Footnotes to a ceasefire: A reader’s guide to India-Pak history
Editor’s Note: This excellent reading list curated by Amritesh Mukherjee offers much-needed context on the fraught and complicated relationship between the two nations.. These books cover everything from Partition narratives to diplomatic policy, the border wars, and global geopolitics.
Written by: Amritesh Mukherjee is a reader, writer and journalist—mostly in that order. Covering literature, cinema and art through his writings, he's fascinated by the stories that shape our world. You can follow him on his Insta and X account.
The deadliest attack on civilians in recent Kashmiri history has once again drawn blood along a border that has never really healed. Twenty-six tourists, many of them families on vacation, were gunned down in Pahalgam. Within days, India responded with deep military strikes across the Line of Control and into Pakistan’s Punjab, launching Operation Sindoor. Suddenly, history has come alive yet again in the headlines.
This list maps the long and tangled relationship between the two neighboring countries, from the unresolved trauma of Partition to the tactical choreography of cross-border strikes, from high diplomacy to experienced disillusionment. This isn’t the first time maps have bled, nor will it be the last. Between memory and revenge, rhetoric and restraint, lies a long history of mistrust, missteps, and mutual grief. These ten books may not offer solutions, but what they do offer is perhaps more necessary: context.
The Sole Spokesman by Ayesha Jalal: Partition narratives often play out in binaries: Hindu-Muslim, India-Pakistan, Nehru-Jinnah. Jalal’s ‘The Sole Spokesman’ resists that simplicity. Through painstaking archival work, she builds the case that Jinnah’s call for Pakistan was never meant to be fully literal, that it was a bargaining chip aimed at reconfiguring power within a united India. Pakistan, she shows, was as much strategic fiction as it was a political demand: a means to compel safeguards for Muslims across India beyond the majority provinces. But fiction turned into reality.
Amritesh’s take: The book walks readers through Jinnah’s careful imprecisions, the British state’s hurried exit, and the Congress’s political calculus, and how they converged into a blood-soaked border. As Partition arrived—rushed, brutal, irreversible—so did a Pakistan, even its supposed architect called “moth-eaten.” ‘The Sole Spokesman’ repositions the line that cut through the land as one that was always blurred in intent.
Midnight's Furies by Nisid Hajari: What Midnight’s Furies shows elaborately is how quickly ideals can curdle into vendetta. It’s a study of how the personal can turn political and how the choices of a few men scar the destinies of millions. Hajari’s deeply researched book punctures the myths around Partition and drags into the light the petty feuds, fragile egos, and fatal misreadings that fed a humanitarian disaster. Hajari resists caricature: he shows Nehru’s charisma but also his dismissiveness; Jinnah’s secularism but also his cold detachment.
Amritesh’s take: Both men were brilliant, but both were also flawed, neither able to grasp the scale of the storm they were unleashing. The book begins in Calcutta, with riots that prefigure the savagery of what’s to come: trains soaked in blood, villages gutted by vengeance, cities torn apart by ethnic cleansing. That legacy, he reminds us, lives on, from Kashmir to Kargil, from nuclear standoffs to terror strikes. In a moment like Pahalgam and its aftermath, ‘Midnight’s Furies’ reminds us that the wounds of history seldom heal.
The Great Partition by Yasmin Khan: Unlike the previous two titles, Yasmin Khan’s ‘The Great Partition’ turns away from the marble halls of diplomacy and listens instead to the cries on scorched earth. This is not a story told from the top down but a history seen from the torn refugee's bundle, the burnt village, and the silence of assaulted women. It’s not an easy read, nor should it be, laying bare how an idea—freedom—was contorted into a nightmare of fire and flight.
Amritesh’s take: Partition here goes beyond a date, a deal, a line. It’s a collapsing scaffolding built on colonial ego, nationalist urgency, and an ocean of assumptions. Using diaries, letters, and testimonies, she restores faces to figures and lives to statistics. It’s a book of haunting silences and crowded trains, of missing names and overwritten stories, and in its pages, Partition finally becomes what it always was: a human catastrophe rather than a mere political compromise.
The Lost Rebellion by Manoj Joshi: One can’t understand India-Pakistan dynamics without understanding the modern history of Kashmir. With a journalist’s eye for detail and a historian’s appetite for context, Manoj Joshi dissects the 1990s insurgency in Kashmir through ‘The Lost Rebellion.’ He traces the journey which began as a youth-led cry for azadi but rapidly morphed into a cross-border jihad with the trajectory fed by Pakistan’s calculated interference and India’s strategic inertia. It is both a story of betrayal and one of loss: of governance, of life, of trust.
Amritesh’s take: Using interviews, field visits, and official records, the book captures the chaos and contradictions of the 1990s Kashmir insurgency. The book is made all the better through its dense reportage and the seamless threading of the micro (timelines, encounters, betrayals) with the macro (diplomatic stances, geopolitical maneuvers). As a portrait of a generation betrayed and a conflict unresolved, this book remains unmatched.
1965: A Western Sunrise by Shiv Kunal Verma: The book makes one thing clear: winning a war militarily doesn’t always mean winning it politically. More than a battlefield chronicle, ‘1965: A Western Sunrise’ is a tale of missed warnings, chaotic strategies, and incredible persistence. Drawing from first-hand accounts, terrain visits, and even flights in vintage aircraft, Verma reconstructs a war that India fought before it was ready: logistically, emotionally, and institutionally. And yet, by the end, it was Pakistan that walked away bruised, its objectives unmet. The war’s ambiguity, with both sides claiming victory, can also be seen as a metaphor for the larger India-Pakistan impasse: always fighting, rarely resolving.
Amritesh’s take: Verma documents here, yes, but also diagnoses. His respect for the uniform is clear, but so is his discontent with systems that fail those wearing it. He exposes the political naiveté, operational blunders, and strategic illusions that turned a limited conflict into a full-scale war. He captures both the adrenaline and the anxiety of war, especially for those on the ground who were left to improvise in the absence of clear command. The story shifts from colonial divides to the ideological tussles of the Cold War, showing how a war over Kashmir was never just about Kashmir.
The South Asia Papers by Stephen Philip Cohen: There are few scholars whose names are inseparable from a field; Stephen P Cohen is one of them. ‘The South Asia Papers’ brings together a lifetime’s work on India, Pakistan, and the strategic chessboard they inhabit. As one of the earliest and most consistent American voices studying the region’s military sociology and nuclear dynamics, Cohen’s archive of essays maps the frameworks through which South Asia has been seen, misunderstood, and usually ignored in global strategic circles.
Amritesh’s take: The essays move across topics—Bose and the INA, Kashmir and Kargil, nukes and nationalism—but are anchored by a central question: why has peace remained unreachable? It is the intellectual footprint of an outsider who helped the West see South Asia less as a crisis zone and more as a strategic space with its own internal logic. Ultimately, instead of answers, the book offers you better questions.
India's Wars by Arjun Subramaniam: Few works have attempted to record India’s post-independence wars with the clarity and balance of Arjun Subramaniam’s ‘India’s Wars.’ In a genre repeatedly crowded with either official silences or valorised memoirs, this book walks that rare middle path, unflinchingly critiquing the institutions. Whether detailing the IAF’s overlooked role in 1947 or exploring the diplomatic fog surrounding the 1965 war, Subramaniam creates a story of flawed leaders and determined soldiers.
Amritesh’s take: His view is top-down but nuanced, drawn from archives, field accounts, and policy documents. Beginning at the fraught dawn of Independence and ending at the audacious creation of Bangladesh, this book is many things: a history of strategy, a commentary on operations, and a cultural mirror. It is a clear-eyed and refreshingly honest introduction to India’s military journey via its formative conflicts.
Neither a Hawk nor a Dove by Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri: This is a book of ghosts, of those lost to war, but also of the peace that nearly was. It offers a layered, often conflicted, look into the foreign policy theatre of early 2000s Pakistan. Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri’s sweeping memoir of his tenure as Pakistan’s Foreign Minister is a quiet elegy to missed chances, to diplomatic courage scuttled by domestic optics, and to a region that keeps refusing to heal.
Amritesh’s take: Portraying the usually misrepresented machinery of Pakistani foreign policy, Kasuri walks us through backchannels and diplomatic tightropes, particularly the near-breakthrough moment in Kashmir under Musharraf’s tenure. There’s an unmistakable undercurrent of regret running through the book: over peace that came close but couldn’t arrive, over backchannel promises undone by politics on both sides.
In Pursuit of Peace by Satinder Lambah: Lambah’s vantage point is unmatched. Few knew the fault lines of India–Pakistan relations as intimately as him. In a geopolitical terrain shaped more by saber-rattling than dialogue, ‘In Pursuit of Peace’ provides a countercurrent through a deliberate record of India–Pakistan relations as seen from the eyes of one of its most experienced diplomats. From his early posting in Islamabad to the key back-channel talks of the 2000s, Lambah offers a view from the negotiating table to present two nations bound by history and geography but also by ego and inertia.
Amritesh’s take: His chapters flow through decades of frost and thaw: Indira Gandhi’s statesmanship, Vajpayee’s overtures, Manmohan Singh’s diligence. At every turn, he reminds the reader how close the countries have come to defusing hostility and how often politics has snatched it away. Without underestimating the structural barriers—the military in Rawalpindi, the electoral politics in Delhi—Lambah maintains that diplomacy, however futile it may seem, remains the only viable tool in this fraught relationship.
India vs Pakistan by Husain Haqqani: Haqqani’s argument is simple: the tragedy of the subcontinent isn’t war or terrorism but the permanence of mistrust. Shifting through official narratives, he exposes how Partition’s aftershocks have calcified into identity. He argues that Kashmir isn’t the source of tension but rather the stage where deeper insecurities play out. Similarly, Pakistan’s nationalism has been built more in fear of India than in faith in itself.
Amritesh’s take: He doesn’t let India off the hook, either, indicting its inconsistencies, triumphalism, the majoritarian shift, and diplomacy that often confuses strength for strategy. He calls out the delusions on both sides, the easy conflations, the mythologies. His call for greater cultural and civilian engagement may sound utopian in an age of drone strikes and propaganda wars, but it’s a necessary reminder that peace must be stubbornly and honestly imagined. Haqqani still believes in the power of cultural memory, of porous borders, of the ordinary humanity that war forgets.
