‘Assembling India’s Constitution’ reorients our view of how the Indian Constitution was made
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Rohit De and Ornit Shani’s Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History reorients our understanding of the making of the Constitution of India. It falls well within writing on revolutionary postcolonial constitutionalism, which posits India as one of the major constitutional democracies to emerge after the collapse of modern empires.
Within this body of literature, but against the prevalent view of constitution-making as a bounded, elite-driven process located within the Constituent Assembly of India, this book reconstructs Indian constitution-making as a dispersed, participatory, and socially embedded field of political activity.
Indian constitution-making, according to De and Shani, included groups categorised as tribes, who drafted and submitted their constitutional visions to the Constituent Assembly of India; princely states who experimented with the transition to representative institutions by drafting alternative constitutions and sending representatives to the Constituent Assembly; bureaucrats and provincial legislatures who sought to negotiate their authority with the emerging democratic Indian state, and ordinary citizens who submitted petitions, proposals, and demands to the Constituent Assembly.
Rights and representation
In the book, De and Shani advance a broad claim about constitutionalism itself, with considerable empirical richness: constitutionalism functioned as a language of politics, or as a shared idiom through which diverse individual and institutional actors articulated political claims, imagined constructing lasting...