The making of India’s Constitution is usually told as the story of the few hundred prominent lawyers, politicians, and intellectuals who comprised the Constituent Assembly—the body tasked with drafting this historic document between 1946 and 1949.

But a new book by the scholars Rohit De and Ornit Shani, Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History, argues this familiar account captures only part of the story.

Drawing on a remarkable range of archival material, the book shows that constitution-making was not confined to the halls of the Constituent Assembly alone. It also played out in provincial legislatures, princely states, government offices, civic associations, and communities across India. Ordinary citizens debated the constitution, petitioned its authors, organized around it, and creatively sought to shape its provisions.

To discuss the book and its relevance for our understanding of India’s democratic evolution, Rohit and Ornit join Milan on the show this week. Rohit is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic. Ornit is an 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.

The trio discuss the serendipitous origins of the book, the authors’ unusual writing process, and the gaps in the conventional account of India’s constitution-making. Plus, the three talk about overlooked constitution-making efforts in the princely states and the forgotten story of Manipur’s democratic experiment.

Episode notes:

1. “India’s Hidden Treatise on Statecraft (with Rahul Sagar),” Grand Tamasha, November 2, 2022.
2. Rohit De, A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).
3. Ornit Shani, How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 
4. Rohit De and Ornit Shani, “Assembling India’s Constitution: Towards a New History* Open Access,” Past & Present 263, no. 1 (May 2024): 205-248.
5. Video: “How India Became Democratic (with Ornit Shani),” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 25, 2018.

Transcript

Note: this is an AI-generated transcript and may contain errors

Milan Vaishnav Welcome to Grand Tamasha, a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Hindustan Times. I'm your host, Milan Vaishnav. The making of India's constitution is usually told as the story of the few hundred prominent lawyers, politicians, and intellectuals who comprise the constituent assembly, the body tasked with drafting this historic document between 1946 and 1949. But a new book by the scholars Rohit De and Ornit Shani, Assembling India's Constitution, A New Democratic History, argues this familiar account captures only a small part of the story. Drawing on a remarkable range of archival material, the book shows that constitution-making was not confined to the halls of the constituent assembly alone. It also played out in provincial legislatures, princely states, government offices, civic associations, and communities across India. Ordinary citizens debated the constitution, they petitioned its authors, they organized around it, and they creatively sought to shape its provisions. To discuss the book and its relevance for our understanding of India's democratic evolution, Rohit and Ornit join me on the show this week. Rohit is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of A People's Constitution, The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic. Ornit is an associate professor of Asian studies at Haifa University, and she's the author of How India Became Democratic, Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise. I am pleased to welcome them to the podcast. Rohit, Ornit, congrats on the book and thanks so much for joining us.

Rohit De Thank you for having us.

Ornit Shani Thanks for having us.

Milan Vaishnav So I want to start by asking you a little bit about the origin story of this book, which, you know, every book has its origin story, but this one is rather unique. In the acknowledgments you write that the two of you didn't originally set out to write a book together, but the project evolved organically from your individual archival research and kind of ongoing conversations about the Constitution. Ornit, maybe let me start with you. What brought the two of you ultimately together to write this book?

Ornit Shani Indeed it was, bottom line, it was a gradual and organic process. And, you know, when we already, when Rohit worked on A People's Constitution and I worked on How India Became Democratic, we have been having a lot of conversations because both books are also in kind of dialog with each other. They both look from different perspectives on the question of the constitution, engagement with people. And at the time when we finished the book, we talked and we realized each of us while working on our previous book started to collect materials about the engagement of the Indian public with the constitution while it was in the making. And so basically, the process started when we finished our books from conversations and discovery of, you know, both of us discovered such materials. Initially, we thought maybe we should organize a conference to rethink the question of the making of the constitution. We even had a program already, a rough program and we thought about that, then COVID came up and basically we started to, the conversation we were having about the materials we each collected, we were sitting and, we on Zoom meetings from afar or initially in Cambridge I think it was, we were discussing our materials jointly, and jointly discussing the material started a gradual more structured process where we met on a weekly basis for a few hours, a few times a week, and just read together the archival materials. At that time we realized that some of the materials we have are, you know, we have exactly the same things, but we also discovered, for example, a file that Rohit had the first part, I had the second part, which he didn't have. And so we discovered this, you know, the kind of the fact that we have all these materials and they're complementary. And we decided to do something historians usually don't do. We decided to combine our archives and call it, we called it the OrnitRohit archive, which is, you know, we're putting together all the materials and got into a process of reading the materials together and discussing them. And it was in this process that suddenly the thought of actually we, we, we write something together while we do it. And that's how it came about. So, it's the joint discussion of the archival materials, the joint reflection. It's something that I've never done before. It was, that was the big joy. And, and that's how it gradually came about organically. I don't know, Rohit, if you want to add something to that.

Rohit De I think we were also both grappling with similar questions in part because while we were having these conversations, if you remember around 2019-2020, there were widespread sort of public mobilization in India, where there were public readings of the Constitution and in all the commentary, there was a kind of pleased note around it, but also a surprise that, oh, this is the first time we see the public engaging with the Constitution. And we knew from the materials we had seen that that wasn't true. We're also lucky to be living through a generation of really exciting work on the constitution. And while many of the scholars disagree on many points, there is a kind of shared consensus that the constitution and the ideas it contains really came from a small section of very forward-thinking nationalist leadership, which would not explain the kind of public engagement that we see. So, we also very strongly felt that there had to be a kind historical account that sort of showed this longer history of public engagement with the Constitution, something that we also witnessed when we were looking at our previous books. So, in Ornit’s book, it was quite clear that when the election rolls were being drawn up, ordinary people were sort of constantly pushing back at the bureaucrats. Or in my book, People's Constitution, literally the day the Constitution goes into force, people start moving the courts, sort of framing their claims in a Constitution language. And this doesn't come out of thin air. There's obviously a sort of larger sense of ownership around it that allows this to happen.

Milan Vaishnav I mean, this is a kind of natural segue to the writing process, which I don't know about you guys, but whenever I listen to interviews with authors, I'm always fascinated by, you know, how they actually do their work. And again, in the acknowledgments, you write that you literally compose the book together, sometimes word by word, line by line, seated at the same table over lengthy weeks in India, the UK, the US, and occasionally on Zoom across seas. That's how you put it in the acknowledgments. Ornit, is this something that you planned? I mean, again, it sounds like it just emerged organically, but it's one thing to do something jointly in a co-authored way, but it is another thing to actually sit shoulder-to-shoulder with someone and write at the same time.

Ornit Shani It was completely unplanned. And beyond that, I think we say that as well, none of us ever imagined writing a book with someone else. And in fact, at the time, each of us was embarking on a new project, right? Rohit was doing his new project and I was busy with my new project which we both put aside in order to do this book. In some ways, taking on from the last things that Rohit was saying, you know, the fact that we almost got into ourselves the fever of constitutionalism that was going on in India at the time, and we were so excited and passionate to do that. So, we completely didn't plan it. It was really, organically from the discussion, we kind of thought, okay, so maybe we actually have an article. So, we started to write, initially we thought, and that's ultimately the article that then came out in the Past and Present. But we then very quickly realized that we have a book. We also could imagine the structure of the book. And so that's how it started. And so yes, it was organic. It was unplanned. And I think that the notion of word for word, line by line, literally as it's written in the acknowledgments, is a direct result of the process of the reading of the materials and of reflecting together on them, where each of us brings different things to the materials where we discuss and then we have long discussion of what would be coming in what– much of our discussion was about what we're going to choose to come into the book because so much is left outside. So, it was, I think it's the process of the reading and thinking that gave birth to the kind of writing and it would like you know, Rohit would start the sentence, I would complete it, we would rewrite it together. And of course, initially it was much slower process, but there were these funny moments by the time we wrote our fifth and sixth chapter, where we felt that our prose is completely aligned and we kind of really complete each other's sentences. So, it was a fun process to do that.

Milan Vaishnav You know, I think we started this conversation by kind of positioning your book as a kind of revisionist account. And maybe it's worth backing up a second and talking about what the kind of conventional wisdom has been. As you put out in the book, you know, the kind of canonical account of India's constitution really focuses very narrowly on the constituent assembly and the debates and the various texts it produced. I think between around December 1946 and November of 1949. And Rohit, you know, the book really takes aim at this prevailing narrative. And I wonder if you could just spend a second telling us, you know, what is missing from the conventional account? And at a kind of macro level, how does your book revise our understanding?

Rohit De Sure. Maybe I'll start. So, I mean, we want to emphasize that the fact that India had a constituent assembly and it had, to a large extent, popular leaders in the assembly is something that is unique amongst British colonies. And the debates in the Assembly are significant. However, since sort of the Granville Austin sort of opus in the 60s and Shabani Kinkar Chaubey's book, all the work that has come out around the Constitution of India has really focused on debates in the assembly and they've had three or four sort of shared assumptions. One is that very crudely that the constitution, in its sort of most democratic form, emerges because of the kind of benevolence of India's nationalist elite. They kind of gave the Indian people a constitution. The people weren't really sure what they were getting. Secondly, it focused...

Milan Vaishnav Well … sorry, just to add, I mean some people gone further to say not just sure of what they were getting, but not equipped, not prepared, not fundamentally liberal or democratic

Rohit De And this is across sort of, you know, the political spectrum, there's either a sense that this is democratic ideas or non-democratic soil, or, you know, to take kind of nativist argument, these are foreign ideas that are not organic to Indian society. Secondly, there is a sense that this is a very coherent set of debates that are happening almost in real time in this closed, insulated room where people are talking to each other, and you can understand what goes into the Constitution [and] the life it has simply by looking at the debates within the chamber. I think what we're offering is a paradigm shift where the constituent assembly is just one node in a much larger set of conversations. To understand both the shape the constitution takes and its future career, we have to look at the engagements that happen outside. Now, some of these engagements are the thousands of people and organizations who are writing to the assembly and in course of writing, also meeting, debating, engaging with these ideas within their own communities. It's also the fact that the members of the assembly themselves are not isolated actors. They're constantly in conversation with these groups outside and they are being influenced and shaped by them. And finally, that the story of India's constitution doesn't end in 1950. And that's a sense that both the constitution makers in the assembly and the constitution sort of engages outside are very aware of. So, the constitutional text and meaning continues to adapt. And this is a kind of shared understanding that people have. In some ways, you know, there's a kind of conventional wisdom in constitutional theory that you know you have three components to a constitutional culture. You have a text, which is the first thing that arrives. Then you have a set of shared practices around the text. These are practices of governments, bureaucrats, lawyers and judges, and the shared practice in the text often lead to a reaction from society that might come together, engage and change. And what we're suggesting is actually to invert the sequence and to look at sort of this insurgent engagement as something that happens even prior to the text.

Milan Vaishnav I mean, I think one question which arises, and I don't know which one of you wants to take this on, is whether this book is making a broader challenge to the literature on democratic constitutionalism writ large, or is there something distinctive or kind of sui generis about the Indian case, right? Because one of the things you say, just to put what you said in slightly different words coming from the text of the book is you say, look, constitutionalism is often portrayed as a means of constraining democratic politics, right? And what your book is arguing is that the widespread public engagement with constitution-making made constitutionalism integral to democratic politics. Which strikes me as a much larger point that could transcend India's own boundaries.

Ornit Shani Right. So, if I'll start maybe, I mean, one way to address what you're saying, or first to, you know, indeed what we're showing is in fact, the public engagement, its intensity was constitutive of, you know the making of the constitution. One thing is that the answer can be that we don't know whether it's a unique to India or not unique to India. Because, and that goes back to what Rohit was discussing just, you know, in relation to the previous question, the question what people thought about the constitution, about the constitution making, was never asked. And when we think about the making of India's constitution, right, there's so much literature and this question was not asked basically because of what you said, Milan, the assumption that it was beyond their... you know, born or tracing their imagination. We don't know if, you know that maybe our book calls for research about what people thought about the constitution when it was made in other, say, post-colonial settings. You know, in Pakistan there's now new research by Mariam Khan that shows evidence of at least women's engagement with question of constitution making. So that's one way to look at it. It calls for more research for us to know in terms of the uniqueness or whether it's different. The fact that it actually calls for some rethinking of democratization and constitutionalism, yes, exactly in that way, because it had, you know, the process of democratization. You can say that the process of democratization in India at the time was part of, or I'll put it differently, the making of the constitution, public engagement with constitution making was inherent also to the process of democratization in the sense of how people were already, you know, not waiting for the text, but already imagining how is that going to, they were test-trialing. How will that affect our lives, what can be corrected while it's in a draft form, right? When the draft is published, they ask the assembly for amendments and changes. And then even before that, when they think, okay, that's what the constitution means, they start to write their own text and send it to the assembly. So, they already start to imagine what would it mean to live under this constitution. They're not making for a top-down constitution to come. You know, this is the narrative, right? This discerning elite that gave a constitution but you know the way I kind of personally started to think about this project was because I read Rohit's book and I thought Wow, but I said, it can't be that, you know, butchers, sex workers, you know, address the Supreme Court based on the Constitution, making innovative argument just a month after the Constitution comes into force. They already have the Constitutional language and in such sophisticated manners. So, in that sense, yes, I think it calls for rethinking.

Rohit De I think a couple of, you know, a lot of constitutional theory sort of takes the American experience really as the norm and the kind of democratic critique of the American experience today that is a constitution that's very difficult to change. Its meaning is very sharply controlled by a fairly partisan Supreme Court, which has life appointments. That doesn't really represent the vast majority of world constitutional systems. And secondly, to the extent that the Indian case stands—and there must be, there are many other places that are similar, is that India in 1946 had, you know, almost 50 to 100 years of a history of people and organizations that had learned how to engage collectively and engage with the state. So, this constant refrain that these ideas are alien and the vocabulary is alien is simply not true because as we find, even groups that you would not imagine would be familiar with this language are able to harness and translate their demands into this language of liberal constitutionalism. So, it's not a language that is alien to the people of India, it's a language that actually emerges quite organically from many of these exchanges.

Ornit Shani And just to add one more point, I think one of the interesting thing we find with this, what we called a fever of constitutional expectations is the way Indian publics are able to think beyond, you know, liberal constitutional thinking that has been like the norm of thinking about constitution making. So immediately they don't—fundamental rights are not enough. They think about ‘what about the means of enforcement?’ They think therefore about and they also think about norms about rights. That are coming into the discourse of legal discourses later on in the 80s, for example, disability rights, right to food, right to education, all these things we see at the time because people think while they're informed by their daily life. And that brings in, that obviously sets the scene for what democratic politics, democratization would look like, especially since at the time they're also waiting for the first elections. There's the notion of now there is universal franchise and that is also inherently part of the way they think about what the constitution would mean for their lives.

Milan Vaishnav I mean, there's a practical issue here, which you talk about in the book, but I think it's one that some of our listeners might be thinking about, which is, you know, so much of the constitutional correspondence is taking place in English. But you argue that contrary to expectation, this didn't actually preclude broad public participation. And Ornit, maybe I could just ask you, you, know, here's a country where English at that time was largely confined to the elites. Poverty and illiteracy we know are widespread. How did communities overcome the barriers, of the kind of linguistic and social barriers that allowed them to engage in constitution making despite not being fluent in English?

Ornit Shani Yes. So, you know, so two, three points. One, there's quite a lot of literature that shows us that despite not reading or speaking English, Indians were reading or listening to the news or reading newspapers because of the practice of communal reading, whether it's in rural India where one person who can read, whether it's a vernacular and use the word English, read it to everyone else and that’s the way it's done or. And a lot of, by the way, what we show in the book is that so much of the press was also published in vernacular languages, right, across India. But it's the public was one of the things is how the public made deliberate efforts to both speak in the language of the Constituent Assembly and in translating what is happening at the Constituted Assembly to their publics. And the process of public engagement, as Rohit mentioned, was not simply, you know, a group of individuals. It was the groups that were writing, the publics that were writing, were, you know, making their assemblies, right? It was big public meetings. It was discussions. It was then a committee. They wrote a memorandum. They send it to the assembly. So, all these public deliberations, whether they were taking place in vernacular languages and then translated into English by those leaders who spoke English, but it was all, you know, in that way, it was disseminated, of course. So, the fact that tribal people made the effort to send memorandums written in English to the assembly, should we dismiss it because it's written in English? Or actually, we should see here the efforts they made to speak to the Constituent Assembly in its language to pursue their demands. It's even more than that, you know? When, for example, one of the representatives of the Khasi to the Committee for Tribal Areas in the Northeast, Mavis Dunne, comes to talk to the committee and she's the first Khasi woman lawyer. She speaks English, obviously. She speaks, she's very articulated when she speaks with the committee. But then when the committee asks about, okay, so can we decide that or can we take that as the as a kind of view of the Khasi. And she said. Well, no, I have to go back and speak with the Khasi and talk to her. No, I'm, she's, you know, the concept of representation is such that she's not the representative, such as almost like the means of speaking to the committee. And then she has to go and obviously going back and speaking to the language. But the other point about the efforts to vernacularize all these discussions in the constitution making is. And we describe it in our second chapter, we have an analysis of how from the moment the constitution, the draft constitution is published, their efforts across India of organizations writing to the assembly to translate the text. There's an organization in Bombay, I forget their name, who suggests to translate it to, I don't know, like five or six different languages in order to, and the constituent assembly secretariat are quite alarmed when they get this request, can you authorize our translation into Canada? Because they say, well, it is going to be published in Hindi and Urdu, but we can't authorize this, of course, because this is also the draft, it's going to change. So, we don't think that the fact it was in English took away from this public engagement.

Rohit De Yeah, I'm just to add, I mean, you know, there are, so this is not just true for the mid-20th century states. So, you, know, whenever people have tried to communicate with the state, they have written to the state in its own language. So, in Persia and in earlier times. And the few examples we had of people trying to communicate in a language outside of English, Hindi or Urdu, sometimes they're not heard. So, we have this Tamil letter, which really causes, it just moves from Delhi and back to Madras because even the Tamilian bureaucrats can't actually read Tamil. So, the only way you can be heard is if you make the effort to write in English. And we see that most of these communities become aware of that and they know that. I think the Northeast is particularly striking because especially in the Khasi areas, we have evidence that there were groups meeting in every village. They were sort of translating the material into Khasi. But eventually when the document would be formed, it would be a document written in English and then sent to Delhi. So, there is, you know, these are communities that are aware how communications happen on both ends. And I think one of the imaginative reconstructions you have to do is that for every document we have, we know there have been like dozens of documents behind it that are not visible, like calling people to a meeting, exchanging letters in the first place, maybe passing a resolution, and many of those conversations would have not happened in English. And finally, I mean, one of interesting things is that much of the language of constitutionalism is in English. So we see a lot of people trying to find equivalent phrases in Indian languages. And there's a lot of linguistic creativity on how do you translate right? So how do you translate constitutional assembly? And in some ways, the Hindi and Urdu official translators are constantly playing catch up. And one of the more interesting letters is from the Hindustani Prachar Sabha, which has a table where it puts in the Hindi phrase, the Urdu phrase, and what they call the Hindustani phrase. And it's quite clear the only one that's really legible is the Hindustani phrase, which is using a kind of Rosemary ki Zindagi sort of language. Whereas the Urdu and Hindi phrases are deeply samsarized and personized and not things that are self-evident in themselves.

[…]

Milan Vaishnav I mean, this kind of leads me to the chapter, I think it's chapter one, which looks at the role of caste, right? And in this chapter, you're looking at the role of caste, the quest to kind of abolish untouchability, the establishment of reservations for Dalits. And Rohit, you know, in the book, you argue that many of these provisions, which ended up in the Constitution were won through a lot of organized struggle, right? Again, sticking with the larger theme, these were not just kind of bestowed by benevolent elites, they really were the product of bottom-up. I want to ask you a little bit about the forms this activism took, right? I mean, and what evidence do we have that whatever Dalit organizations or citizens were agitating about actually influenced the constitution-making process?

Rohit De So I mean, the conventional narrative always is that these were things that were inevitably going to happen, right? So, the national movement had, it was natural that independent India would abolish untouchability and provide this dramatic change to the caste order. However, the assembly itself had no separate representation for Dalit members. In fact, when the cabinet mission plan is sort of making these concessions, the Scheduled Castes federation, that is Dr. Ambedkar's party, sort of mobilizes on the street in Bombay, outside the Congress offices, courting arrests, demanding that they be represented. Much is also made of the divide of the Dalit members inside the Congress and leaders like Ambedkar. But we also find that there is a convention of all Dalit and tribal members of the to the assembly but also all legislatures across India who come together and create a common platform of demands, which they send not just to the assembly members, but also to all 700 members of the British parliament. So, there's a way in which they're trying to ensure that these demands are held accountable. And throughout, we see that the letters that are being sent are followed by agitation on the ground, but also not sent as a kind of request, but a real assertion, an assertion that is based on both a history of discrimination, but also a claim around numbers. The two things that we've found that were unexpected is actually a lot of letters from groups that were called backward caste, a topic that we think is current today, and it wasn't really addressed by the assembly at that time. And in some ways, backward caste members were underrepresented in the assembly, and they pointed out. And at one point, one of the groups from Uttar Pradesh, the Naisamaj says that Who are you, the minority of the people, to decide how much of jobs and seats the majority of us should get? There's also an interesting set of responses from upper caste groups who are mobilizing against the abolition of untouchability and the provision of affirmative action. And it's interesting even in their letters, where initially they couched their demands on the kind of grounds that they would make in colonial India, that this is about a right of our community. It's a custom. It is about our custom that has to be respected. It's about our ritual status. And within a few months, it's quite clear that this language is not going to work. So, they then start reframing their demands as, well, actually as orthodox upper caste Hindus, we're a religious minority. So, we should like, you know, Muslims and Christians be exempt from certain practices of the state. And they actually they say that, you know, we should have religious Hindu religious leaders in Parliament. And Christian religious leaders and Muslim leaders in the same way that the British parliament has bishops inside them. So, they're also trying to find a way in which they can couch what we would say are perhaps non-progressive demands in this kind of language of constitutionalism. And it's quite clear that on that ground, at least they do not win, which makes it clear that there is a struggle on the grounds inside the party and in the assembly. And famously, of course, Ambedkar blends his weight to many of these struggles at one point trapping to resign from his position if the kind of demands, performative action and jobs etc. are not granted.

Milan Vaishnav You know, one of the most interesting parts of the book, I thought, was the section on the princely states. Because, again, as you point out in the book, you know, a lot of the constitution making that took place within the princely states is like completely absent from the story of their integration into the Indian Union, you know, and I'm thinking here also of like Rahul Sagar's work, right, who has been uncovering including in latest book, you know, all of these papers which come from various princely states to show that there's actually quite a lot of thinking that went into the constitution-making process within the native states. Ornit, I guess I want to ask you kind of two questions. One is, give us a sense of how widespread these constitution-making efforts were. And then number two, how seriously did princely rulers invest in this idea of constitutional reform?

Ornit Shani So, it was on a very large scale. So, and in fact, constitution making processes in the princely states to place at the scale of the kind of regional of all princely States and local. So, already from early 1946, the Chamber of Princes issues these basically almost order memorandum to the states to start thinking about constitutions, sending constitutions to the state and send them even a list of six fundamental rights that should be part of these constitutions. Among them was one of these fundamental rights was the abolition of forced labor, right? And this is happening before, like months before the Constituent Assembly convened in Delhi. So that was the kind of top level of the politics of princely state. But the more interesting thing is what is happening in the state. So how large scale it is, I think we say in the book we were able to trace close to 70-something constitutions of princely states and of individual constitution making, but it's hundreds more because as we show in the book, initially many states start their own constitution making process and they started, you know, some before the assembly convenes, some as the assembly convened. I'll say in a moment something about the seriousness of this process. But then as the constitution-making process in Delhi is taking place, many of the states starts a process of what we call pooling their sovereignty. So, creating unions of states that then elect constituent assembly for them and embark on question of constituting them and constitution making for them. So yes it's happening across the princely states. In fact, you know, we say if you imagine a map of India at the time between December ‘46 and November ‘49 when the constitution is adopted by the constituent assembly in Delhi and you put a dot of the constituent assembly in Delhi right the place where the canonical account this is the contained space and place of constitution making use and you'll also add dots of every place in India where princely states made constitution-making, let alone the public, it will cover the whole region, which was 45% of the territory of India, 93 million people. So, the rulers engaged very deeply with the constitution-making process. We go deeply in the book into two cases, Reva and Ratlam, to show how serious was the process. You know, the process involved—so the process we described was similar in other places. So, it was about, of course, it was a response of the rulers to popular demands for self-government, for more representative government. So it about appointing a committee. It was... About the public vetting on who will chair the committee in Reva, right? In Reva, the original chair of the committee was not accepted by the public because they wanted someone who understand the language, who would engage with the people. It was committees who published to, you know, called for the public hearings. In the case of Reva Harry Gorsing, who was the chair of committee, was touring Reva meeting with people. He describes in his memorandum hundreds of people coming to each one of these gatherings. We got letters from Shadi al-Qasb, from tribal groups, Shadi Al-Qaasb groups, Muslim groups who actually have their own vision of what they want from the future constitution. For example, these weak groups wanted to retain the ruler because they felt that only the Maharaja would take care of their rights and they were afraid of the coming of, you know, a new politics where there's no, you know, traditional guardian of their rights. You look at the Ratlam process. So in Reva, for example, then the Constitution is being published for comments. So there's a lot of iteration and people that come and speak in Ratlam, the committee initially think that women should not necessarily have franchise because backwardness, but then it was public engagement with the process that made them change the draft constitution of Ratlam to have a voting right for women. There's also a lot of innovations in the princely state constitution in the sense, so one thing is that the constitution making processes in the state outpaces the process of the constitution making in the constituent assembly. So, before the drafting committee meets for the first time to start its discussion, in some princely states abolition of untouchability has already happened.

Rohit De Yeah. I mean, I think, I mean the princelies have always been an interesting side. And I think Rahul's work shows that there have often been these occasional figures who have crafted these works of political theory in some of these states. But I mean to be clear, most of these states were authoritarian, autocratic, and were not willing to sort of concede power to the masses. There's really something about the moment in 1946 where it becomes clear to the princes that the only way that they can retain some form of sovereignty and to prevent the Indian Union from coming in and taking them over is to have this constitution, both as evidence that they can enact democratic reforms, but also to sort of, you know, and transform to a constitutional monarchy. So, they take it seriously. And what, and as our chapter shows, originally the Indian assembly was supposed to have no authority to make constitutions for the princely states. There was supposed to be an appendix at the end that would list all the state constitutions. However, it's through this process where they were making constitutions and they were sending members to Delhi that paradoxically, the making of the constitution that they were doing to protect themselves got them drawn further into the kind of Indian constitutional structure. And these ideas sort of proliferated across the board. We also often think of a few that, you know, the possibility this was going to be inevitable that all the princely states would be integrated. But actually, if we look around different parts of the British Empire, Malaysia, the UAE, Uganda in its early years, there were many forms where they would have integrated princely territories and British territories together and created a kind of federal regime. So, there were moments of alternative possibilities in between ‘46 and ‘49 that some of these sort of, sort of show.

Ornit Shani And, you know, just one last thing that we kind of, you know, the fact is that if you look at the November 1949 Constitution that was adopted by the Constituent Assembly, you see that there are many things from the constitutions of the states that found their place in the Indian Constitution, in the constitutional text. We can't see them today because we see them as asterisks or something that was amended. And most of them were disappearing by the 1970s. But, for example, four states even retained their armies. And that was part of the Constitution. There were clauses that stipulated areas wherein the Indian government cannot intervene in the states. And all that appears in the 49 draft, which we usually don't even look at, right? So, because when you search the text of the Indian Constitution, you don't see those clauses from the state's constitution.

Rohit De And in some ways, the origins of India's asymmetric federalism actually comes from some of these negotiations. So it's not just Kashmir, but also many of these other princely states that are able to win certain concessions for border districts or certain privileges. And the idea that you can't have one size that fits all, you have part A, part B and part C states, comes through some of the some of this conversation and negotiations.

Milan Vaishnav This is actually a good segue to asking about Manipur, because this is a state that had its own democratic constitution. It had elected a state assembly. Neither of those things prevented its eventual incorporation into India. And so, Rohit, if I could just ask you, say a little bit about what was distinctive about Manipur’s democratic experiment, and how did New Delhi come to ultimately assert control over this part of the country?

Rohit De So, I mean, there are, I think, three princely states that provide kind of interesting country examples. There's Kashmir, there's Hyderabad, and there's Manipur. And Kashmir of course, there is much that's written about, but we want to state that Kashmir actually is able, at least in 1950, to kind of retain a state constitution after independence. It's the only one that manages to do that. Hyderabad is really interesting because Hyderabad is supposed to send 16 members to the assembly in Delhi. It never does that. Kashmir ultimately sends four members to the country assembly in Delhi. So, Hyderabad does not have any membership in the assembly. The Hyderabadi members do not sign the constitution. It's ultimately sort of applied to the territory of Hyderabad by the Nizam. However, you know, Hyderabad, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh become the kind of sites of constitutional change. In fact, the first major change, which is states reorganization, is because of mobilization in what is Hyderabad. Manipur is often forgotten, but is sort of unique in being one of the first principally states to clearly have a constitution that abolishes the death penalty, does not provide for emergency provisions and also brings in, you know, a franchise. They have a government on that respect. And when the Indian Union is trying to get the Maharaja to a seat, the Maharajah keeps saying, but I've already transferred my powers to this assembly. So, I do not have, I don't have the authority to a seat. I have to go back and ask my assembly. And as we show in the chapter, there are various attempts, for example, what you would do in almost any other princely state is to sort of use the office of the divan to suggest that emergency powers can be applied. But the Constitution of Manipur does not have a provision for emergency powers. So we see a lot of correspondence where the Indian Union's legal advisors are like, how exactly do we go about doing this? Because it's not clear that we can do this based on what the Manipur Constitution says. And eventually, of course, it's sort of real politics that wins out. There are concerns about border areas, supposed communist activity, and there are many accounts of how Manipur was eventually sort of integrated into the union and turned into a chief commissioner's province. But the constitution of Manipur does provide a kind of hurdle to be navigated. And there's a Guwahati High Court decision from 1956 involving, I think... Shyamaprasad Mukherjee, which basically says that to the extent that the constitution does not take away from the Indian constitution, it's not clear that that constitution is abrogated. So, yeah.

Ornit Shani And just to add to that, it relates very well to your previous question because what we're showing with the Manipur case, which is a section in our chapter, is to show how serious was the constitution-making process in Manipur, right? So, it started in a... March, April, 1947, there was a committee, the constitution is inaugurated in October 1948, a franchise committee is established, is seated, is deciding how to divide, you know, constituencies, having hearings, etc. And then once the June ‘48 elections on the basis of universal franchise takes place in Manipur. It's a big election and the new legislative assembly takes power and yeah this is like 1948 it's just you know months after the draft constitution is being published in the Indian draft constitution this we show from following resets we show in the in the chapter how these legislative assembly take a lot of decisions. They legislate they so it's very active a democratic government in Manipur. So to see that on the one hand, we chose the result of a very serious constitution-making process. And on the other hand, the effort to sabotage it, there's no other way to put it, by the Indian government, because they want to take over Manipur and to see how legally difficult it is for them when we, you know, reading the legal opinions that Rohit was referring to, I think is a mark of showing the seriousness of these processes. And in one way, you know, it's a trouble area where it was never resolved, right? It was taken over rather than resolved constitutionally as it was through the processes of constitution parallel ongoing constitution making dialogs processes as in most of the rest of India.

Milan Vaishnav Let me try and bring this conversation to an end maybe by asking you about, you know, what you hope the broader public takes away from this book. You know, one of the objectives as you put it in one of final chapters is to put the public back into the republic. That's one of key takeaways. But as people are reading this, what do you want them to remember and what relevance do you think it has for the constitutional and democratic challenges that India faces in this day and age in 2026? Rohit, let me start with you and then I'll ask Ornit to weigh in as well.

Rohit De Sure. So, I think the one takeaway we want to really emphasize, and this is something you find in the archives, is really a culture of civic and public engagement, which we were fortunate to have around 1946. This has two components. One, of course, that a public that feels it and come together and engage not just in making demands for itself, but placing their demands through a process of public reasoning. So this is not a kind of hostage bargaining with the state, but making claims in a language that can be shared. And secondly, for the state to allow these channels of communication to exist. Public participation can't just work if it's top down. So, there have been studies on Nepal, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, which have shown that when public participation is a box to be ticked as a good practice, the level of engagement and input is not very high. It often leads to a kind of failure of the constitutional process. What made India different was that the process was organic, and to some extent, the state and political parties were responsive. I think it is important to also recognize that the meaning of the Constitution is not fixed and controlled by certain elites, be they judges or constitutional thinkers, but is one that is shaped through public dialog and conversation.

Ornit Shani So if I can add to that, one thing is about, you asked about the relevance. So, you know, at a time where there were, you know there are arguments in India or they have been especially ahead of the 2024 elections that, you know, if the government would come to power with a large majority, they would. There's a need to maybe rewrite the Constitution. It's not Indian, it's not the people's, it is a colonial constitution. And one of the things that I think our book makes very clear is that it's very difficult to argue that, but it is, I mean, it writes books titled The People's Constitution but it's the Indian people's constitution. One of big things we show in the book and that's part of our argument is how through the process of engagement with the constitution-making, people appropriated it and made it their own. So it is the people's constitution. And another little point is that, I think we write it in the introduction that we take the reader, you said what we want the readers to take from it. We take the readers into this journey of constitution-making across different sites in India with the hope it you know we think that almost every Indian can find some roots of his family in one way or another in the the breadth of stories and constitution making processes we talked about in the book in fact we had few nice emails coming from people that we never met we never knew who kind of send an email with even a picture.

Rohit De I mean, one of the nice ones really has been people saying that, oh, actually, I'm from Ratlam and I've never seen Ratlam mentioned in any discussion of the constitution. Or somebody saying, well, you know, this letter that you have with these initials, that was actually my grandmother, who was a sort of politician in Bihar. So, I think there are pieces of it and only can I just scratch and bring in just a small amount of the materials that we looked at. So, there's really a kind of invitation for others to go in and examine the rest of these archives and these voices and pick up on topics that we haven't focused on but are really there. And in some ways, many of the questions and issues remain the same for Indian politics today.

Milan Vaishnav My guests on the show this week are Rohit De and Ornit Shani. Together, they are the authors of Assembling India's Constitution and New Democratic History. This is just a fantastic book that I was telling both Rohit and Ornit before we started recording that I loved it for two reasons. One is it's just incredibly inventive and novel. The argument of the book and challenges, I think, a lot of what most of us have come to understand about how the Constitution was written. But the second is just, it's a really elegantly written book with incredible evidence, but just a really nice kind of narrative and storyline. Congrats to both of you on the book and thanks so much for taking the time.

Rohit De Thank you for your generous engagement.

Ornit Shani Thanks, Rohit and Milan. Thank you so much.