In an age of increasingly hysterical border protection the post-colonial critique of nationalism and its attendant borders becomes ever more prescient. This paper will address the literary approach to global culture and the critique of the nation in a concept I refer to as the transnation. The transnation is a function of utopian thinking in post-colonial writing, a state of inbetweenness not adequately accounted for by the terms ‘diaspora’ ‘migrancy’ or ‘multiculturalism’ but which disrupts the discourse of loss attending those terms. One feature of this concept is the challenge to the restriction of various kinds of borders as it addresses the boundaries circling identity formation in national and cultural discourse. Salman Rushdie’s satire of nationalism in Midnight’s Children is well known, but I follow a development of this urge to freedom in novels by two other Indian transnational writers, Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. In the process I will examine the significance of maps and memory, nation and names in these exogenous views of post-colonial subjectivity.