Book excerpt: Against the Nation invites readers to explore South Asia as a place and as an idea with a sense of reflection and nuance rather than submitting to conventional understanding of the region merely in geopolitical terms. The authors take the readers across a vast terrain of prospects like visual culture, music, film, knowledge systems and classrooms, myth and history as well as forms of politics that offer possibilities for reading South Asia as a collective enterprise that has historical precedents as well as untapped ideological potential for the future.