The Jurist at the Periphery Who Authored More Than 200 Judgments

What makes a judge worthy of remembrance? Is it the number of judgments authored, the constitutional importance of the offices occupied, or a moment of jurisprudential rupture that refuses to disappear from our collective legal memory? These questions remain largely unanswered in Indian legal scholarship.

M.N. Rao: The Renaissance Man of Law, Amita Dhanda, Eastern book company, 2026.

Our elitist judicial historiography has created its own centers and peripheries. A handful of Supreme Court judges and celebrated judgments constitute its dominant canon and truth regimes, while simultaneously several other legal actors, despite inhabiting important constitutional spaces, remain outside its epistemic fold. Amita Dhanda’s M.N. Rao: The Renaissance Man of Law provides an interesting entry point to interrogate this politics of legal remembrance.

Justice M.N. Rao was hardly a peripheral figure if one maps his institutional journey. He was a lawyer, district judge, law secretary of undivided Andhra Pradesh, high court judge, chief justice, senior advocate, chairperson of the National Commission for Backward Classes, philanthropist and public intellectual.

Dhanda describes him as a Renaissance Man precisely because these were not disconnected professional episodes. His experience of litigation informed his judicial craft; judging travelled into administration; administrative experience, in turn, shaped his understanding of institutions.

Yet he presents us with a peculiar paradox as, in my view, he remained peripheral despite continuously inhabiting the institutional centers of law. Dhanda does not explicitly frame her book in these terms. But her act of recovering Rao from the margins of legal memory makes this question unavoidable.

Rao authored more than 200 judgments covering virtually every branch of law. His judgment in Sakinala Hari Nath is particularly significant. Speaking for the full bench of the Andhra Pradesh high court, Rao held that judicial review by constitutional courts could not be displaced by tribunals and struck down Article 323-A(2)(d).

The Supreme Court subsequently approved this position in L. Chandra Kumar. In my view, herein lies an irony of legal memory. L. Chandra Kumar occupies a secure place in the constitutional law classroom; the judge whose reasoning anticipated its central proposition remains far less visible.

Rao’s other judgments similarly reveal a jurist difficult to place within simplistic binaries of activism, restraint, or State and citizen. Dhanda herself describes ‘balance’ as a recurring metaphor in his jurisprudence. He zealously protected personal liberty against arbitrary governmental action without necessarily questioning the legitimacy of preventive detention itself.

More interestingly, in P.C. Kakar, Rao refused to mechanically surrender judicial reason to psychiatric expertise. The label of ‘unsoundness of mind’ had been deployed against an officer who challenged military authorities. Instead of relying upon conventional psychiatric texts, Rao turned to Thomas Szasz’s Ideology and Insanity.

Dhanda reads the judgment as recognising the possibility of the psychologisation of dissent. This judgment can be read in a radical way. This judgment holds significance in an era where we have seen the criminalisation of disabled bodies, such as GN Saibaba and Father Stan Swamy.

Ashis Nandy pointed out that the state often distinguishes between legitimate, sane, mature dissent and illegitimate, irrational, infantile dissent. The so-called mature dissent is always well-monitored, controlled dissent, and inconvenient dissent is pathologized. 

Such moments complicate the peripheral location subsequently accorded to Rao in the dominant story of Indian constitutionalism as his judgments for subaltern classes have radical potentials. 

While reading this book, I kept drawing parallels with Justice Radhabinod Pal. Justice Pal and Rao present almost opposite routes to jurisprudential remembrance. Rao’s legal career was expansive, spanning institutions and hundreds of adjudicatory and professional interventions. Pal’s legal immortality, despite his broader career, remains overwhelmingly tied to one extraordinary act: his dissent at the Tokyo Trial after the Second World War.

Pal stood at the periphery of the Tribunal’s decisional consensus. Yet his dissent survived the majority that defeated it. His critique of retroactive criminalisation and the moral asymmetry of victors sitting in judgment over the vanquished acquired a jurisprudential afterlife far beyond the institutional moment in which it was written.

Pal spoke from the margin and entered the center of legal memory. Rao repeatedly inhabited the center but remained at its margins. This contrast tells us something important about the construction of a legal canon. Legal memory does not operate as a neutral archive in which contribution and recognition exist in symmetrical proportion.

Some judgments become ‘landmarks’, others become footnotes. Some judges acquire an afterlife, others disappear behind doctrines subsequently appropriated by higher constitutional courts. Pal produced rupture. Rao practiced institutional craftsmanship. Interestingly, jurisprudential history appears to remember rupture more readily than craftsmanship.

This question of visibility and erasure interestingly reappears in Dhanda’s account of Rao as a senior advocate. She identified 165 Supreme Court cases in which he appeared, but only 66 judgments acknowledged counsel’s arguments by name. Even among the six cases Rao considered closest to his heart, his contribution was expressly acknowledged in only two.

This is not merely about giving lawyers their professional due. Judicial decisions are collectively produced texts, although the mythology of adjudication attributes their authorship overwhelmingly to judges. Once the arguments of counsel disappear from the reported judgment, they also disappear from the archive through which future generations reconstruct legal history. Silence, here, produces jurisprudential erasure.

The chapter on Rao’s tenure as Chairperson of the Backward Classes Commission exposes another contradiction, which is the limits of virtuous individuals working within structurally weak institutions.

Rao entered the Commission hoping to advance the cause of caste justice but discovered that the Commission was, what Dhanda calls, a ‘toothless tiger’. It was a body whose capacity for transformation remained constrained by its recommendatory character and governmental control.

Dhanda goes further, asking whether radical voices seeking foundational change can meaningfully emerge in commissions whose membership is determined by the very government they may have to confront.

I found a very sobering lesson here. The book repeatedly celebrates Rao’s integrity, yet Rao’s institutional journeys repeatedly demonstrate that individual integrity cannot cure structural powerlessness.

Dhanda’s affection for her subject is conspicuous. She herself calls the book an ‘accident of affection’. However, there is utmost honesty here. She acknowledges her long association with him. But she avoids it by occasionally arguing with Rao rather than merely memorialising him.

Her discussion of his writings on religion is one such moment. Rao displays considerable faith in the State and courts as its instrumentality. 

Indian courts may identify essential religious practices, legislatures regulate conversion and executive authorities determine when conversion becomes fraudulent. Such powers have been criticised by several jurists who have shown considerable faith in secular principles. For example, Fali S. Nariman and Rajeev Dhavan critiqued the ‘essential religious practice test’ in the following manner:

“With a power greater than that of a high priest, maulvi or dharmashastri, judges have virtually assumed the theological authority to determine which tenets of a faith are ‘essential’ to any faith and emphatically underscored their constitutional power to strike down those essential tenets of a faith that conflict with the dispensation of the Constitution. Few religious pontiffs possess this kind of power and authority.”

Dhanda too detects the paternalism embedded in this arrangement. She wonders how Rao’s analysis might change through an Ambedkarite conception of religion as an instrument for reconstructing an unequal social world. These disagreements make the book intellectually richer. Affection does not completely displace interrogation.

Yet one question deserved greater attention, i.e., what produced Rao’s peripheral location in Indian legal memory? Perhaps the answer lies partly in our obsession with the Supreme Court. Perhaps it lies in the production of the ‘landmark judgment’ as the principal currency through which Indian constitutional history is narrated. Or perhaps Rao’s very Renaissance quality worked against canonisation as his intellectual and institutional contributions were dispersed across too many sites to be reduced to one memorable jurisprudential moment.

Radhabinod Pal had a ‘spectacular’ moment in the Tokyo trial. Rao had no Tokyo. Legal elite historiography’s obsession with spectacularity forces many men, women and episodes in the periphery, a liminal zone where memories fade away.

Perhaps M.N. Rao: The Renaissance Man of Law should therefore be read not merely as a celebratory biography of an accomplished jurist but as an intervention against the impoverished ways in which Indian law produces its own memory. Rao’s peripheral location tells us less about the significance of his legal life than about the hierarchy through which the legal academy decides what is significant.

Vijay K. Tiwari is an assistant professor (law) at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. 

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