Assembling India’s Constitution: Recovering The Invisible Hands That Built A Republic

Hansa Mehta took her ideas on women’s rights to a United Nations conference, where they were adopted into the report almost word for word. Back home, she sat in the Constituent Assembly and held informal meetings with the other women members to work out how to push for greater representation. In the official record of how India’s Constitution was made, she is barely visible. Rohit De and Ornit Shani went looking for people like her — and found a great many.

Their book, Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History (Penguin Random House / Allen Lane and Cambridge University Press, 2025), longlisted for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize 2026, is a deliberate act of historical recovery.

For decades, the dominant story of India’s founding document has centred on the Constituent Assembly in Delhi: a relatively small, largely elite body of men (and a handful of women) who debated, drafted and finally adopted the Constitution between 1946 and 1949.

De and Shani do not deny the importance of that Assembly. Instead, they turn the camera outwards and downwards, revealing a far more crowded and raucous process of constitution-making that unfolded across the subcontinent and even beyond it.

The authors argue that a founding elite did not simply write the Constitution and hand it down to a grateful people. Instead, multiple, parallel and often competing constitutional conversations shaped its formation.

Ordinary citizens, caste associations, women’s groups, tribal communities, provincial legislatures, judges, civil servants, and the rulers and subjects of the princely states all participated. They sent petitions and resolutions, held public meetings, drafted their own charters and bombarded the Assembly’s secretariat with demands.

The volume of this correspondence was so large that the Assembly’s staff actively encouraged it, even circulating members’ addresses so that citizens could write to them directly.

A Nation Engaged in Constitution-Making

The geographic range is striking. From the remote Himalayan valleys of Spiti and Lahaul to a village deep in Tamil country, from the Chittagong Hill Tracts to the princely states of Saurashtra, and even from the Indian diaspora in Stockton, California, people debated the shape of the future republic.

Many of the roughly 500 princely states produced their own constitutional documents establishing representative institutions — sometimes more progressive and earlier than what was emerging in Delhi. Anti-caste organisations, religious groups of every denomination, disability advocates and child-rights campaigners all staked their claims.

The result, the authors show, was not a top-down imposition but a dense, iterative process of negotiation in which the Assembly often found itself responding to pressure from below.

This public engagement mattered. De and Shani contend that the widespread sense of ownership that ordinary Indians developed over the Constitution helped give the document its unusual legitimacy and endurance.

In a society marked by deep inequality, linguistic diversity and the trauma of Partition, the Constitution survived not merely because of the brilliance of its drafters but because large numbers of people had already invested in it as a tool of struggle and a language of rights. Constitutionalism became a medium through which marginalised groups could make claims, rather than a finished text handed down from on high.

The book complicates familiar critiques. Those who dismiss the Constitution as an elite or colonial artefact must now reckon with the evidence of extensive popular participation. Those who celebrate it solely as the achievement of a few towering figures must confront the thousands of named and unnamed citizens — women like Hansa Mehta among them — whose ideas and demands shaped the final document.

Unfulfilled Visions of Equality

The book examines progressive possibilities, including broader conceptions of women’s rights, that members discussed but ultimately set aside, reminding readers that the Constitution that emerged represented only one of several possible futures.

De, a historian at Yale and author of A People’s Constitution, and Shani, of the University of Haifa and author of How India Became Democratic, bring complementary strengths to the project. Their earlier works already challenged elite-centric narratives of India’s democratic founding. Here, they expand the source base considerably, drawing on underused archival material — petitions, resolutions, provincial records and correspondence — that previous constitutional histories largely ignored. The result is both a work of rigorous scholarship and a compelling act of democratic recovery.

Assembling India’s Constitution does not claim that ‘the people’ simply won. It carefully acknowledges the limits of participation and the hierarchies that persisted. What it insists upon is that the story of India’s constitutional founding remains incomplete without the crowds outside the Assembly hall.

By restoring those voices, De and Shani offer not only a richer history but a more democratic one — one in which the Constitution appears less as a monument erected by its founders and more as a living assembly that the people themselves helped put together. As countries contest constitutionalism across the world, they make this recovery feel both timely and necessary.