ABSTRACT
At the stroke of the midnight hour, India awoke to freedom of a kind, as well as to a host of unresolved problems that had only been discussed theoretically before. In political and intellectual circles, there had for some time been a deeply felt need to anticipate the nature and content of the post-independence Indian state. With formal independence achieved, the need for a definite programme and direction for the new Indian state now became a matter of urgency; there was a need to order various contending ideas into manageable forms and to find at least an interim closure to the debates on the nature of the new India.
