For Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the alternative to accepting Partition was something worse than Pakistan: “Raja-sthan”. That is, the potential fragmentation of India as a result of princely states refusing to accede to the Union. Jawaharlal Nehru feared “balkanisation” or an “indefinite number of partitions”. Choudhry Rahmat Ali once imagined, as Sunil Purushottam writes in From Raj to Republic: Sovereignty, Violence and Democracy in India, “a Pakistan consisting of a fragmented yet subcontinental landscape of Muslim sovereignty”, including an “Osmanistan” roughly corresponding to Hyderabad State — yet with no notion of the ruling Asaf Jahi dynasty retaining their sovereignty. These imaginations of the future, national and “non-national”, left little room for the princely states. Yet, some of the latter, with support from elements of the British establishment, were busy trying to carve out a niche for themselves in the run-up to Independence. Josy Joseph’s Birth of a Nation: The Twenty-one Days that Made India, is an account of some of the negotiations and machinations the leaders of these states engaged in over the three weeks leading …