Today, November 26, is Constitution Day.

Judge Sundar Lal Tripathi, in the film Jolly LLB 3, says to his employee Qasim, “In our constitution, two things are very important, letter and spirit. Everybody focuses on the letter, which led the spirit and sentiment behind it to be forgotten. Sometimes I try to hold on to that sentiment”.

Tripathi captured the feeling shared by millions of Indians who continue to hold on to the constitutional spirit as a guiding value.

The sentiment to hold the constitution and its spirit is embodied by the people in their everyday lives. Different citizens coming from different backgrounds have embodied the constitutional spirit in their own ways, through their actions, resistances, and everyday negotiations with the state. Thus, the expression of constitutional spirit that we see today reveals the value of the Indian constitution beyond its text. Yet the scholars who worked on the Indian constitution generally remained confined to Constituent Assembly debates, the formal processes of drafting, and the institutional histories of its making. What often goes unnoticed is how the constitution’s spirit survives outside these formal spaces – in the lived experiences of the very people it was written for.  

Rohit De and Ornit Shani’s book Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History opens a window much wider than the conventional view of the framers seated in the Constituent Assembly. Their work reminds us in a manner reminiscent of how V.S. Naipaul speaks of India’s “million mutinies” that, in De and Shani’s view, the constitution was not shaped only by the debates in Delhi but also by the countless voices, petitions, and interventions emerging from common people across the country.

Drawing on rich archival evidence, the book shows that constitution-making unfolded not just in the Assembly’s courtyard but also in the farthest frontiers of India, from the hills of the Northeast to the desert towns in the northwest. These interventions did not always find their way into the final text of the constitution, yet they serve as a powerful reminder that citizens were never distant observers. Rather, they were fellow travellers in the long journey of constitution-making – companions on the same train, to borrow Shakespeare’s imagery of “the world as a stage” where each person plays their part. Their voices, though sometimes absent from the written document, were integral to the drama of shaping India’s constitutional imagination.

These voices emerged from the margins and interacted with the assembly. De and Shani note, “The tribal public engaged with the constitution in the making, perhaps with even force than the rest of India.” These voices rose from the margins and travelled all the way to the Assembly, shaping and challenging its ways of making of constitution. In contrast to Granville Austin’s influential view that the Indian constitution was primarily the creation of elites. De and Shani show and rightfully so that it emerged from dispersed sites across the country, carried by groups as varied as the Akhil Balak Sangh and the Deaf and Dumb Society. Their participation reminds us that constitution-making was never the exclusive preserve of a handful elites sitting in Delhi, but a democratic labour shaped by innumerable hands across the country.

As Rahat Indori wrote, "sabhi ka khoon shamil hai iss mitti mein" – the blood of all is in this soil – placed in the context of assembling India’s constitution, it reveals a simple truth: the Indian constitution, like the nation itself, carries within it the labour, anxieties, and aspirations of countless people, not just the framers in the Assembly, but citizens spread across geographies, communities, and social worlds. It is this shared inheritance, built from many voices, that continues to anchor our republic. 

Former vice-president of the Constitutional Court of Portugal, Judge Gonçalo Almeida Ribeiro, once remarked in his lecture at SOAS, University of London, “The people are the author of the constitution.” De and Shani’s work echo this idea, reminding us of the quiet but immense strength that citizens carry, especially in moments when both citizens and the very idea of citizenry are under attack.

Assembling India’s Constitution offers us, as citizens, a way to awaken from our democratic slumber and ask where our story truly begins. It reminds us that we are rooted in the very foundations of this republic in those early moments when its bricks were first laid, its principles imagined, and its aspirations voiced. It has always been the people, the ordinary and the everyday, who assembled the republic piece by piece, like a carpenter patiently joining the many grains of wood that hold a nation together. And now, in a moment of strain, it is once again the people who must step forward to repair, to reconstruct, and to rebuild the republic so it can stand true to its promise.

Rajesh Ranjan is a lawyer and a researcher who writes on public law, rights and public engagement of the constitution.

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