THE HANDS THAT WROTE THE REPUBLIC

The calligrapher, artists, “founding mothers,” and Adivasi voices behind India’s most important book

- TDG NETWORK

Jaipal Singh Munda: voice from the margins

On the morning of November 26, 1949, the chamber of the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi did not look like a courtroom or a battlefield. It looked, instead, like a library on the edge of history. Piles of bound papers lay on green baize desks, ink bottles stood ready, and the air was thick with the murmur of members waiting to sign their names into the future.

When Dr. Rajendra Prasad put the motion to adopt the Constitution of India, the Assembly had already debated its clauses for nearly three years, across 11 sessions and 165 days of discussion. What followed that day is what we commemorate as Constitution Day. But the story of this document is not only about big speeches and famous leaders. It is also about the hands that wrote every word, the artists who painted the margins, the women and marginalized voices that argued for rights that did not yet exist.

This is a story of how the Republic was made—with nibs, brushes, sweat and stubbornness—long before it was printed in school textbooks.

Before the Constitution could become a law, it had to become an object. The Assembly decided that the first copy would not be typeset, but handwritten—turned into a manuscript worthy of a civilization reinventing itself.

That task went to a quiet Delhi calligrapher, Prem Behari Narain Raizada. Born in 1901 into a Kayastha family of traditional calligraphers, he had lost his parents young and been raised by his grandfather, a scholar of English and Persian who taught him the art of beautiful writing. After studying at St. Stephen’s College, Raizada set up his practice in Delhi, where his delicate, slanted script was already well known in official circles.