In this paradigm-shifting history, two leading historians of India re-examine the making of the Indian constitution from the perspective of the country's people. In a departure from dominant approaches that foreground the framing of the text within the Constituent Assembly, Ornit Shani and Rohit De instead demonstrate how it was shaped by diverse publics across India and beyond. They reveal multiple, parallel constitution-making processes underway across the subcontinent, highlighting how individuals and groups transformed constitutionalism into a medium of struggle and a tool for transformation. De and Shani argue that the deep sense of ownership the public assumed over the constitution became pivotal to the formation, legitimacy and endurance of India's democracy against arduous challenges and many odds. In highlighting the Indian case as a model for thinking through constitution making in plural societies, this is a vital contribution to constitutional and democratic history.
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This insightful new history of the making of India's constitution foregrounds its emergence from the perspective of the nation's people.
Introduction. A new history of India's constitution making;
1. 'Our
constitution';
2. Making the constitution a public affair;
3. Competing
constitutionalism: the princely states and the constitution;
4. The emerging
state and the constitution;
5. The theatre of the assembly;
6. The horizons
of India's constitutional imagination: tribes and constitution making;
Conclusion. An open site of struggle.
Rohit De is Associate Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (2018), which won the Willard J. Hurst Prize (2019). Ornit Shani is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at Haifa University. She is the author of How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise (2017), which won the Kamaladevi Chattophadyay New India Foundation Prize (2019).
