Rohit De and Ornit Shani’s Assembling India’s Constitution uses extensive archival material to narrate the untold histories of the Indian Constitution. Moving away from the standard focus and source of Indian constitutional history, the Constituent Assembly of India and its debates, which ran from 1946 to 1950, the book turns the spotlight on the lesser-known sites, actors, and materials.
Drawing on these understudied sites of constitutional engagement, De and Shani demonstrate the public nature of Indian constitution-making. The publicness, they argue, was crucial for the constitution’s “reception, legitimacy, and endurance” and its resilience (5). Here, the authors make a persuasive departure from the dominant narrative in existing literature, which treats the Indian constitutional founding as an elite-driven exercise.
In each chapter, the authors uncover and examine the diverse and often divergent constitutional visions and politics that emerged outside the Constituent Assembly. Chapter I lays out the range of public constitutional aspirations and representations in the early days of constitution-making triggered by the imminent draft constitution. Through a discussion of the constitutional visions of diverse individuals and organisations such as caste-based, women’s, adivasi (tribal groups), and religious associations, De and Shani demonstrate that the public were keenly aware of the import of the nascent constitution to their lives and wanted to have a voice in its making (23–63). As the authors illustrate, there was a rich tapestry of constitutional thought that emerged from the public, many of whom were ahead of their times (60–63). The material presented in this chapter opens avenues for further research into the understudied influence of organizations over the work of the Constituent Assembly. This is significant given that many members of the Assembly were also members of various interest groups and identity-based organizations in addition to their party affiliations.
Legitimacy, a core theme that runs through the book, takes center stage in Chapter II. This chapter explores the public demands and representations made to the Constituent Assembly through an examination of archival letters, memoranda, and newspaper reports. De and Shani demonstrate that the public carved a space for participation in constitution-making despite there being no noteworthy plans for inviting public comments (65–79). The authors persuasively argue that the public’s active engagement was an assertion of “ownership over the future constitution” and imbued the Constituent Assembly and the constitution with legitimacy (66, 105).
Chapter III adds an important piece to the puzzle of the largely successful integration of the princely states with the Indian Union. De and Shani argue that the constitution-making efforts in many of the princely states, concurrent to the work of the Assembly, were instrumental in the success of the integration (113). The analysis offers deeper insights into the constitutional genesis of India’s federalism and its asymmetric nature (161–163). In Chapter IV, the book illuminates an overlooked context to the Constituent Assembly’s functioning, that of the influence of established and powerful institutions of the colonial state such as the provincial legislatures, judiciary, and civil service. The chapter explores the ways in which the demands of these actors, each with their often divergent institutional agendas and interests, were accommodated within the constitutional order, and how the institutions themselves were reconfigured in the process. De and Shani demonstrate that the colonial continuities that appear to mark these institutions are deceptive as there was a fundamental reshaping of the institutional and power relations under the new constitution (198–200).
In Chapter V, the vivid imagery evoked by the authors’ narrative style, apt use of photographs, and pictures of archival material shines through. De and Shani deploy the metaphor of the theater to showcase the labor involved in the running of the Constituent Assembly’s infrastructure (208). The authors return to a familiar site, the Constituent Assembly, but study what they term the “extended, institutionalised yet informal spaces” such as dining halls, gatherings in the accommodations arranged for the Assembly members, and the Constitution Club of India (a social space for the members) (220–221). Here, the book offers the reader glimpses of the social life of constitution-making outside of the documented debates. The authors then extend the metaphor of the theater to argue that the constitutional advisor to the Assembly B. N. Rau’s tour abroad with the draft constitution was more than an act of constitutional borrowing and situate the Indian constitution-making within a wider international milieu (221–228). Finally, the authors examine the public activities of two members of the Assembly, Hansa Mehta and Maulana Hasrat Mohani, to make a larger point about how the members’ engagement with groups and organizations influenced the substance of the arguments and dissents made within the Assembly hall (228–264). This ties in with the book’s argument against viewing the Indian Constitution and Constituent Assembly as a “closed text and space,” respectively (267). It is a revealing examination that expands our view of the role played by individual members beyond the vocal and influential figures in the Assembly, those who Granville Austin famously called the “oligarchy.”Footnote 1
While the book often presents a humanizing account of Indian constitution-making, it is not an uncritical one. In its closing chapter, it turns to the constitutional imaginaries voiced by the adivasi (tribal) peoples of India and the limitations of the constitutional treatment of tribal rights and territories (305–315). De and Shani present a history of parallel constitution-making among adivasi groups, which they argue represents a “competing framework” that has served as a resource for constitutional politics, turning the constitution into an “open site of struggle” (273–274). The chapter strengthens the book’s broader argument against a focus on the founding moment, and its emphasis on the constitutional politics that has stemmed from “the many acts of public assembling” outside of the Constituent Assembly (14).
The conceptual thread that ties the chapters together is the idea of “assembling,” which is also central to the book’s arguments (13). De and Shani argue that the Indian constitution-making involved a process of “fitting together” or “assembling” diverse and concurrent attempts at constitution-making, and the constitution was the product of “competing constitutionalisms” from multiple places and peoples (13–14). They make the case that “the many acts of public assembling” played a role in turning disparate peoples and groups into “constitutional actors” (14). The assembling, they argue, resulted in flexibility, adaptability, and portability as structural features of the constitution (14). While the book’s emphasis on the publicness of constitution-making produced through assembling is uniformly persuasive, the idea of assembling is somewhat strained the closer one gets to the actual constitutional text. Why were some claims accommodated and others ignored? Power is an obvious explanation. The overwhelming dominance of the idea of national unity during constitution-making, as scholars like Rochana Bajpai have identified, is another explanatory factor.Footnote 2 Viewing the material that the authors have uncovered through the lens of national unity, its implications for whose and which constitutional aspirations were assembled in the text, and the constitutional design tools used to achieve national unity remain generative areas for further research.
The book enters the legitimacy debate that has become contentious in Indian constitutional studies in recent years. The Indian Constitution’s legitimacy has been questioned on grounds of the purportedly elite nature of its making, constitutional borrowing, lack of public participation, its ostensible foreignness, and colonial continuities. De and Shani engage with these arguments and make their stance unambiguous in the conclusion, iterating the public ownership of the Indian Constitution (324). The authors persuasively make their case using the wider history of public participation, deliberate acts of constitutional comparison and borrowing, and the transformation that underpins the deceptive textual and institutional continuities with colonial era Acts and structures. This is a valuable and scholarly intervention in an increasingly ideologically loaded debate.
The depth of the sources and material used in the book, drawn from archives, photographs, and letters, presented in an accessible manner, illuminate the ways in which Indian constitutional studies are enriched by looking outside of the Constituent Assembly debates. It offers valuable context to many important debates on the Indian Constitution. A minor quibble is that in making the book accessible to a range of readers, understandably, a discussion on methodology and the challenges of doing archival research in India does not find place. Given that the book marks a methodological shift in studying the Indian Constitution, the scholarly reader would have benefited from such an addition.
Assembling India’s Constitution meaningfully expands the boundaries of constitutional studies and is likely to find a place among the essential readings on the Indian Constitution. The book would be of interest not only to scholars of Indian and comparative constitutional studies and constitutional history but also to a wider non-academic audience interested in the Indian Constitution.
