This chapter offers a new way of understanding the workings of the Indian Constituent Assembly. We move beyond studying the script, or the published Constituent Assembly debates, making visible the labour, infrastructure and ideas that went into the staging and the atmospherics of the assembly itself as a public and a lived space. The procedural rituals, the pulse of the debates, and the physical setting of the Constituent Assembly building enabled and shaped the constitution-making process. We follow a few actors from the Constituent Assembly as they moved across different assemblies in India and abroad while the constitution was still in the making. In doing so, we reveal the Indian constitution’s part in an emerging international regime of human rights and practice of comparative constitutional law and reconstruct a sense of the everyday ordinary life of the Assembly, which was deeply connected with the Indian public and the world outside.

The Indian constitution was poised to create a new map of power, transforming the relationship between existing state agencies and new authorities. This chapter demonstrates how the individuals staffing the state apparatus were not mere spectators, passively following the constitution-making process, but actors who actively sought to influence, change, or resist the emerging constitutional order through both public and private channels. The success of the future constitution of India required a smooth transition of the organs of the colonial state to the postcolonial order. Turning their loyalty and ambitions to the new state and its constitutional order was not an obvious outcome in 1947. The chapter examines how provincial legislators sought to guard their autonomy; how the higher judiciary endeavoured to protect their judicial independence; the contested constitutional status of Delhi; and finally, how the ‘neutral’ bureaucracy who were managing the process of constitution making actively sought to defend their own jurisdiction and interests at the time. This process, which paralleled the integration of territories, led to the functional integration of the units of the state.

This chapter examines how people from the margins of Indian society and territory, the so-called backward tribes (Adibasi), wrote themselves as constitutional actors, engaging with the constitution in the making with even more force than publics across the rest of India. The intensity of tribal expectations, and the failure of the constitution to meet them, led to a range of violent and nonviolent conflicts that have turned the constitution into an open site of struggle, and even transformed the text through constitutional amendments and scheduling, creating, for example, tribal majority states, tribal autonomous governing bodies, recognising groups as tribes, entitling them to affirmative action, and granting recognition to tribal languages. These changes were never benevolent gifts of the state. The alternative tribal visions of the constitution remained resilient as a competing framework that offered resources to reshape the lives of millions of Indian’s tribal people. The chapter examines constitutional debates within tribal groups, between tribal groups and the Constituent Assembly, and the creation of competing constitutional systems, such as in the Khasi States.

The chapter examines the public’s ideas and aspirations about the future constitution, through thousands of letters and memoranda that diverse publics sent to the Constituent Assembly. The public’s demands were informed by their everyday life experiences, generating constitutional ideas that would take years to find their ways into global constitutional governance. We focus on the new politics of caste that emerged with the promise of a transformative constitution, wherein caste groups invoked and disseminated the language and vocabulary of liberal constitutionalism for both regressive and progressive aims. We uncover a fuller range of public voices absent from the Constituent Assembly. The public demands were based on deliberative process of reasoning, and often grounded on universal principles that would apply to all groups. We thus uncover in this chapter a reservoir of public constitutional thinking, a body of constitutional theory that emerged from India’s streets.

Assembling India’s Constitution offers a new history and a new paradigm for understanding the making of the Indian constitution, as it emerged outside the Constituent Assembly, driven by diverse publics across the breadth and length of India’s territory and even beyond it. The book is based on a wide range of new archival materials from across India and the world. We reveal the existence of multiple, parallel constitution making processes underway across the subcontinent, showing that the Indian constitution was not, as it has been assumed, solely an elite exercise anchored in the Constituent Assembly in Delhi. We reimagine and reconstruct the constitution making altogether, foregrounding public constitutional practice and politics as a key to sustaining the constitution and its vision. In doing so, we challenge conventional chronology of constitutional development and pluralise the sources and nature of India’s constitutional law and politics. We argue that the making of the Indian constitution entailed a process of fitting together – assembling – disparate and simultaneous constitution making efforts across the country.