Book Panel | Rohit De and Ornit Shani - Assembling India's Constitution: A New Democratic History
Join co-authors Rohit De and Ornit Shani for a conversation on their recently released book, Assembling India's Constitution: A New Democratic History, featuring discussants David Engerman, Karuna Mantena, and Nazmul Sultan.
In this paradigm-shifting history, Rohit De and Ornit Shani re-examine the making of the Indian constitution from the perspective of the country's people. In a departure from dominant approaches that foreground the framing of the text within the Constituent Assembly, they instead demonstrate how it was shaped by diverse publics across India and beyond. They reveal multiple, parallel constitution-making processes underway across the subcontinent, highlighting how individuals and groups transformed constitutionalism into a medium of struggle and a tool for transformation. The book presents a rich tapestry of these interactions, describing how many of the 500 princely states adopted constitutional documents establishing forms of representative government; discussing the contributions received by the Constituent Assembly from associations of women, Dalits, upper and lower castes, and religious groups of every faith and denomination; outlining the contributions from provincial legislatures, the judiciary and the civil service, and finally reviewing the important demands made by some tribal communities. De and Shani argue that the deep sense of ownership the public assumed over the constitution became pivotal to the formation, legitimacy, and endurance of India's democracy against arduous challenges and many odds. In highlighting the Indian case as a model for thinking through constitution-making in plural societies, this is a vital contribution to constitutional and democratic history.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Rohit De is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the South Asian Studies Council at Yale University. He is a historian of South Asia and the British common law world. He is the author of A People's Constitution: The Everyday Law in the Indian Republic (2018).
Ornit Shani is an Associate Professor in the history of India’s democracy and South Asia politics at the University of Haifa and is the Henry Hart Rice Visiting Professor at Yale University in Spring 2025. She is the author of How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise (2018).
David Engerman is the Leitner International Interdisciplinary Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University. A historian of twentieth-century international and economic thought, his research explores the global politics of development, modernization, and inequality. Engerman is the author of several influential books, including Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (2003), Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (2009), The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (2018), and Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made (2025).
Karuna Mantena is Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and co-director of the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought (CSPT). She specializes in political theory with research interests in the history of political thought, the theory and history of empire, South Asian intellectual history, and postcolonial democracy. Karuna is the author of Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (2010). She is currently finishing a book on Gandhi and the politics of nonviolence.
Nazmul Sultan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. His research interests include the history of political thought, empire and anticolonial thought, democratic theory, and ideas of the global. His first book, Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought (2024), examines how a foundational set of disputes over the terms of modern peoplehood underwrote the formation of the democratic project in colonial India. His current projects focus on reconstructing the intellectual history of the postcolonial state in mid-century political thought and investigating the global condition of modern political thought.