Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2011
The real work of this Constituent Assembly … is the high adventure of giving shape, in the printed and written word, to a Nation's dream and aspirations.
Jawaharal Nehru, Constituent Assembly Debates, vol. I, p. 59One of the major political goals of India's leaders at independence was to forge a common national identity in the face of unparalleled social and cultural diversity. Translating this goal into legal language of constitutional formulations was the greatest challenge for the Indian Constituent Assembly when it drafted the constitution between December 1946 and January 1950. The aim of this chapter is to examine how the Indian framers addressed this challenge and how they navigated the country's seemingly irresolvable tensions.
India, the second most populated country in the world, is one of the most diverse in religious, cultural, ethnic and linguistic terms. The Muslim community is the largest religious minority in India. Constituting roughly 20 percent of India's population prior to partition, even after partition the Muslim community still comprised 10 percent of the population, making India the third largest Muslim country in the world. Other important religious minorities are Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Jains and Parsis; all together their share in the population is around 5 percent. Hindus, who comprise around 83 percent of India's population, are themselves socially segmented into thousands of sects, castes and subcastes, traditionally stratified and ranked in hierarchical order. India is extremely linguistically diverse as well.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.