The chapter explores the Indian public’s proactive efforts to participate and insert themselves into the constitution-making process. This ran against the accepted wisdom at the time, which held that constitutions should be crafted by mature political elites and constitutional experts behind closed doors. Their insistence on having a say ultimately forced the Constituent Assembly to incorporate the public into its chambers and procedures, and it turned the constitution-making process into an open public affair. Newspapers, magazines, and radio programmes closely tracked the constitution-making process, and the draft constitution became a bestseller. The Indian public acted as unsolicited citizens, as sovereign-subjects, in their pursuit of their constitutional visions and aspirations. Even before the constitution arrived, the Indian public was busy working out its potential implications for their lives. Indians claimed ownership of the constitution, suggested amendments, translated it into vernacular languages, and they held the central and provincial governments to account on its basis. They, thus, legitimated the constitution even while it was being made.

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.