—Rohit De, Professor of History, Yale University; Ornit Shani, Associate Professor of South Asia, University of Haifa
[Editor’s Note: ICONnect is pleased to feature a symposium by the five nominees for this year’s ICON-S Book Prize. This is the third entry in the symposium.]
Rohit De and Ornit Shani, Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025
On 8 January 1947, less than a month after the Indian Constituent Assembly gathered in Delhi and seven months before India would become independent, the assembly’s Secretariat received a letter from Gauhati, Assam. Nalinkanta Barkakati’s letter, typed on a small sheet of notepaper, began by acknowledging his ‘ignoran[ce] in constitutional matters’ and ‘not knowing if such provisions existed in other constitutions’. Even so, it seemed to Barkakarti that for ‘our constitution to be democratic in the true sense’, it needed to give voters the right to recall their elected members by providing for a vote of no-confidence against an individual legislator at any point after their election. He added in a handwritten sentence, ‘hereby compelling them to resign’.
Mr Barkakati’s letter was remarkable for three reasons. First, a proposal for a right for voters to recall an elected legislator was an unusual proposition in the field of constitutional law. Among the half-century’s worth of constitutional proposals in India, such a clause had appeared only once in the manifesto of the Hindustan Republican Association in 1924, an organisation that had since ceased to exist. Mr Barkakati said that ‘it would be too much’ for him ‘to suggest how it can be done’, but it would be a simple matter ‘for the best brains of India in the Constituent Assembly’.
Second, Mr Barkakati’s letter was one of thousands the Constituent Assembly received from the general public, even before its convening on 9 December 1946. Publics across India developed a fever of constitutional expectations. They shared their theories and preferences with those in charge of drafting the constitution, and they expected that their recommendations would be taken seriously. In the case of Mr Barkakati, the letter had no address for correspondence to even acknowledge receipt. Yet, the Constituent Assembly Secretariat filed it as a proposal to be considered by the Sub-committee on Fundamental Rights and forwarded a copy to the research office. In so doing, they inserted the voice of an ordinary anonymous citizen who noted that he was ‘one of the down-trodden 400 million’ into the process of the constitution making. A year later his suggestions would be noted and forwarded to Sub-committee on Fundamental Rights.
But perhaps most remarkably Mr Barkakati’s had written his letter at a time when the Constituent Assembly had no intention or plan to offer the public an avenue through which they could express their views. And, indeed, Barkakati’s letter arrived well before the Sub-committee on Fundamental Rights had been constituted. From 1946, even before the Constituent Assembly convened and ahead of India’s independence, the Indian public erupted with demands, ideas and aspirations for their future constitution. This burst of constitutional consciousness among the Indian public emerged organically from below. It was not a result of a top-down efforts to educate the public about the constitution.
Our joint archival discovery of hundreds of documents evidencing, against the commonly held wisdom, that Indian publics across the subcontinent, including people from the margins of the society and remote territories of the country, engaged intensely with the making of the constitution drove the making of this book.
In the canonical account, the workings of the Constituent Assembly in Delhi, its debates and the texts it produced between December 1946 and November 1949, form the cornerstone of India’s constitutional thought. The long and rich debates and their resulting constitutional text also became the main source for how scholars have understood the (so-called) founding of India’s constitution. Scholars, thus, explained the production of the constitutional text as a result of elite consensual decision making, or conflicts, which drove its framing and lent legitimacy to the text. They have also emphasised the transformative power of the ideas that informed the new constitutional structure; or, to the contrary, stressed the text’s continuity rather than break from the colonial constitutional framework. In both cases, the voluminous debates, spread over 5,546 pages in a set of five books, and the constitutional text have formed the principal source for understanding the constitution-making process and its implications for India’s democracy.
Moreover, scholars have largely assumed that constitutional details were beyond the imagination, interest and capacity of the Indian people, or as a leading work put it ‘[m]ost people in India had no idea of what exactly they had been given.’[1] It has been seen, thus, understood as a pedagogical text for an ignorant and undemocratic public.
Assembling India’s Constitution offers an alternative story. The book explores the making of the Indian constitution as it emerged outside the Constituent Assembly, driven by diverse publics across the breadth and length of India’s territory and even beyond it.
By turning our gaze away from the Constituent Assembly, weoffer a new history and a new paradigm for understanding the making of the constitution. The book reveals the existence of multiple, parallel constitution making processes underway across the subcontinent, showing that the Indian constitution was not solely an elite exercise anchored in the Constituent Assembly in Delhi. From across the subcontinent diverse Indian publics debated the future constitution and made constitutional demands. The 5,546 pages of the Assembly debates represent a tiny sample compared with the thousands of pages of wide-ranging deliberations around the making of the constitution outside the Assembly.
Informed by their lived social realities and experiences, the Indian public deeply engaged with the future constitution. As they assembled across the country to discuss the future constitution, Indians turned it into an open site of struggle. Constitutionalism as a practice and a language, we argue, became a medium through which their struggles and aspirations were negotiated. It was this process of its making, we argue, that produced a resilient constitution for India. The vibrant life of the constitution-in-the-making outside formal legal chambers was critical for its future reception, legitimacy, and endurance. Moreover, the deep sense of ownership the public assumed over the constitution through their engagements with its making became pivotal to the formation of India’s democracy against many odds.
By bringing to light new sources and completely revising dominant narratives of India’s constitution making, the book shows how even when the public’s views were not heeded to during the formation of the constitutional text, their ongoing contestations and engagements with the constitution making ensured that Indian constitutionalism was never limited to the final text of the constitution, and changed the constitutional text and its interpretation over the decades to come.
Assembling India’s Constitution developed from our previous books and the conversations we have had. Both our books centred on public engagement with the constitution. In How India Became Democratic, Ornit Shani explores the making of the first list of voters on the basis of universal franchise between 1947–1950, arguing that ‘the institutionalisation of procedural equality for the purpose of authorising a government in as deeply a hierarchical and unequal society as India, ahead of the enactment of the constitution turned the idea of India’s democracy into a meaningful and credible story for its people.’ Public struggles for a place on the electoral roll, she shows, led to significant change in the constitution shortly before its enactment. In A People’s Constitution, Rohit De shows how people and groups from the margins of society, such as sex workers and butchers, employed the constitution and its language as they sought redress for infringements of their rights resulting, in particular, from new state market regulations, as soon as the constitution came into force. He argues that the constitution ‘profoundly transformed everyday life in the Indian republic, and that this process was led by marginal citizens’, often minority groups with little-to-no electoral leverage.
The fact that the key transformative constitutional promise of universal adult franchise was implemented in anticipation of the constitution gave the document credibility. It fostered public engagement with the constitution as people were struggling for a place on the electoral roll. The fact that people from the margins of the society turned to the constitution to address their grievances as soon as it came into force demonstrates that they were already well versed in the new constitutional language and had a strong sense of ownership of it. Assembling India’s Constitution uncovers how this came about.
The book explores the making of the constitution through the notion of assembling, both as a process and an organising idea. We argue that the making of the Indian constitution entailed a process of fitting together – assembling – disparate and simultaneous constitution-making efforts across the country. The Indian constitution emerged from competing constitutionalisms at different places and orders of power that involved large and diverse publics. The dominant focus on constitutional founding meant that scholars examined what they saw as a moment of origin, an attempt to build something new, based on a common purpose. These accounts treat constitutions like monuments, fixed, or associated with one moment and place. This approach to making the Indian constitution has narrowed the scope of scholars’ investigation largely to the three years of the Constituent Assembly debates inside Constitution Hall in New Delhi.
Looking outside the Constituent Assembly helps us answer how could a constitution be written for a territory whose borders were unknown, and apply to a people when it was not yet clear who would be the people of India? We uncover competing constitution making process in the more than 550 semi-autonomous Princely States that would eventually make up 45 percent of India’s territory, and of the 30 million Indian Tribal people who were not represented in the Constituent Assembly. We also show how the provincial legislatures, judiciary and bureaucracy at large actively sought to change, shape and resist the emerging constitutional order, allowing for state institutions that were developed for colonial rule to transition into a democratic order.
The book makes at least four significant contributions to the study of constitution making and comparative constitutionalism beyond India. First, it redefines the constitution making process, foregrounding public constitutional practice and politics as a key to sustaining the constitution and its vision. Second, it challenges the conventional chronology of constitutional development. In constitutional theory, the formation of a constitutional text precedes its practicing and the aspirations and expectation that emerge from it. In India, however, as we show throughout the book, the public did not wait for the text to practice constitutionalism. Their engagement with the future constitution inverted the common sequence of constitution making. The public’s aspirations and expectations drove them to practice constitutionalism ahead of the text, thereby both testing it and shaping it. Third, the book expands and pluralises the sources that can be used as tools for exploring constitutional law and politics. Finally, emphasising the engagement of pluralistic and collectivised publics rather than a singular, undifferentiated people, the book demands a rethink of traditional theories of constituent power.
Suggested citation: Rohit De & Ornit Shani, Assembling India’s Constitution, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, Jun. 26, 2026, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/assembling-indias-constitution/
[1] Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1997, 34.