BOOK REVIEW
By Siddharth S Mohan
About the Reviewer
This book review of Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History by Rohit De and Ornit Shani is authored by Siddharth S. Mohan, a First Semester student of the Five-Year B.A. LL.B. programme at Government Law College, Thiruvananthapuram.
“I feel like it is workable; it is flexible, and it is strong enough to hold the country together both in peace time and in war time. Indeed, if I may say so, if things go wrong under the new Constitution, the reason will not be that we had a bad Constitution.” — B. R. Ambedkar
Assembling India’s Constitution offers a profound rethinking of how India’s Constitution came into being. Moving away from elite-centric narratives, the book presents constitution-making as a deeply participatory, contested, and unfinished democratic process. The authors demonstrate that the Constitution was not merely drafted by the Constituent Assembly but was shaped by ordinary Indians who actively imagined, debated, and demanded rights even before the Constitution formally came into force.
About the Authors
This decentralized history is the work of Rohit De, an Associate Professor of History at Yale University and a legal historian recognized for his research on the “everyday life” of the Indian Constitution, and Ornit Shani, a Professor of Modern South Asian History at the University of Haifa whose scholarship has documented the bureaucratic origins of India’s universal franchise. Together, they shift the focus from the Assembly Hall to the collective mobilization of the public.
Although the Constituent Assembly began its work six months before the decision to partition India and was dominated by the Indian National Congress, the real arena of constitution-making extended far beyond the Assembly Hall. The Constitution functioned as a language and practice through which struggles rooted in caste, class, gender, religion, disability, and regional identity were negotiated.
The book highlights how letters, memoranda, and petitions sent to the Assembly were the culmination of collective mobilisation by marginalised groups. Women’s organisations, child welfare groups, disabled associations, and religious minorities articulated sophisticated constitutional visions. The All India Women’s Conference, under Hansa Mehta’s leadership, viewed the Constitution as an opportunity to reconstruct national life and secure substantive equality.
Language emerges as a key theme. While there was no single all-India language, efforts were made to translate public correspondence into multiple Indian languages, revealing both democratic intent and structural limits. Despite not being formally invited, the public demanded participation, transparency, and scrutiny, expecting a transformative Constitution capable of dismantling entrenched social hierarchies.
The book also situates constitution-making alongside the trauma of Partition. With borders and authority uncertain, constitutional drafting became inseparable from violence and displacement. Yet the process endured, reflecting faith in constitutionalism as a vehicle for social change. Tribal aspirations, however, were largely ignored, replaced by administrative schemes rather than self-articulated constitutional guarantees. This exclusion later necessitated statehood movements and special provisions, revealing the limits of participatory constitutionalism.
A central argument of the book is that Indians did not approach the Constitution as subjects petitioning future rulers, but as citizens asserting ownership. Constitutional politics did not end with adoption; groups immediately critiqued its silences on education, employment, and social security. As Hansa Mehta observed, the Constitution is an open site of struggle. Its worth lies not in textual perfection but in how it works in the interest of the people. Assembling India’s Constitution is not a history of winners and losers, but of enduring public constitutional struggle. It shows that Indian democracy was not inherited or gifted—it was assembled, contested, and remains unfinished.
