ABSTRACT
This essay recounts the author’s shift from focusing on the normative architecture of Indian liberal thought to a critical examination of histories of power that undergirded the story of the Indian constitution. Through discussions in seminars and other conversations with Dipesh, the author came to recognize not only the place of power in the production of the past but the limits of the binary between colony and nation. Thus, studying the Montagu Chelmsford Reforms of 1919 revealed a shared language of politics between the colonial state and Indian nationalists that excluded the masses. Was it surprising, then, that the colonial state could enact a liberal constitutional reform (for those sections of the population that could be represented) and an equally repressive Rowlatt Act (to control the vast majority who had not yet attained the right to represent themselves) in the same year? Not much later, seeking to understand the Indian constitution – and its making and unmaking – the author focused on the history of politics of the late colonial period in order to explore the contentions between colonialism and constitutionalism as well as the tensions between nationalism and constitutionalism. Such a history of politics not only foregrounds the acute limits of the imperialist and nationalist schools, but it saliently showcases the possibility of rethinking Indian constitutional history by exploring the articulations of those individuals and groups who saw the emancipatory potential of the document exactly on account of its underlying contentions and tensions.
