Decolonization and India’s Constitutional Order

Anticolonial movements of the 20th century generated audacious ideas of freedom. After decolonization, however, the challenge was to give an institutional form to those radical ideas.

Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony is a new book by the scholar Sandipto Dasgupta which provides an innovative account of how India ultimately addressed this daunting challenge.

It's a fresh, somewhat revisionist look at the making of the postcolonial constitutional order and tries to place the current crisis of liberal democracy in proper historical and conceptual context.

Sandipto is an assistant professor of politics at the New School for Social Research, where he works on the history of modern political and social thought, especially the political theory of empire, decolonization, and postcolonial order.

To talk more about his book, Sandipto joins Milan on the podcast this week. They discuss the two-way relationship between decolonization and constitution-making, the absence of representation unity between the Congress Party and the masses, and why India’s leaders believed a planned economy would forestall a social revolution. Plus, the two discuss how the absence—rather than the excesses—of democracy have led to rising majoritarianism.

Episode notes:

1. “Republic Day Episode: Madhav Khosla on India’s Founding Moment,” Grand Tamasha, January 28, 2020.

2. Sandipto Dasgupta, “Gandhi’s Failure: Anticolonial Movements,” Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 3 (2017).

3. Sandipto Dasgupta, “‘A Language Which Is Foreign to Us’: Continuities and Anxieties in the Making of the Indian Constitution,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, no. 2 (2014): 228–242.