Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-54dcc4c588-42vt5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-09-29T06:22:47.497Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - The Theatre of the Assembly

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2025

Rohit De
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
Ornit Shani
Affiliation:
University of Haifa, Israel
Get access

Summary

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.

Information

Type
Chapter
Information
Assembling India’s Constitution
A New Democratic History
, pp. 201 - 267
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.

Save book to Kindle

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.

  • The Theatre of the Assembly
  • Rohit De, Yale University, Connecticut, Ornit Shani, University of Haifa, Israel
  • Book: Assembling India’s Constitution
  • Online publication: 24 September 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009330046.007
Available formats
×

Save book 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 Dropbox.

  • The Theatre of the Assembly
  • Rohit De, Yale University, Connecticut, Ornit Shani, University of Haifa, Israel
  • Book: Assembling India’s Constitution
  • Online publication: 24 September 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009330046.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

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.

  • The Theatre of the Assembly
  • Rohit De, Yale University, Connecticut, Ornit Shani, University of Haifa, Israel
  • Book: Assembling India’s Constitution
  • Online publication: 24 September 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009330046.007
Available formats
×