In Talbot’s assessment, a sense of both ‘Indianness’ and religious community pre-dated British rule. Talbot’s model is a synthesis of all the three approaches, and portrays nationalism as a “blend of tradition and modernity”. Of these, the modernist perspective has been the most dominant and has had a potent influence on nation-building schemes of many Third World states, including Nehruvian India. Modernists, on the other hand, regard it as a recent construct arising from socio-economic transformations of the last two centuries. Perennialists differ from primordialists in that they consider nationalism to be rooted in long-standing but mutable ethnic allegiances. There are primordialists, who see the nation as a “natural order”. Given the complexities of-identity formation, competing theories vie for scholarly affection.

In his new volume, India & Pakistan, Talbot addresses the confounding issue of identity formation in the highly fluid and volatile subcontinental environment before and after 1947.Expectedly, he does not fail the reader. He is, ergo, of greater relevance than the average South Asian chronicler, who tends to probe no further than the “stroke of the midnight hour”.

For Talbot there was certainly no “end of history” in 1947. His oeuvre is predicated on fundamental continuities in the Subcontinent’s history before and after independence, which is why his later work, Pakistan: A Modern Historv, was able to meticulously trace many contemporary authoritarian trends in the country to antecedent British administrative methods. Ever since Ian Talbot essayed, in 1996, a remarkable autobiography of Khizr Twana, an outstanding but hitherto unrecognized pre-partition politician and followed it up, in 1999, with a magisterial survey of Pakistan in the last five decades, he has acquired a reputation for historically rich and theoretically stimulating writing.

Imagined societies