Sovereignty over Time

Abstract This essay examines the dismantling of native sovereignties to establish postcolonial sovereignty in South Asia, focusing on the 1948 military annexation of Hyderabad. It argues that forming postcolonial states involved both self-determination and the dismantling of other sovereignties. Sovereignty, both as a criterion and an object of cognition, entailed denying self-determination to contested polities and imposing new forms of alienation and subjection. The colonial/anti-colonial genealogy and postcolonial nation narratives foreclosed the politics of territory and obscured the historical nature of territory. By focusing on states that disappeared after 1945, the essay underscores the need to rethink the links between territory, sovereignty, and statehood in the politics of self-determination.