by the absence of any historical and comparative analysis of states and political processes in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The arbitrary lines drawn at the time of India's partition in 1947 – the subject of my doctoral research – appeared to have become a mental barrier to a comparative and thematic treatment of post-independence developments in the subcontinent. After completing a study of the first decade of Pakistan's independence, I turned to culling material on post-independence India available in British and American archives. The findings convinced me that the immediate post-independence period in both countries was not only comparable but a key to understanding the divergences in their post-independence history. After the ‘transition’ to democracy in Pakistan and Bangladesh, any comparative exercise had to try and explain why political, social and economic developments in the subcontinent were apparently showing signs of converging.