ABSTRACT
When India attained independence in 1947, one of the hopes was that the new nation state would, at long last, represent the true concerns of the people of India. In fact, the language of the Preamble of the Indian Constitution, with its evocation of ‘We the people of India’, evokes precisely the sentiment that, finally, the newly freed India belonged to Indians. The question posed very sharply by this exploration is whether this shift at the level of the Constitution percolated down to the practices of colonial governance. Did some of the more egregious British methods to dominate and subordinate Indians depart with the British or did they somehow remain within the newly constructed nation? In particular, did the noxious colonial practice of firing on unarmed people, which found its most horrific expression in Jallianwala Bagh in 1920, depart with the British?
