by Zainab Firdausi
In Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony (Cambridge University Press, 2024) political theorist Sandipto Dasgupta analyzes the short period in which the historic Indian Constituent Assembly, following the Independence movement’s successful mass mobilizations, navigated the challenges of postcolonial nation-building. This historical vantage point allows Dasgupta to explore the relationship between anticolonialism and postcolonialism in ideal and concrete terms. In this interview with Zainab Firdausi, Dasgupta discusses his book and its place in the often separated literatures on constitutional formation and decolonization.
Zainab Firdausi: In your book, you identify a strong tension between the received historical knowledge about what constitutionalism entails and the act of writing a constitution itself. You argue that the trajectory of constitution-writing in India followed, in part, a constitutional template that was “liberal democratic in vintage and Anglo-American in origin” but nonetheless imagined as universal. Historicizing this constituent moment, you argue, is to “undo reification to acknowledge the specific birthmarks of the postcolonial constitutional form.” To that end, I would like to start with a broad question: can a postcolonial constitution claim historical specificity while also seeking to build a corpus of liberal or universal rights?
Sandipto Dasgupta: That’s a great place to start. It touches upon the question of how to read political theory from the history of the peripheral world. Commonly, the categories or concepts that we work with in political theory are abstracted versions of histories of particular parts of the world. Traditionally, much postcolonial literature has framed this as a conflict between Western “universals” and non-Western “particulars” that negate the former, while other writing disputes this. My approach aligns with the latter group. First, we should examine how certain historical experiences congeal into stable concepts. By historicizing those concepts, we can explore how to reanimate them with their originating contexts and contestations. Second, we should examine the history of each concept’s circulation and reconfiguration in the peripheral world, through both the experience of colonial rule and struggles against it.
This is what I attempt with concepts like “constitution,” “democracy,” “popular sovereignty,” “property,” and so on in this book. Generally, in political science we find a supposedly universal template against which postcolonial countries like India are measured—the question being how much of that template they have or have not adopted. Against this, my goal is not to recover something distinctly “Indian,” but rather to figure out how ideas and institutions like “constitutions” or “democracy” were shaped by the concrete history of the anticolonial struggle and the task of postcolonial founding.
Take the example of constitutions, the focus of the book. When we think of constitutions, we think of a particular normative template which inscribes limited government, basic rights, separation of powers, judicial review, etc. These comprise, more or less, an abstracted version of the American constitutional compact, which America’s postwar hegemony helped to globalize (as superbly described in Aziz Rana’s recent book). This template entirely informs the conventional understanding of constitutions, even though constitutions themselves vary significantly. By historicizing the postcolonial constitutional form, we can rescue the specificity of decolonization’s historical trajectory—in all its promises and contradictions—from the hegemonic template of American constitutional theory, which has its own particular location.
The other point to note is that, for the colonized, a space of conceptual innocence with pure traditions does not exist. There is no indigenous constitutional thought to be recovered against a derivative one. The history of colonialism is one of uneven integrations and circulations. Modern anticolonial movements struggled with, through, and against a “Western” or “universal” conceptual repertoire. In my book, I try to capture the process and outcome of that struggle, rather than to affirm or deny the universality or indigeneity of institutions and ideas.
ZF: Historically, constitutions have preceded the basic state institutions that they seek to bring about. A major way in which Indian constitution-writing differed from attempts elsewhere was the need to adjudicate the newly independent government’s inheritance of the colonial. In 1935, the British Parliament passed the Government of India Act, which enabled provincial autonomy in India and formed the basis of administrative rule in the Indian Constitution. You note the anomalous nature of the Indian case, and echo the critics of the Indian National Congress (INC) by arguing that the constitution was conceived “through the calculus of the state, not the poiesis of popular politics.” What does it mean for the material fact of the state’s apparatus to dictate some formal aspects of the constitution itself?
SD: The Indian constitution’s significant reproduction of the colonial-era Government of India Act has generally been read as evidence of the derivative nature of postcolonial rule, reproducing an old debate about the foreignness versus indigeneity of the constitutional form. Instead, I argue that this borrowing was symptomatic of a larger dynamic: a postcolonial transition authored in the language of the state rather than that of popular politics.
The anticolonial movement was genuinely popular, and the INC that led it was a truly mass party. In the final years leading up to independence, however, the INC’s leadership deliberately restructured the party as a government-in-waiting. The state was not just an inert instrument, but a whole modality, with its own grammar and vision, which the INC’s leaders adopted in place of popular politics to conceive of the construction of the postcolony. Because independence was achieved through a negotiated transfer of power, the postcolonial rulers inherited the colonial state apparatus mostly intact. They even retained the bureaucrats and police that had operated that apparatus and repressed the independence struggle. As I argue in my book, it was not the “people,” real or imagined, who authored the constitution, but rather the professionals and administrators who were well-versed in the technologies of the state.
In crafting the postcolonial constitution, they borrowed from the Government of India Act not due to simple mimicry or a failure to borrow from indigenous tradition but because the Act served as a manual for operating the vast machine of the colonial state. This borrowing, in other words, followed from a turn away from the grammar of popular politics, not any judgment about universality or indigeneity.
ZF: Undergirding the effort to wield institutional power is an assumption that the state or its apparatus are, in many ways, “neutral” and that one can simply wield a certain kind of state capacity towards a new goal. You obviously complicate this in your discussion on rights or the question of social enumeration of minorities, which had caused issues in the colonial period. How did members of the Constituent Assembly navigate this notion of neutrality, especially regarding the more repressive aspects of the state?
SD: Within the Assembly there absolutely was an assumption that the state is, as you put it, a “neutral” instrument that one can use to realize whatever one’s preferred outcome may be. For the colonial state that might have been order and repression; for the postcolonial state it would have to be development and social engineering. And thus, after Independence, the colonial state was inherited rather than rethought or remade in any meaningful way.
But the issue of the presumed “neutrality” of the state manifested itself in the question of social transformation. What was the relationship of the state vis-à-vis the society that it was tasked with transforming? Think of someone like B.R. Ambedkar, who had neither political nor social power. This extraordinary interregnum of constitution-making gave him hope: state and law appeared to attain significant autonomy from various forms of social power because things were still in flux, still undetermined. He believed that if one could take advantage of that moment to design clever instruments and norms for intervention, the state could intercede successfully to address the deeply hierarchical and unequal nature of society. This was the basis of Ambedkar’s poignant faith in law and constitutions.
Almost immediately, Ambedkar’s faith would prove misplaced. Its most significant test was land reform, which demanded state intervention upon the most deeply rooted, localized forms of hierarchies erected around the ownership and control of land. Ultimately, instead of dismantling sources of social power, the latter colonized the state, especially at the local levels. One realizes very quickly that the state is not a neutral apparatus—neither at the level of its central operations nor at the ground level, where it meets society. The state itself became a battleground. Those who already held social power captured the state. As I write in the book, Ambedkar realized that laws, even well-drafted ones, yielded far more easily to power than the other way around.
ZF: From the history laid out in this book, one can see that, in some ways, there existed a lawyer-administrator nexus of influence in the constitutional aftermath of independence. In this battle for the levers of the state, who do you think wins?
SD: Regarding the constitution specifically, the main contestation was between the administrators or technocrats and the lawyers. This was not necessarily a conflict between two distinctive social classes with separable material interests. The lawyers and the administrators belonged to the same class—the educated urban professionals—who assumed the leadership of the anticolonial movement. The differences between them concerned modalities of social change: the administrative versus the juridical.
Differences in how each respective group reaches decisions have great consequence for understanding this history. Lawyers think through individuated disputes, while technocrats think in terms of holistic coordination; lawyers are faithful to precedents, while technocrats are future-oriented; lawyers refer to formal legal norms, while technocrats depend on relevant substantive knowledge; and so on. For members of the Constituent Assembly, the process of gradual social transformation was to be helmed by technocrats, for example through development planning. Since the constitution was designed to facilitate that transformation, the grammar of the administrator was to be the privileged grammar of constitutionalism. As soon as the constitution came into being, lawyers (including judges) challenged this, claiming the privilege for themselves.
Under colonial rule, lawyers were the only indigenous social group who could attain wealth and power without directly depending on the colonial state. They became the most important representatives of the colonized, translating their demands into terms that were legible to the colonial regime. This is why almost every single important political figure of that era, such as Nehru or Gandhi, was a lawyer. When the administrators suggested that the lawyers move aside and allow the administrators alone to handle the social transition, the lawyers were not necessarily willing to cooperate. One sees this conflict develop through a series of court cases over the first decades of independence. This led to Nehru’s seemingly paradoxical statement that the “constitution has been purloined by lawyers,” which only makes sense if we understand that the administrators, rather than the lawyers, were the intended custodians of the constitution.
This protracted conflict revealed competing ideas about what decolonization should mean. For the administrators and technocrats, decolonization meant planning and initiating some sort of socio-economic transformation, with the goal of overcoming the colonial condition of underdevelopment. For the lawyers, however, decolonization meant the restoration of a rule of law previously denied by the colonial executive, allowing India to finally join the common-law world without caveats. So, this was not just intra-elite jockeying for material benefits. Judges did not represent the propertied classes against the progressive administrators, as some have suggested. Rather, what made the lawyers a threat to the project of social transformation and, therefore, the postcolonial constitutional system as originally conceived, was simply the logic they followed as lawyers.
ZF: You criticize the ways in which the constitution discarded popular aspects of the anticolonial movement. But how does India’s embrace of the Bandung Conference (1955) or the Non-Aligned Movement (1961) —through which newly independent countries discussed ways to maintain an international commitment to economic sovereignty—complicate one’s understanding of the relationship between the revolutionary anticolonial movement and the more sober approach to independence that followed? How does Third Worldism fit into this critique of yours?
SD: Your question concerns the relationship between the external and the internal faces of decolonization. Empire consists of not only the bilateral domination of one country by another but also a global political-economic order. So, decolonization as a process had to unfold at both the global and domestic levels. My book focuses more on the latter, but let me specify its relationship to the global level.
The global story of decolonization is, on the one hand, a story of ambitious institutional and ideational attempts to establish a non-hierarchical, postimperial world order. On the other hand, neocolonial pushback persisted, imposing continued peripheral dependence. Therefore, one can rightly place the blame for the ultimate exhaustion of the decolonization project at the feet of the metropole.
However, I want to argue that there is another trajectory unfolding within those countries that explains this exhaustion. To be successful, anticolonial movements had to become popular movements—that is, they had to mobilize the masses. Yet, as I mentioned earlier, the very success of that mobilization generated anxiety among the elites. As a result, there was a deliberate distancing of the postcolonial institutions from the popular political expressions of the anticolonial cause. This separation of the popular from institutional politics was, to my mind, a separation of the anticolonial and the postcolonial, and it shaped postcolonial political life.
This distancing explains why the worldmaking potentials of decolonization remain unrealized. Revolutions require revolutionaries. The postcolonial ruling elites deliberately distanced themselves from the only agents that could have played that role in this case: the anticolonial popular movements. I am, of course, not the first one to think along these lines. Many postcolonial thinkers, including most famously Frantz Fanon, have made versions of this critique, and I draw from their ideas.
ZF: Could you provide an instance in which the Constituent Assembly abandoned, perhaps egregiously, popular ideas from the anticolonial movement?
SD: The obvious answer to this would be “democracy.” The expansive anticolonial idea of democracy as popular political participation got deflated into postcolonial electoralism. But I have talked a lot about this theme, so let me go with a different answer: property. In colonized countries, large property owners, especially landlords, acquired their property via acts of the colonial state and acted as state collaborators. For the vast majority of the population, the most immediate experience of colonial oppression and injustice had to do with property, either through control of land or indebtedness. All of this meant that the anticolonial cause generated, by its own logic, a wide-ranging critique of private property and ownership. If property’s power is mystified in the metropole by the distinction between the public and the private—corresponding to politics and the economy, respectively—such distinctions were impossible to sustain in the colonies. The INC (and anticolonial parties in other places) expressed such a strong commitment to land reform and nationalization because these were popular demands. However, when formulating a postcolonial regime of property, the ruling elites tried to eliminate only some of the most egregious examples of colonial property regimes—foreign monopolies, forced labor, absentee landlords—rather than to rethink property after empire more comprehensively.
ZF: How does the Constituent Assembly’s endorsement of universal suffrage fit in with the more technocratic aspects of the newly independent Indian state?
SD: We need to appreciate how remarkable the story of postcolonial universal suffrage was. In Europe, it took over a century for everyone to get the vote, but in India, where the overwhelming majority of citizens were propertyless and illiterate, universal suffrage burst forth in one go.
The credit for this goes entirely to the popular nature of the anticolonial struggle. I have already mentioned this, but let me expand a bit more. Anticolonial movements had to be popular—not incidentally or contingently, but irreducibly. This was the case both conceptually and practically.
Ideologically, colonial rule based itself on the supposition that the colonized lacked the capacity to govern themselves. Against this, the anticolonial cause had to assert the people’s capacity as self-governing political agents. Conceptually, therefore, all anticolonial movements claimed power in the name of popular sovereignty. Practically, such a claim required building mass anticolonial parties that could politicize and organize the people. The Indian independence movement was one of the more successful versions of this.
Since the claim to independence based itself upon the notion that all Indians possessed the political capacity for self-government, it became very difficult to say, after winning the anticolonial struggle, that some Indians could not be trusted with the vote. Universal franchise was thus not a gift from a collection of enlightened founding fathers; along with the independence of the country, it was won by the people through their political actions. I talked earlier about distinctions between the anticolonial and the postcolonial. Well, universal suffrage was one of the most explicit legacies of the anticolonial cause among postcolonial institutions: one instance where the postcolonial was unambiguously anticolonial.
ZF: Lastly, could you describe your methodology in this book? You move between a corpus of political theory, historical archives of events, and the voluminous Constituent Assembly debates.
SD: Deriving conceptual and theoretical claims from a set of practices and historical experiences posed a methodological challenge. Political theorists are usually trained to work with particular authors and texts and reconstruct a coherent system of thought or arguments. Here, however, I was dealing with contemporaneous records and acts, full of contingencies and contradictions.
This relates to how I read my primary source: the Constituent Assembly debates. When constitutional or legal scholars read these debates, their tendency is to look for abiding principles or justifications, for coherence. Instead, I approach these debates as a record of the fraught project of postcolonial transition as viewed by those who were tasked with navigating it. What interests me are conflicts and contradictions, the thorny questions and their (ir)resolutions. What were the promises opened or paths abandoned? To which questions did the Assembly seek answers? This in turn required me to bring together the intricacies of constitutional formation with the tumultuous histories of decolonization—two areas of inquiry that rarely speak to each other. As I write in the book, my methodological wager was that the history of decolonization could give us insight into constitutions, and vice versa: an analysis of the constitution-making project can provide insight into the dynamics of decolonization.
Sandipto Dasgupta is Assistant Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He earned his PhD at Columbia University.
Zainab Firdausi is a PhD candidate in Political Theory at Yale University. Her current research is on historical and political justifications of the administrative state.
Edited by Alec Israeli.
Featured Image: Jawaharlal Nehru and other members taking pledge during the midnight session of the Constituent Assembly of India held on 14 and 15 August 1947, via Wikimedia Commons.
