Let’s say you were asked to write a history of the making of the constitution of India. How would you go about doing that? If you are someone who paid attention during history class in high school, you would most probably focus on the Constituent Assembly, which was the group of political representatives who carried out the deliberations and debates on the text of the constitution. You might even more specifically focus on the Drafting Committee of the Constituent Assembly chaired by Bhimrao Ambedkar. You would additionally pay careful attention to the text of the assembly members’ speeches and interventions, to the text of the draft and the official constitution, and to the lives and ideas of the “stalwart” assembly members. Picking important elements from all these sources and weaving them together, you would end up penning a decent history of the making of the constitution.

Indeed, that is how scholars have conceptualised and written this history for a long time, and by and large it has been a productive and enlightening exercise. It has also been, quite often, an exercise in dramatic and heroic narratives in which we were told of “India’s good fortune in having a handful of great men and women who, with foresight and benevolence, gifted a constitution to a people,” as Rohit De and Ornit Shani put it in their book Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History. 

To Shani and De, these long-standing “great” personalities and their dramas are important to the history of the making of the constitution, but are still only a part of that history. While narratives until recently have taught us that the concepts and visions which became the text and spirit of the constitution originated in the high ideals and sophisticated articulations of Constituent Assembly members, De and Shani’s “new democratic history” tells us the fascinating story of “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”. 

How are the authors able to convince us that ordinary Indians, and not just elite assembly members as has been commonly assumed, played a significant role in the making of the constitution? This is a bold claim, particularly as it is counterintuitive and challenging to prove; but Shani and De rise magnificently to the challenge. They help us unlearn and relearn received wisdom by employing a tremendous variety and quantity of historical sources which deal with constitutional ideas and with early avatars of the constitution itself, but from outside the by now immortalised Constituent Assembly proceedings. The authors’ collaborative work of assembling this impressive array of sources – “from a range of documents, across multiple cities, various ministries and departments, social organisations, private collections, and private libraries” – is a phenomenal scholarly feat in itself. 

Some of the extraordinary primary sources De and Shani introduce us to are the thousands of letters and petitions that people and groups from across India wrote to the Constituent Assembly beginning even prior to its first official meeting in December 1946. The assembly had not formally invited public suggestions, but nevertheless many Indians “saw a window of opportunity and addressed the Constituent Assembly as unsolicited citizens, as future sovereigns rather than subjects”. 

Amartya Sen’s famous argumentative Indians “developed a fever of constitutional expectations,” and aware that “the constitution was going to change their lives,” made all sorts of suggestions on how “our constitution" should be. They wrote to the assembly, for example, that the public should have a right to recall poorly-performing elected candidates, that “the brutal system of death sentence (hanging) should be abolished”, and that “the power to make ordinances or to suspend the constitution during emergencies be expressly taken away from the executive” and given to legislatures – the last advice coming all the way from the Pardesi Punjabi Conference in California, USA. 

The “politics of hope” kindled by the constitution-making enterprise in 1946-49 ensured that Dalits, Adivasis, and other subaltern groups and individuals made their ideas and demands known to the elites. Shani and De deftly highlight the many contradictions involved when the state attempts to enact social reform via constitutional and legal routes but in the absence of major structural, societal changes. For example, Dalit leaders during this time were aware that the highly cherished fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression, while essential in a democracy, could still be weaponised, and hence “it was insufficient to guarantee the freedom of speech without also protecting them from social consequences, like economic boycotts and dismissal from employment, or from actual violence”. Though the caste-related progressive aspects of the Constitution have at times been attributed to the “benevolence of the upper-caste leadership of the Constituent Assembly”, De and Shani argue that “the energy, fury and nature of demands from dalit political groups show that these were achieved through their organised struggle”.

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The authors also address long-standing myths about the constitution. There is, for example, the accusation that it is overly inspired by foreign or colonial ideas and is insufficiently “Indian”. Assembling India’s constitution puts the final nail in the coffin of this myth. Among other things, the book explains in meticulous detail how “the secretariat of the Constituent Assembly incorporated the [Indian] public into the Assembly” and even provided people with a list of Assembly members’ addresses, “allowing direct correspondence with them”. 

It provides a comprehensive context to and an insightful analysis of the “world tour” of B.N. Rau in 1947: Rau’s visits to several foreign countries with the early draft of the constitution were, the authors argue, less about “borrowing” from other constitutions and primarily about introducing the Indian draft to peer nations to help garner “global recognition for the document”. Through the example of the remarkably dynamic Hansa Mehta (who was on the Constituent Assembly and also on United Nations committees) and Hasrat Mohani, the book describes how Assembly members brought to constitutional debates not only high universal ideals and global concepts, but also the lived experience of an active Indian public life: “Mehta took us to New York, Geneva, Bombay, and Baroda, but also to women’s conferences, girls’ schools, and zenanas. Mohani moved between Delhi, Lucknow, Kanpur, and Mecca, but also through refugee camps outside the Assembly, riot-torn streets, mosques, and literary gatherings.”

Even as they accomplish the task of showing us how the general public was an inherent part of the Republic and its constitution from the very beginning, Shani and De also painstakingly dissect the thorny reality of certain publics and their aspirations being left out of the constitution. Case studies like those of the Manipur constitution and of the Federation of the Khasi States expose the Brahmanical orientalism of Constituent Assembly elites who were too obsessed with their narrow imaginations of “India” to properly comprehend tribal or Adivasi societies and cultures.

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In the original 1950 constitution, for instance, “not a single tribal language was listed in the Eighth Schedule among the then-fourteen official languages, even though some had more speakers than other languages listed in the Schedule”. It was primarily through protracted struggles that many tribal communities were able to secure progressive amendments to the constitution in later years, though these successes were “often paid for with blood”. To De and Shani, “the sheer number of amendments and schedules are neither symptom nor cause of instability, but rather represent a key mechanism through which India’s constitution has become a meaningful tool of action and an open site of struggle.” 

Assembling India’s constitution is an eminently readable book which skilfully shows how one can write detailed “public” histories of events and phenomena which in the dominant discourse have been considered outside the realm of a supposedly passive and apolitical public. In a world where grand historical narratives are all the rage, with writers covering hundreds to thousands of years in a single volume and making sweeping commentaries on entire nations and “civilisations”, this hefty book which focuses almost exclusively on just three years (December 1946 to January 1950) – years which were also marked by Partition and its complexities – shines brilliant light on the sheer richness of human societies and events, and on the sheer folly of making generalising claims about people and nations.

Moreover, in a country ostensibly obsessed with history but still largely clueless about its own past after 1947 (apart from nonsensical claims and nothing-happened-before-2014 vibes), this book proves that we need to be more curious about the tremendously eventful twentieth century, and more respectful of the strides that people before us made in building, maintaining, and constantly improving a democratic polity, often – as Shani and De rightly indicate – paying for it in blood.

In many ways, Assembling India’s Constitution is a scholarly paean to chaotic democratic processes, to “pushing-pulling” between different entities, to the convening and assembling of diverse peoples and communities, and to being functional not in spite of chaos, but empowered by it. In teaching us about the deep, meticulous, often messy political actions and engagements of Indians in the past, the book presents a precious opportunity for Indians today – largely docile in the face of the rapidly worsening undemocratic state of affairs – to revisit and resume such engagements.

Kiran Kumbhar is a historian, teacher and former physician, currently affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania.

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