'FORESIGHTED MR MK NAMBYAR - CONSTITUTIONAL JOURNEYS BEYOND ORIGINAL INTENT'

1.A very good evening- Mr KK Venugopal, Senior Advocate, Mr CS Vaidyanathan, Senior Advocate, family of Mr MK Nambyar, distinguished judges, members of the bar, ladies and gentlemen.

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2.It is a pleasure and honour to be speaking in the memory of the inimitable Meloth Krishnan Nambyar, someone who has been an inspiration to generations of lawyers and judges including my humble self. Born in 1898, in the present-day Kasargod district, Kerala, Mr Nambyar stepped into the legal profession in the 1920s. He joined the chambers of the revered Sir CP Ramaswamy Iyer, a stalwart at the Madras Bar. Sir Ramaswamy was the force behind the progressive Temple Entry Proclamation of 1936, which ended castebased restrictions on temple entry in the then princely state of Travancore. Deeply influenced by the principles his mentor espoused, Mr Nambyar embodied them through the course of his journey- both professional and personal. Mr Nambyar went on to join the Mangalore District and Sessions Bar in 1924. He obtained his masters in Constitutional and Administrative law from the London School of Economics and was called to the Bar from Lincoln’s Inn.

3.At the cusp of India’s independence, Mr Nambyar moved his practice to Madras. This was of course only a step before he would be catapulted to independent India’s Supreme Court, arguing in a first-ever interpretative examination of the newly enacted constitutional guarantees. Mr Nambyar famously addressed the Court in AK Gopalan with nothing but the bare text of the Constitution in his hands. His interpretation of the sweep of our fundamental rights was resisted initially. French poet and author Victor Hugo said that ‘nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come’. Mr Nambyar’s interpretation of the Constitution is an exemplar of an idea whose time eventually came. His exposition of the law was significantly ahead of its times and became a part of the law much after he had envisaged it.