The collective bind

The preamble to a constitution is conventionally perceived as an introductory note, as a concise abstract or as an elaborate indication of political identity, and performs many gestures.Footnote ¹¹ Preambles usually state what the constitution hopes to achieve, its functional objectives (‘a more perfect union’, ‘a Christian nation’, ‘the Islamic Ummah’, ‘a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic’), the aspirations of the constitution and the nation that it founds (‘promote common good’, ‘justice’, ‘equality’, ‘liberty’, ‘fraternity’) and its source/s of authority (‘the Most Holy Trinity’, ‘Almighty Allah’, ‘We the People’, ‘the Emir’).Footnote ¹² The objectives and aspirations of the constitution are captured and relayed right at the beginning, enabling the perception of the constitution as ‘no more than one massive footnote to the preamble’ (Baxi Reference Baxi, Dhavan and Jacob1978, 124). ‘We the People’ is the agency of popular sovereignty that inaugurates and authorises most contemporary constitutions, inspired by the US Constitution.Footnote ¹³

In the Indian Constitution, the Preamble contains vividly designed borders, the most intricately crafted of all the frames that are present in the visual document (Figure 1). The wide, thick and detailed borders contain an elaborate network of flowers, vines, leaves and plants, and are interspersed with four extensively and exotically crafted depictions of animals in each corner.Footnote ¹⁴ There is a representation of what appears to be an elegantly decorated cow or bull in the top-left corner, an embellished elephant in the top right, a charging and geared warhorse in the bottom left and a pouncing tiger in the bottom right. One enters the Preamble through the frame of the primal. The inaugural gaze is mediated by and oriented with an aura of exoticism and a sylvan grandeur, arguably delineating the marked difference and singularity of India.

Figure 1.

Image of the Preamble in the original manuscript.

(Retrieved from the Library of Congress, available with Open Access.)

In addition to the title of ‘The Constitution of India’ – which is engulfed by floating vines and spatially divided from the remaining text through the figure of a lotus, the designated national flower – the first two letters of the Preamble, ‘WE’, are enclosed by the botanical intervention, with the first letter overpowering and almost occluding the second. Whereas the title of the Constitution has vines running around it, but not through any of the letters, vines menacingly grasp and clutch the letters ‘WE’ from inside as well as outside. The personal pronoun is already interpellated by and intermeshed with the scene from which it emerges. The ‘W’ stands boldly, the largest letter on the page, and announces its inflated presence to the extent that the word ‘Preamble’ to its left is marginalised and almost ignored. As Norton (1988) has noted in the context of the US Constitution, but which is more apposite here, the differentiated marking of the personal pronoun of the collective is a peculiar strategy by which authority is annunciated and acclaimed. ‘The shape of the letters, the form of the text as well as its content, invests the assumption of authority with particular importance’ (Norton 1988, 459). In other words, it is a clarion call for attention, proclaiming the emergence and entrance of the collective into the world. In being possessed by the vines, it is also a message that the collective has always already been a part of the scene that surrounds the Constitution, and it is merely being accorded formal recognition now. In the legal emblematic tradition, vines, as in Alciato’s (Reference Alciato1534, 12) Amicitia, ‘tells us to seek friends of such a sort that not even our final day will uncouple them from the bond of friendship’ and are fittingly used here to bind the constitutive collective in a presumably everlasting grasp.Footnote ¹⁵

A question which arises directly from this, and which has generated much writing in constitutional theory as well as jurisprudence, is when this constitutive entity of ‘We the People’ is constituted? When does ‘I’, or multiple groupings of ‘us’, become a pronounced, differentiated and positive ‘We’? Is the ‘People’ a representation of a pre-political collective – with a ‘pre-established, unified will’ – whose decision sets the wheels in motion, as Schmitt (Reference Schmitt2004, 65) has argued?Footnote ¹⁶ Or perhaps it is an attribution of empowerment that is retroactively ordained, as Kelsen (Reference Kelsen1960/1970) would have it? Alternatively, could it be a notion that is produced in a performative utterance at the moment of the Constitution’s founding, what has been referred to as an autobiographical self-declaration (de Ville Reference de Ville2023)?Footnote ¹⁷ How should this notion of ‘the People’ be perceived’? Should ‘the People’ be presupposed as an entity, or as retroactively empowered, or as incarnated, as a ‘twin sibling’ (Addis Reference Addis2018 176), along with the Constitution? Where does this collective come from?

The images in the Indian Constitution, through their productive relaying of a distinct nationalist teleological linearity, are fundamentally tied to this precise undecidability at the heart of the Constitution’s founding; what has been variously termed as ambivalence, paradox and tension, and has generated much debate and disagreement in the study of constituent and constituted powers, potentia and potestas, political power generation and legal power distribution.Footnote ¹⁸ The ambivalence in the constituting of the inaugural law is related to a founding ambivalence that characterises nations and modern nation-states.Footnote ¹⁹ Engagements with this paradox have run the gamut from a decisionistic claim (Schmitt Reference Schmitt2004) that ‘the People’ is a pre-political, established, collective to a normative claim (Lindahl Reference Lindahl, Loughlin and Walker2007 and Lindahl Reference Lindahl2015) that the foundational authority is derived from an originary transposition; from claims (Loughlin Reference Loughlin2014 and Loughlin Reference Loughlin2015) that the tension between the constituted and the constituent powers are suspended in a constant dialectic to claims (Norton 1988) that there occurs a transubstantiation at the founding moment. Some have argued (Christodoulidis Reference Christodoulidis, Loughlin and Walker2007) for the productive irresolution of this antinomy and that the constituent power is the irreducible, irritating supplement that needs to persist and challenge forms of constituted powers, and some have even gone so far as to claim (Dyzenhaus Reference Dyzenhaus2012) that this entire mode of questioning and analysis – of ambivalences, tensions and paradoxes as it relates to constituent and constituted powers – is immaterial and irrelevant to the field of law given that law’s authority is intrinsically derived. Evidently, there is an abundance of engagements on the question of constitutional founding.Footnote ²⁰

Addis (Reference Addis2018, 130, 147) has argued that preambles imagine and ‘paint a picture’ of the identity of ‘the People’, and some preambles even go so far as to narrate long, tumultuous and ‘unbroken’ histories that have led to the moment of the unified, singular people giving to themselves a constitution. The Preamble to the Indian Constitution, unlike the constitutions of Algeria, Croatia, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran and Iraq, does not contain an elaborate ‘history of the people that is taken to be centrally constitutive of their identity (their stability as a subject) … tying together the past, the present and the future’ (Addis Reference Addis2018, 147). The Preamble is ‘terse’, as characterised by Orgad (Reference Orgad2010, 718, n. 17), but in visually emblazing and inaugurating the ‘We’ with the emblematic imprimatur of amicable vines, the constitutional subject is already orientated to the production of a collective identity. What is supposedly performatively enforced in the texts of other constitutions is imaginally bound up in the vision of the Indian Constitution. The inaugural page of the Constitution, through its vines and frames, exotic beasts and venerated cattle, stylistic calligraphy and foliaceous outbursts, opens the interiority of the subject to a firmly held collective bind within a native scene. In disclosing the personal pronoun as already woven up in a unitary foliage, the Preamble relays to the subject a sense of a concrete and intricate binding. This is a visually stunning representation of what is otherwise implicit in the very understanding of a constitution. For, as Finer (Reference Finer1950) has pointed out, especially with reference to the German terms for a constitution, Grundgesetz and Verfassung, ‘a Constitution involves a certain grasping, a holding together, the bringing about of coherence, and a fastening’ of the collective (de Ville Reference de Ville2023, 5). The aesthetic features of the Preamble to the Indian Constitution, in grand visual form, introduce this sense of such a grasping, of an inextricable collective bind, to the interiority of the constitutional subject. If the Preamble to the Indian Constitution, unlike the other constitutions mentioned above, does not contain an elaborate history of the collective identity, the function of narrating an unbroken history – beginning with a mythic provenance and traversing theophanic manifestations – rendering an identity and unity of ‘the People’ with a stable subjectivity, is displaced from the Preamble and dispersed through the medium of the images throughout the Constitution. As will be evinced in the next section, subsequent images in the text entrench the collective bind of the Preamble into a historical bind, whereby the collective, in the imaginal depiction, is not just performatively produced but historically constituted through an unbroken chain.

The historical bind

Part One of the Indian Constitution, which deals with the name of the nation and a brief statement of its federal nature, features a deceptively simple image (Figure 2) of a Mohenjo- Daro seal depicting a humped zebu bull accompanied by inscriptions, based on the Harappan excavations.Footnote ²¹ The naming clause begins with a totemic symbol. A totem, especially as it is represented in an animal, holds significant value in standing metonymically for the origin of law.Footnote ²² In depicting the totem here as the inaugural image of Part I, the viewer is already being orientated to transmissions of origin and narratives of unilinear heritage.Footnote ²³ It is displayed in the form of an official seal, an emblem, staying true to its original inspiration. In its emblematic form, it is apposite for inaugurating the first part, as the ‘image speaks of origin and so designates place’, which is a formulation derived from the emblematic genealogy of law, the mens emblematica, where the emblem takes hold as the primordial ‘sign or insignia of lineage’ (Goodrich Reference Goodrich1991, 245).Footnote ²⁴

Figure 2.

Image of zebu bull adorning Part I of the Indian Constitution.

(Retrieved from the Library of Congress, available with Open Access.)

Crucial to the task of curating a nation and weaving a firm sense of nationhood, as Goswami (Reference Goswami2004, 1) affirms in the Indian context, is to make ‘the nation appear natural’, as a monadic and singular unit. Despite affirmations of intrinsic diversity being germane to Indian history, the foundational catchphrase of ‘unity in diversity’ assigned unity as functionally preceding diversity (Nehru 1946). ‘India, that is Bharat…’, as Article 1 proclaims, emerged from a sustained effort at a singularity that never existed organically, and syncretised diverse elements into a unicity, while simultaneously obviating putatively recalcitrant elements in favour of an ostensible harmony. As Goswami (Reference Goswami2004, 188) has adeptly demonstrated, early iterations of Indian nationalism, especially in the late nineteenth century, emerged from a twin function of, first, a ‘historicization of territory’, whereby the territory of India, contrived as a fixed geographical unit, was sacralised and accredited with a unilinear history, and, second, a ‘territorialisation of history’, which aimed to confine a unified interpretation of Indian history within the circumscribed territory, and, in effect, ‘pushed aside and severed historical interrelations among various social groups’. ‘Bharat’, a loaded term in Hindu mythology and standing as a synecdoche for both functions simultaneously, was introduced into the constitutional text, in its inaugural article, after much controversy surrounding its usage and theological import (Singh Reference Singh2005, 911). While this formed one strand of nationalist politics – in its exclusive manifestation, which has resurged more forcefully today in India – it was opposed by an avowedly secular outlook to nationhood and constitutionalism. However, despite occupying polarised camps, both the communitarian and the secular iterations of nationalism unanimously embraced a faith in a unilinear historicity, implicitly inheriting the dual functionality that it entailed. It is this unilinearity that the images visually legitimised, precisely at a time when it was still a tentative proposition.

The creation of a nation is often dependent on an arbitrary circumscription of origin, of a necessary demarcation of birth at a particular time. As Debray (Reference Debray1977, 27) has argued, the possibility of any societal formation, even more so for a national formation, is predicated upon ‘a delimitation in time, or the assignation of origins… This means that society does not derive from an infinite regression of cause and effect. A point of origin is fixed, the mythic birth of the Polis, the birth of Civilization… This zero point or starting point is what allows ritual repetition, the ritualization of memory, celebration, commemoration – in short, all those forms of magical behaviour signifying defeat of the irreversibility of time.’ The Mohenjo-Daro seal stands as a representation of the Indus Valley civilisation, which, in the imaginal staging within the Constitution, is perceived as the historical origin of Indian civilisation, the primogenitor of a long, unbroken and continuing lineage. Historical continuity is not necessarily a matter of self-evident truth, for such lineages of continuity are often convoked to satiate and conform to political predilections and aspirations that arise much later (Jacobsohn Reference Jacobsohn2010, 134). As Hobsbawm (Reference Hobsbawm, Hobsbawm and Ranger1983, 7) has argued, in the context of national formations, ‘even historic continuity had to be invented, for example by creating an ancient past beyond effective historical continuity either by semi-fiction… or by forgery’. While the general veracity of Hobsbawm’s claim may be open to scrutiny, it particularly holds weight for the seal that adorns Part I of the Indian Constitution, as the inclusion of the Indus Valley as the inaugural point in the unbroken history betrays a notorious political chicanery.

Since the nineteenth century, Indian historiography, including Indologists such as Max Mueller, have perceived the Vedic period as the foundational point of Indian civilisation and history. In the twentieth century, this linear narrative faced the prospect of a devastating blow with the discovery of the antecedent Indus Valley civilisation; a civilisation which, according to the interpretation of most archaeologists, was clearly pre-Vedic temporally and non-Vedic essentially. This discovery threatened the continued possibility of isolating and demarcating the point of origin in the Vedic age as the determined progenitor of a unilinear Indian civilisation. The solution adopted to reconcile with this threat was one of appropriation. As Thapar (Reference Thapar2000, 597) elucidates, ‘what were they to do with this negation of an “unbroken” linear historical descent? … [It] required that Vedic civilization must be taken back in time and identified with the Indus civilization. And that is the attempt that is now being made – to describe the Indus civilization as essentially identical with the Vedic culture, in order that their claim to a linear unbroken ancestry which goes back to Vedic sources remains intact.’Footnote ²⁵ Faced with the prospect of an alien origin – evidence that points to an unconnected and detached predecessor – preceding the hitherto confirmed originary point of nationalist history, the nationalist imperative was to appropriate the past and couch it in a temporality that reconfigures it in a national time.Footnote ²⁶ The Indian Constitution makes use of a revisionist history to resettle and conform to the already projected narrative arc that frames the temporal rhetoric of the text (Lazar Reference Lazar2019). History gets constituted and reconstituted under the constraining frame of the nationalist imperative, generating the foundational desire to exhibit the imaginal lineage that remains tethered to the present and stable in its course.

It is in this context that the chronology of the image that succeeds the Mohenjo-Daro seal can be perceived as part of this fictive narration of the nation’s linear continuity. The arbitrary periodisation, as Siva Kumar states, ‘is borrowed from nationalist history’ even if the style of the images themselves express the artist’s ‘eclectic sensibilities’,Footnote ²⁷ as the image that follows in Part II – of an ancient gurukul, an ashram, representing the Vedic age (Figure 3) – is now, to borrow from Thapar, neatly representative of the ‘unbroken’ civilisational linearity. An imaginal chain links the Indus to the Vedic, exemplifying the imaginary historical continuity. The figure in Part II that depicts a gurukul, where Vedic sages are engaged in ritualistic practices in the foreground of what appears to be a forested area, neatly conforms to the dominant, if distorted, historical narrative of the Vedic age directly succeeding, if not considered to be the same as, the Indus Valley civilisation.Footnote ²⁸ A nationalist linearity is reconstructed, entrenched and legitimised through constitutional visualisation. A unitary and unilinear image of the nation enables the Constitution to project a history – as Jawaharlal Nehru stated in his famous ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech, delivered in the Constituent Assembly when India attained independence from British rule – of the nation as having traversed from ‘the dawn of history’ in an ‘unending quest’ through ‘trackless centuries’.Footnote ²⁹

Figure 3.

Image of a gurukul (Vedic ashram) adorning Part II of the Indian Constitution, on citizenship.

(Retrieved from the Library of Congress, available with Open Access.)

The images in the Constitution, too many to include visually in this article, continue the narration of the unilinear nation, and betray the desire of a nationalist temporality characterised by an unbroken historical continuity. This function of enabling and entrenching a nationalist history, because it can be most directly discerned in the images, confirms and conforms to Fitzpatrick’s analysis (1992, 113) that ‘[w]hether recent and abrupt or immemorially regressive, national histories were constructed or reconstructed which, far from pursuing fraternal connections with other people in a universal project, told rather of exclusive origins and identity, of distinct community and a unique spirit’. The productive formation of the collective bind that we witnessed in the Preamble soon gets imaginally buttressed with a historical force that renders this collective with an idiosyncratic identity and scintillating spirit, enabling the collective bind to be reproduced as a historical bind of the collective. Precisely to circumvent any indication of a performative utterance of the personal pronoun, the imaginal foundation pervades the Constitution with a historical and civilisational lineage that remains fixed, tethered and unable to be shirked. The national unit accretes a grandiose historical narrative which is afforded a visual stamp of constitutional legitimacy through the images. This replication, resonance and (re)construction of a history that is linearly tied to a distorted origin, emboldening the notion of a commonality of the ‘people’ with a stable and historical subjectivity is, as indicated earlier, critically tied to the foundational ambivalence that closely, if obscurely, tails constitutional law. It is the imaginal bind that steps up as a deus ex machina to visually resolve an irresoluble and enduring quagmire.

The imaginal bind

The term ‘constituent power’ in its French variant – pouvoir constituant – was first conceptualised by Abbe Sieyes’s revolutionary discourse, where he claimed that ‘the people’, who were already in his account ‘the nation’, possessed the necessary power for political establishment (Loughlin Reference Loughlin2014, 220). This line of argument has been buttressed and repeated often, including, as adumbrated earlier, in Carl Schmitt’s constitutional theory. But, on the contrary, the notion of ‘the people’, and the nation even more, is perpetually ascertained and (re)constructed. As opposed to being a signifier for a fixed product, it is a process that is always already at work. Nations are receptive, either through appropriation or adaptation, to ‘infinite diversity of purposes, histories, ideologies and sustaining myths’ (Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick2001, 113) and are capable even of shifting in time (Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm, Hobsbawm and Ranger1983, 11). Nationalism, as Gellner (Reference Gellner1964, 169) posited, does not imply the awakening of a nation and its people, but rather ‘it invents nations where they do not exist’. In its appropriative avatar, it aspires to coalesce and fold the dangers it encounters, such as the Indus threat for the Indian nationalist narrative, in a neat linearity, (re)constructing the nation in a cohering testimony of time. In a crucial sense, then, as opposed to the view that the nation and the nationalist history culminate in the production of the Constitution, as argued by Nehru, it is the Constitution that affords a stamp of legitimacy to the nationalist linearity being invoked. It could be construed that this became an exasperated imperative to respond to the chaos and cataclysm that was the partition that surrounded the birth of the nation.Footnote ³⁰ As Lazar (Reference Lazar2019, 1) has contended, promulgating constitutions, because they are ‘contentious events’, requires a selling of the constitution to an often ‘sceptical or fractured citizenry’. This is often achieved through tropes ranging from rhetoric to myth, pride to prejudice, trauma to guilt. The constitution, in other words, requires a supplemental, but in no way incidental, kernel to form its affective substrate that binds the citizenry to the law, which goes on to constitute what Heritier has termed the necessary liturgical and aesthetic foundations of positive law (Heritier Reference Heritier2014). ‘The people as a collective body, therefore, is formed not only by the demos, an assembly with a deliberative function that votes and elects its representatives, where everyone acts rationally by definition, but also always in parallel to the laos (the Greek etymological origin of “liturgy”)’ (Heritier Reference Heritier2014, 143–44).

The ambivalence at the heart of constitutional law, of whether the people, or the nation, are constitutive or constituted, inheres in an irresolution in the lifeline of all constitutional polities.Footnote ³¹ It persists because of the modernist negation (Wall and Matthews Reference Wall and Matthews2024) of the aesthetic and liturgical element that lives immanently within the body of the law and which libidinally ties (Sherwin, Reference Sherwin and Manderson2018b) the body of the national citizenry, the constitutional subjects, to the body of the juridical, fusing the corpus iuris with the corpus mysticum.Footnote ³² Imagining, projecting and creating nations, and constitutions that fix and define such nations in time and space, necessarily entails a transcendental kernel – whether of a civil religiosity,Footnote ³³ a repressed mythology (Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick1992), a (re)framing of universal rights in a transcendental legalityFootnote ³⁴ or in a historical narration and imaginal depiction of civilisational continuity – that allures the subject to a binding relationship with the law. This transcendental kernel often performs its function of binding through the medium of aesthetic forms, which allows the law to bind, and ‘it binds deceptively, it binds unconsciously, and it binds affectively’ (Goodrich, Reference Goodrich1990, 9). While ‘every society, in every period, in fact, tends to sacralise – that is, to detract from criticism and dogmatise – its social binding function and represent it symbolically in the form of images, in order to exalt its power’ (Heritier Reference Heritier2014, 149), the Indian Constitution exemplarily demonstrates how images foundationally enact and represent such a binding. The visual economy of presence (Sherwin Reference Sherwin and Manderson2018b), much more than any rational notions of deliberative reason, is what enables the image of a historical collective to be interwoven with and bound up into a constitutional subjectivity. Richard Sherwin claims that erstwhile forms of visual attachment, as manifested in the ‘visual economy of the Incarnation’ (2018b, 335), were displaced in political modernity into a secular rationality. ‘[O]ver time, what began as a transcendental, symbolic visual economy devolved into something far different: a secular legal positivism, the modern semiotic economy of signs and definitions’ (Sherwin Reference Sherwin and Manderson2018b, 335). However, images continue to proliferate, bind, attach and move the interiority of the subject and the history of the collective in increasingly mobile forms. The ‘ghost’ (Sherwin Reference Sherwin and Manderson2018b, 335) that remains in ‘the secular machinery of positive law’ is not necessarily ‘unrepresentable’ or ‘inconceivable’ but all too visual, visible, sensible and affective, at least as witnessed in the context of the images in the Indian Constitution. These images visually mediate and exemplarily perform the binding that occasions the founding of nations and constitutions.

Predicated not only on reason, but on the idea of an actual or ‘a widely accepted myth of actual agreement’, the people become a central aspect of the legitimacy of the constitution (Rosenfeld Reference Rosenfeld2009, 25). The founding people are specifically invested in a greater burden as their document becomes performatively authoritative not just for them but for their posterity as well. To borrow from Norton (1988), there is a double transubstantiation that takes place in the dialectic between constituent and constituted powers. The flesh of the founding people, with its attendant strategies and rhetoric of a coalesced identity, is transubstantiated into the word of ‘the people’ in the constitution, and the now verbal notion of the people returns to transubstantiate into future citizens in its self-image.Footnote ³⁵ This is a demanding process. To be tied to the word is an ensuing and insipid struggle if left to itself and requires a transcendent, aesthetic and liturgical element to inscribe the people with a cohering identity that can be libidinally attached, worth fighting and even dying for. Whether one views this as ‘temporal imperialism’ (Norton 1988 460) or as a ‘transtemporal authorship’ (Michelman Reference Michelman2009, 717), the notion of ‘We the People’ requires a sufficiently strong resonance for all of posterity to heed and value in this cohering impulse.

The images in the Indian Constitution depict a civilisational justification for the linearity of a historical people, progressively destined to constitutional commonality of purpose and action. In its very form and aspiration, the notion of a singular people echoes a transcendental manifestation of an entity, with the function of God now transposed to the function of the people, ‘the ontological productivity of divine making… transposed into the ontological productivity of human law-making’ (Lindahl Reference Lindahl, Loughlin and Walker2007, 165).Footnote ³⁶ Modernity, as has been rehashed time and again since Nietzsche’s observation, may have well done away with the need for God, but the empty place still remains, filled with many substitutes and chain of associations. The images in the Indian Constitution invoke deities (Ram, Krishna, Shiva, Sita), spiritual figures (Buddha, Mahavira, Gobind Singh), deified leaders (Gandhi, Bose), monarchs and warriors (Ashoka, Vikramaditya, Akbar, Shivaji, Laxmibai, Tipu Sultan) and the myth of a single strand which connects all of them to an arcane origin and the modern national citizen. Thereby, the images powerfully function as a counter-archive of the historical collective and libidinally binds it to this transcendental lineage, and as such provide the historically constructed identity of the national collective with a constitutionally visualised legitimation. The historical bind is further entrenched and affixed through an imaginal bind. The negation of these images and its function in the cohering and coalescing enterprise only ignores the persisting force with which Indian nationalist politics continues to perceive itself in civilisational and ordained terms. Jawaharlal Nehru viewed ‘the People’ as having persistently traversed through ‘trackless centuries’, and it is echoed up to the present in the same terms, with a recent Government of India booklet claiming that ‘the view or the will of the people in governance has been the central part of life since earliest recorded history’.Footnote ³⁷ Whereas the Nehruvian government entrenched a civilisational perspective in more secular terms, the incumbent Modi government performs this gesture in more explicitly theological terms, as evinced in the Prime Minister’s recent reference to the image of Ram in the Constitution.Footnote ³⁸ Despite the gulf of secularity and religious communitarianism that separates these two epochs and ideological wings, the narrative arc of a civilisational continuity with an unbroken chain has remained a powerful and affective trope across the political spectrum. It is this stability of the people as a civilisational entity and the sustenance of a singular and uninterrupted subjectivity that is upheld and buttressed by the images which provide the introductory annunciation and acclamation in the Preamble with an imaginal foundation and visual meaning. The images are the Indian Constitution’s internal mnemotechnique (Berlant Reference Berlant1991) of remembering (which is to say documentarily constructing and simultaneously legitimising) a nationalist history, with a stable subjectivity and an unbroken linearity. The collective that is constructed in the Preamble gains a historical force suffused with a civilisational lineage and is imaginally bound and tied to the Constitution through an otherwise banished visual economy.