By exploring themes of fragility, mobility and turmoil, anxieties and agency, and pedagogy, this book shows how colonialism shaped postcolonial projects in South and Southeast Asia including India, Pakistan, Burma, and Indonesia. Its chapters unearth the contingency and contention that accompanied the establishment of nation-states and their claim to be decolonized heirs.

The book places key postcolonial moments - a struggle for citizenship, anxious constitution making, mass education and land reform - against the aftermath of the Second World War and within a global framework, relating them to the global transformation in political geography from empire to nation. The chapters analyse how futures and ideals envisioned by anticolonial activists were made reality, whilst others were discarded. Drawing on the expertise of eminent contributors, The Postcolonial Moment in South and Southeast Asia represents the most ground-breaking research on the region.

Gyan Prakash is Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University, USA. He is the author of Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (1990), Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (1999) and Mumbai Fables (2010).

Michael Laffan is Professor of History at Princeton University, USA. He the author of Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma Below the Winds (2003) and The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past (2011), and the editor of Belonging Across the Bay of Bengal: Religious Rites, Colonial Migrations, National Rights (2017).

Nikhil Menon is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, USA.