Rohit De and Ornit Shani’s Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History marks a major historiographical rupture in the study of India’s constitutional origins. Against the canonical narrative that centres the Constituent Assembly and its elite deliberations, De and Shani reposition the making of India’s Constitution as a collective, participatory, and contested process—one animated by diverse publics across India’s social, regional, and institutional spectrum. Through an extraordinary excavation of what they call the ‘Ornit–Rohit Constitutional Archive’, the authors reconstruct the vibrant, dialogic life of constitutionalism outside the Constituent Assembly, restoring to view the multitude of voices that sought to shape the democratic imagination of the new Republic.
The book’s central claim—that democratization preceded constitution-making in India—reverses the conventional causal logic of constitutional historiography. Drawing from petitions, letters, memoranda, and resolutions submitted between 1946 and 1949, the authors demonstrate that the Constitution was not simply written for the people but with and by them. The Moshalchi community’s 1947 letter from Bengal, which opens the book, becomes emblematic of this submerged archive of public constitutional action: marginal groups, peasants, tribals, and workers appealed to the Constituent Assembly as ‘unsolicited citizens’, articulating their anxieties and aspirations in constitutional idioms.
This insistence on the people’s proactive constitutional agency unsettles the elitist paradigm advanced by earlier scholars such as Granville Austin and Madhav Khosla, for whom the Assembly debates constituted the privileged site of constitutional creativity. De and Shani turn the lens outward—from Delhi’s Constitution Hall to the country’s farthest reaches—arguing that the making of India’s Constitution must be understood as an act of assembling, not of founding. The ‘assembling’ metaphor, drawn partly from Stephen Legg’s notion of the ‘assemblage’, captures the plural, fluid, and improvizational nature of the process. In this framing, India’s Constitution becomes less a monument than a living structure, continuously shaped by competing constitutional imaginaries.
What distinguishes Assembling India’s Constitution from other revisionist works is its archival imagination. The authors integrate materials from the National Archives of India, provincial records, private collections, and local organizational archives, unearthing petitions from the Tea Tribes of Assam, draft constitutions of Princely States, and correspondence from women’s associations and Dalit collectives. These sources illuminate the extent to which the public viewed constitution-making as their own project. For instance, the Constituent Assembly Secretariat received thousands of communications, often written in English—the ‘language of the court’—but translated and circulated in the vernacular media. Rather than treating this linguistic mediation as elite capture, De and Shani interpret it as an act of vernacular constitutional translation, a process through which Indians ‘became fluent in constitutional language’ even before the universal franchise was implemented.
The book’s six substantive chapters are organized around this expanding geography of constitutionalism. The first two chapters explore the fever of constitutional expectations and the public’s transformation of the draft Constitution into a bestseller. The third and fourth chapters turn to the Princely States and provincial legislatures, showing how their own constitutional experiments both challenged and facilitated India’s federal integration. The fifth chapter, ‘The Theatre of the Assembly’, situates the Constituent Assembly as one among several sites of debate rather than the centrepiece of nation-building. The final chapter examines tribal and frontier engagements, reclaiming the role of groups like the Garos and Khasis in shaping the constitutional imagination. These chapters, therefore, decentre the elite nationalist narrative and bring to light the simultaneity of multiple ‘constitutional journeys’.
De and Shani’s intervention extends beyond historiography to constitutional theory. By demonstrating that the Constitution emerged from dialogue, not decree, they challenge the juridical fetish of the ‘founding moment’. Their approach resonates with Upendra Baxi’s idea of the Constitution as a ‘living text’ and with Nivedita Menon’s notion of ‘insurgent constitutionalism’. The authors show that constitutional politics in India was never confined to the legal chambers—it was a practice of everyday negotiation that made constitutional democracy resilient despite postcolonial fragility.
In ‘Conclusion: An Open Site of Struggle’, De and Shani trace how this participatory impulse continued after 1950. The Communist Party’s early critique of the Constitution’s class bias, the women’s groups demanding reserved seats in 1951, and later Dalit and tribal mobilizations exemplify what they call the ‘public back in the Republic’. The Constitution, they argue, has remained an open text precisely because it was forged through popular contestation. In their reading, contemporary constitutional performances—from protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act to public readings of the Preamble—reaffirm this historical continuum. The Constitution, they suggest, endures not as a sacred document but as a shared repertoire of struggle.
Methodologically, Assembling India’s Constitution stands out for its interdisciplinary synthesis. It combines legal history, political theory, and anthropology, while maintaining an accessible narrative. The authors’ co-writing process—literally side by side, line by line—produces a unified yet polyphonic voice, mirroring the pluralism they describe. Their argument also speaks to comparative constitutionalism, situating India within global debates on participatory constitution-making. Unlike top-down ‘invited’ participation seen in post-conflict settings, India’s experience was bottom-up and anticipatory: the people demanded a Constitution before being invited to author it.
Yet, the book’s celebration of participatory constitutionalism occasionally risks romanticizing the democratic impulse. While De and Shani acknowledge that many public demands were unheeded, their treatment of exclusion remains understated. The book might have further examined the gendered hierarchies within these publics, or the tensions between caste solidarity and universal equality. Similarly, their critique of the elite narrative could have engaged more directly with the paradox of representation: how a non-elected Assembly nonetheless became a durable democratic institution. These are, however, questions of extension rather than limitation.
At a theoretical level, Assembling India’s Constitution reorients the study of postcolonial state formation. It reframes constitution-making not as an act of state-building but as a technology of social transformation. The authors’ insistence that ‘in India, the Constitution did not produce democracy; democratization preceded the Constitution’ destabilizes Eurocentric models of constitutionalism rooted in revolution or rupture. Their argument finds echoes in Ranabir Samaddar’s ‘materiality of politics’ and Partha Chatterjee’s ‘political society’, where the subaltern’s claim-making becomes constitutive of state legitimacy. The book thus bridges normative constitutional theory with empirical social history, offering a vocabulary to think about constitutionality from below.
Importantly, De and Shani’s narrative arrives at a politically charged moment. Writing in the shadow of what Tarunabh Khaitan terms ‘executive aggrandisement’ and James Manor’s ‘competitive authoritarianism’, the authors see in the Constitution’s continued invocation by ordinary citizens—during protests, elections, and civic rituals—a renewal of its founding energy. Their observation that the printed Constitution became a bestseller during the 2024 elections powerfully underscores this cyclical revival of constitutional consciousness.
Assembling India’s Constitution ultimately reconstructs not only an archive but an ethos. It compels readers to rethink the Constitution as a living democratic archive, continually authored by the people it governs. By re-inscribing the subaltern and the peripheral into India’s constitutional history, De and Shani extend the temporal and spatial boundaries of the founding moment. Their work stands as both a scholarly achievement and a civic intervention, reminding us that constitutionalism, at its best, is not a legal inheritance but a collective project of imagination and struggle.
If Granville Austin gave us the Constitution as the ‘cornerstone of a nation’, De and Shani give us the Constitution as the conversation of a people. Their book is indispensable reading for historians, political theorists, and citizens alike—an invitation to revisit the making of the Indian Republic not as a closed chapter, but as an open, ongoing assembly.
Asis Mistry is Assistant Professor, Political Science, University of Calcutta, India, and specializes in Ethnic and Nationalist Politics, Contemporary Political Theory and Democratic Politics.