Imprint of the people in shaping the Constitution

Contrary to the belief that it was an elite decision-making exercise by the Constituent Assembly, the Constitution-making process saw active campaigns by a cross-section of society

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The story of the making of India's Constitution, as usually told, begins in Delhi.

As the clock struck 11 on December 9 1946, the story goes, the Constituent Assembly convened for the first time in Constitution Hall, New Delhi. The debates over the next three years among the 300 Assembly members and the constitutional text they produced have become the main source for understanding how India’s Constitution came to be. This meant that the Constitution was seen as a result of elite decision-making, and that the constitutional details were beyond the imagination, interest and capacity of the Indian people. It has, thus, been seen as a pedagogical text for an ignorant and undemocratic public. Moreover, scholars have persistently debated whether the Constitution marked a break or a continuity from the colonial past.

Our new book, Assembling India’s Constitution, offers an alternative story, showing that the Indian Constitution was not solely an elite exercise. We discovered that Indians from across the subcontinent were deeply engaged with Constitution-making and debated it. Contrary to the common wisdom, many Indians knew what they were getting. Based on their expectations of a transformative order, they organised into action to make constitutional demands, translated the Constitution into their own languages, challenged the Constituent Assembly, and offered new ideas. In this process they made efforts to educate the members of the Assembly. And most importantly, they assumed ownership of the Constitution and made it their own.