It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India's greater population. Drawing upon the previously ...unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India,A People's Constitutionupends this narrative and shows how the Constitution actually transformed the daily lives of citizens in profound and lasting ways. This remarkable legal process was led by individuals on the margins of society, and Rohit De looks at how drinkers, smugglers, petty vendors, butchers, and prostitutes-all despised minorities-shaped the constitutional culture.
The Constitution came alive in the popular imagination so much that ordinary people attributed meaning to its existence, took recourse to it, and argued with it. Focusing on the use of constitutional remedies by citizens against new state regulations seeking to reshape the society and economy, De illustrates how laws and policies were frequently undone or renegotiated from below using the state's own procedures. De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist's contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders' challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers' petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers' battle to protect their right to practice prostitution.
Exploring how the Indian Constitution of 1950 enfranchised the largest population in the world,A People's Constitutionconsiders the ways that ordinary citizens produced, through litigation, alternative ethical models of citizenship.
India became independent on August 15, 1947, and became a democratic republic on January 26, 1950. For the three years in between it functioned as a British dominion, where unelected Indian ...nationalist leaders were administered oaths in the name of the King-Emperor by a British Viceroy. While this was a critical period for establishing the Indian state, as borders were fixed, populations exchanged, industries set up, electoral lists created, and the constitution written, the legal infrastructure of dominionhood has been ignored both in scholarly literature and in political writings. Central to the article is the problem that Dominion status creates for legal temporality, a gray zone between colony and a republic. This article excavates this neglected period, arguing that it is critical to understanding both the endurance of India's postcolonial constitution and democracy and the legal processes of decolonization within the British Empire. The article examines the peculiarities of the debate over dominion status for India after World War I. Within the British Empire, India had a legal status somewhat less than dominion but higher than a colony, due to the failure to accommodate racial difference within imperial federalism. It then investigates the reasons behind the British government and Indian nationalists both accepting Dominion status in 1947 despite having opposed it for almost two decades. Finally, it examines how the "dominion period" is both a problem and a resource for the judicial construction of time and constitutional legitimacy in republican India.
Jan 26, 2020 marked the seventieth anniversary of the Indian Constitution. Official celebrations focused on memorializing the "fundamental duties" of the citizen in the constitution that range from ..."respecting public property and adjuring violence" to "respecting the national flag and national anthem." In striking contrast, hundreds of thousands of Indian citizens gathered in the streets protesting the changes to the citizenship law by affirming constitutional values of equality, liberty, fraternity, and justice through public recitations of the preamble.
Three‐dimensional structures that undergo reversible shape changes in response to mild stimuli enable a wide range of smart devices, such as soft robots or implantable medical devices. Herein, a dual ...thiol‐ene reaction scheme is used to synthesize a class of liquid crystal (LC) elastomers that can be 3D printed into complex shapes and subsequently undergo controlled shape change. Through controlling the phase transition temperature of polymerizable LC inks, morphing 3D structures with tunable actuation temperature (28 ± 2 to 105 ± 1 °C) are fabricated. Finally, multiple LC inks are 3D printed into single structures to allow for the production of untethered, thermo‐responsive structures that sequentially and reversibly undergo multiple shape changes.
Novel inks for printable liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are reported herein. The 3D‐printed LCE structures undergo controlled and reversible shape change upon heating. By controlling the reaction parameters (e.g., reaction type, mesogen concentration, or crosslinking density), a wide range of LCEs are synthesized and characterized for their use as soft actuators.
In early 1943, Lord Wilfred Green, the Master of Rolls and the head of the Chancery Division of the British judiciary, authored a secret memorandum proposing that the Judicial Committee of the Privy ...Council become a “peripatetic court” that would travel throughout the British Empire. This article explores the origins and politics of this proposal to provide a critical re-description of the role of the Privy Council and the circulation of law within the British Empire.
It was a hot afternoon on 10 April 1950, in the town of Chapra in the eastern Indian province of Bihar. As most people had retired indoors to avoid the heat, the women's clothing store run by Kedar ...Nath had suddenly become a hive of activity. His munib (accountant) had gone home early on receiving news of the sudden illness of his son, and his shop had been visited by the local Magistrate and the Deputy Superintendent of Police, the leading figures in the district administration. The Magistrate, Mr S. K Ghatak, ordered Kedar Nath to open up his stores and make his registers available, and in this process discovered that Nath had twenty-five more saris than were accounted for in the stock register. Kedar Nath's relation protested that the saris had been bought that very morning, and that his munib's unexpected absence had resulted in the stocks not being updated immediately. The district officials were not convinced and Kedar Nath was arrested for not having proper accounts of the clothes in his stock. The district court convicted Kedar Nath for violating the terms of Bihar Cotton, Cloth and Yarn (Control Order) 1948, and the Essential Supplies (Temporary Powers) Act 1946 (ESA), and sentenced him to a fine and a month of rigorous imprisonment.
On June 27, 1940, Vera Tiscenko, a Polish actress formerly with the Moscow Arts Theatre, “of her own free will and after due deliberation” embraced the Islamic faith at the Nakoda Mosque at 19 ...Chowringee Road, Calcutta. Vera Tiscenko's journey from Moscow to colonial Calcutta was a long and tortuous one. Fleeing the country after the revolution, Vera settled in Berlin where she married a Russian émigré, Eugene Tiscenko. Over the next few years they moved across Europe from Nazi Berlin to civil war Spain and finally settled in Mussolini's Rome, where Vera gave birth to a son, Oleg. In 1938, Eugene Tiscenko went to Edinburgh to qualify for a British medical degree, while Vera and her son left Rome for Calcutta after being invited by Professor Shahid Suhrawardy, her former director at the Moscow Arts Theatre. The reason for the separation between the couple remains unclear. Chief Justice Derbyshire was to speculate that Eugene Tiscenko might have intended to settle somewhere in British India after qualifying, but Vera herself admitted that the marriage had been unhappy. Finding “relief and solace in the teachings of Islam,” she cabled her husband the news of her conversion and requested that he accept the Islamic faith. Eugene Tiscenko replied that his religious convictions were unshakable and “refused absolutely” to change his faith.
In this article, Inderpal Grewal and Rohit De discuss the history of the application of India’s law against sedition in relation to questions of sexuality and gender. The conversation between them ...frames the project of modernity and the state in each of these two scholars’ work, and the ways in which questions of modernity intersect those of “national” and “anti-national” subjectivation. Here, they are interested in how modernity has been formulated in relation to nations, nationalism and commensurate reform movements, and how critiquing these relationships is so deeply informed by feminist scholarship on South Asia, by feminist scholarship on race and ethnicity in the US, and the critique of empire in all of these bodies of work.
Abstract The framing of India’s constitution was a critical event in the global history of both constitution-making and democracy. Conventionally it has been analysed as a founding moment. Its ...success against multiple odds has been explained as resulting from a vision and consensus among the elite over what would become a pedagogical text for an ‘ignorant’ and undemocratic public. This focus among academics on political elites, and an underlying assumption that constitutional details were beyond the public’s imagination, limited the scope of investigations largely to the Constituent Assembly debates. By directing the inquiry away from these debates towards hitherto unstudied documents, this article offers a paradigm shift in the method of research and understanding of India’s constitution-making. It explores the constitution as it emerged from beyond the Constituent Assembly through engagement with its making among diverse publics. In doing so, it shows that the Indian constitution was not simply founded and granted from above, but came about through many smaller acts of assembly away from the Constitution Hall. It was the public who set normative expectations and tried to educate the members of the Constituent Assembly, and this was critical for the constitution’s future reception and endurance.
PDF
