ABSTRACT
Granville Austin, an independent historian and an authority on the Indian Constitution goes on to suggest that the paintings in the Constitution of India were a part of the vision to establish the new nation’s exclusivity. e framing of the Constitution as a political document and India’s long and distinguished past occupied different periods of time and different levels of reality. e makers of the Constitution were aware that they “could not transform the India of today into the India of Rigvedic times” as articulated by the distinguished parliamentarian Seth Govind Das (1896-1974) in Hindi, but at the same time there was a need to underscore that “the civilization and culture which is the heritage of our early history . . . should not be rejected by us.”2 e visuals helped introduce a different level of reality into the modern political document; they provided a cultural context to the guiding principles of independent India; and most of all they restored the balance between the past and the present.
