Even after seven decades since it came into force, examinations of the Indian Constitution remain partial and incomplete. It is not widely known that the original ratified copy of the Constitution also makes a visual argument through the opening pages of every part. These elaborately crafted artworks, which are entirely negated in Indian scholarship, are structured in the form of a teleological and linear narrative, encompassing a claim of an unbroken link to an immemorial civilisation. Based on archival research and a hermeneutic that combines imaginal analysis, literary theory, historical scholarship and constitutional jurisprudence, this article will demonstrate that these constitutive images are the aesthetic foundation that imaginally binds the constitutional subject and the collective citizenry, and this article will show how its negation is closely tied to a foundational ambivalence that endures in constitutional law.

As a means to resolve the Tribal Question in India, the centrality of the Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the Indian Constitution is widely acknowledged. However, their final incorporation, despite intense nationalist opposition in the run-up to Indian Independence, remains historically unexplained. This article addresses this lacuna by reconstructing the circumstances under which the Indian National Congress came to accept scheduling as a viable method of providing protection to tribal communities. This strategic shift can be explained as a result of combined political pressures generated by communist-led tribal movements and a steadily mounting challenge heralded by a new stream of educated middle-class tribal activists in eastern India. Foremost among the latter was Jaipal Singh Munda who mobilized a large constituency of supporters demanding a separate province of Jharkhand. Taken together, there is enough evidence to prove that in the period 1937–1950, the tribes were not silent and their collective agency had a deep impact on the constitution-making process. Finally, the article argues that this period witnessed a significant change in the character of the Congress as erstwhile freedom-fighters turned into ruling elites.

India’s parliament has passed the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Act of 2022 following a lengthy debate. Legislation is being introduced to rescind the 1920 Identification of Prisoners Act, which permitted the use of identification and investigative methods on detainees. The 2022 Act’s expanded definition of measurements includes iris and retina scans, behavioural traits like handwriting, fingerprint imprints and palm impressions (and their analysis), and physical and biological samples. When reporting measurements, the phrase “and their analysis” implies that profiles can be generated from a variety of sources of information. The Act stipulates that measurements are to be preserved in digital or electronic form for 75 years. This article intends to assess the Act’s potential misuse and possible violation of fundamental rights such as the right to equality and privacy of those covered by the Act. Additionally, the author wishes to provide a concise explanation of the Act and numerous other related issues.

The India-Pakistan relationship and its hold over Kashmir is often described by words such as deadlock, intractability, and stalemate; conveying a geopolitics of “stuckness.” Within conditions of postcolonial era colonialism, and at the intersection of constitutional law and literature, this article explores this stuckness as a jurisdictional crisis. A constitution first and foremost constitutes jurisdictions. Appropriation of land by delimiting the earth, marking out territories, enclosures, boundaries, and visible divisions is the necessary condition for the very possibility of law. How does the Indian constitution constitute the jurisdictional conditions of Kashmir? And how does one read for these jurisdictional conditions in literature? This article is more specifically interested in literary representations of jurisdictional crisis in the contemporary Kashmir novel. It argues that the constitutional politics and history that created the jurisdictional conditions of Kashmir produce a “performance of stuckness” in Kashmir literature.