The Union — Signed Copies
Updated: Aug 24
The Union came out of my constitutional work. Spend enough time with constitutional argument and you develop an attention to hinges — the single clause, the single sentence, on which enormous consequences quietly turn. You start noticing that history works the same way.
In July 1946, the Cabinet Mission Plan to keep India united very nearly held. An intemperate press conference helped bring it down, and the subcontinent was partitioned. The Union asks what might have followed if that one sentence had never been spoken.
It imagines an India that was never divided — a single federation of three constitutional Groups and one thin centre, governing a billion and a half people. But it is not a triumphalist counterfactual. Narrated from the present by a journalist whose grandfather altered that moment, it follows four families — Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Bengali — across eighty years, and asks whether public peace can ever console private grief.
It is, in part, a lawyer's novel: about the architecture of constitutions, the distance between the law as written and the country as lived, and the unglamorous work of holding a fractious polity together. I wrote it over several years, in the hours around practice — which taught me that a long project gets finished in small, unremarkable sessions, not in bursts of inspiration.
Signed copies, direct from me
I am signing a small number of copies myself and sending them out personally. It is the closest I can get to handing the book to a reader — a personal touch, and my thanks for reading it.
The signed run is genuinely limited. When they are gone, they are gone.
How to order
Pay by UPI — ₹670 for the paperback, ₹860 for the hardcover. Scan the code below with any UPI app, or enter the UPI ID directly.
Fill in the order form with your delivery address and the UPI transaction (UTR) reference from your payment.
I sign and dispatch within 7 business days of confirming your payment. Delivery anywhere in India is free.
UPI ID: 8930203102@ptsbi
Please enter the amount yourself, and keep the transaction reference — you will need it on the form.
If the button does not open, use this link: https://advshikharsharma.wixforms.com/f/7496844327335756954
Before you order
Orders are confirmed in the sequence in which payments are received. If the signed run is exhausted before your order is confirmed, your payment is refunded in full.
You may cancel and receive a full refund at any time before your copy is dispatched. Once dispatched, a copy damaged in transit is replaced free of charge, on photographs sent to me within 7 days of delivery.
Signed copies are dispatched within India only. For orders outside India, please write to me first.
Your name, contact details and delivery address are used solely to dispatch this order and to contact you about it. They are not shared with anyone else or used for marketing.
Questions about an order? Write to shikhar_sharma@outlook.com.
Prefer an unsigned copy?
Unsigned paperbacks and hardcovers are on sale through the usual retailers, and will reach you faster:
The book
Title: The Union: An Alternate History of India (1946–2025)
Author: Shikhar Sharma
Publisher: Notion Press
Extent: 516 pages
ISBN: 9798906732002 (paperback) · 9798906732019 (hardcover)
Genre: Literary fiction / alternate history
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