1. Introduction 2. What (Kind of) Independence? 3. Caught in the Parallax: Partition Scholarship and the Unspeakable 4. Production of Space: Identity, Singularity and Legitimacy 5. Writing the Genre of the New: Constituting the Nation, Community and Universal Citizenship 6. Overwriting Class: Backwardness and the Mature Citizen 7. The Impossible Totality: Indian Citizenship and the Constitutive Split 8. Conclusion

Ted Svensson is Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden. He holds a PhD from the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. He has published articles in Global Society, Alternatives and Critical Studies on Terrorism, and he recently contributed with a chapter in the edited volume Comparative Regional Security Governance (London: Routledge, 2012). He was awarded the Political Studies Association's Lord Bryce Prize for best dissertation in International Relations and/or Comparative Politics in 2011.

This work seeks to examine the event and concurrent transition that the inauguration of India and Pakistan as 'postcolonial' states in August 1947 constituted and effectuated.

Distinct from most other studies on the partition and independence the book assumes the constitutive moment as the focal point, offering a new approach to the study of partition in British India, decolonisation and the institutional of the postcolonial state.