Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2025
This chapter offers a new way of understanding the workings of the Indian Constituent Assembly. We move beyond studying the script, or the published Constituent Assembly debates, making visible the labour, infrastructure and ideas that went into the staging and the atmospherics of the assembly itself as a public and a lived space. The procedural rituals, the pulse of the debates, and the physical setting of the Constituent Assembly building enabled and shaped the constitution-making process. We follow a few actors from the Constituent Assembly as they moved across different assemblies in India and abroad while the constitution was still in the making. In doing so, we reveal the Indian constitution’s part in an emerging international regime of human rights and practice of comparative constitutional law and reconstruct a sense of the everyday ordinary life of the Assembly, which was deeply connected with the Indian public and the world outside.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.