ABSTRACT
The Indian Constitution (IC) has been considered in terms of its intertextual relationships with preceding colonial and other political documents, such as the Government of India Act 1935. This essay relocates the IC in intertextual relationships with anti-colonial autobiographies from the same period. James Tully argues that a post-imperial language of constitutionalism has to recognise and accommodate appropriate forms and degrees of self-rule in accordance with diverse customs and ways (4-6, 55). Amongst other things, anti-colonial Indian autobiographies and texts such as Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909) are textual experiments dramatising different modes of self-rule, mixing global, Indian and regional levels of identity in doing so. So, too, the IC combines its cosmopolitan inception with a rootedness in India as it defines self-rule. Widening the discursive sites of the IC to include anti-colonial autobiographies raises questions about the IC as a species of
autobiography itself, but it also points to tensions between the two and it can give us another perspective on the tensions within the IC itself. Both the IC and anti-colonial autobiographies are marked by processes of dialogue, and this essay begins with the cosmopolitan nature of these in the former.
