New Delhi, July 6 -- The making of India's Constitution is usually told as the story of the few hundred prominent lawyers, politicians, and intellectuals who comprised the Constituent Assembly-the body tasked with drafting this historic document between 1946 and 1949. But a new book by scholars Rohit De and Ornit Shani, Assembling India's Constitution: A New Democratic History, argues this familiar account captures only part of the story. Drawing on a remarkable range of archival material, the book shows that constitution-making was not confined to the halls of the Constituent Assembly alone. It also played out in provincial legislatures, princely states, government offices, civic associations, and communities across India. Ordinary citizens debated the constitution, petitioned its authors, organised around it, and creatively sought to shape its provisions. De and Shani spoke about the book and its relevance for our understanding of India's democratic evolution on a recent episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. De, who is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic, told host Milan Vaishnav that the book offers a "paradigm shift." While the conventional view has been that the Constitution emerged from a coherent set of debates happening in the Constituent Assembly, the book argues that this setting was just one node in a much larger set of conversations. "To understand both the shape the Constitution took and its future career, we have to look at the engagements that happened outside the Assembly," De explained. "Some of these engagements involved thousands of people and organisations writing to the Assembly and, in the course of writing, also meeting, debating, and engaging with these ideas within their own communities. The members of the Assembly themselves were not isolated actors." Shani, who is an associate professor of Asian Studies at Haifa University and the author of How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise, argued that ordinary citizens managed to engage the Assembly using English, even though it was not widely spoken at the time. "The public made deliberate efforts to both speak in the language of the Constituent Assembly and translate what was happening at the Constituent Assembly," she said. "So, when tribal groups, for example, made the effort to send memoranda written in English to the Assembly, should we dismiss that because it was written in English? Or should we see the effort they made to speak to the Constituent Assembly in its own language in order to pursue their demands?" In fact, De remarked that activism by Dalit communities helped lock-in progressive anti-caste provisions in the Constitution. "The conventional narrative is that the abolition of untouchability and a dramatic change to the caste order were inevitably going to happen," he said. "But the Constituent Assembly itself had no separate representation for Dalit members." De said the archives revealed that there was a convention of Dalit and tribal members of the Assembly, as well as legislatures across India, that came together to create a common platform of demands. "They sent those demands not just to Assembly members but also to all 700 members of the British Parliament.They were not sent as requests, but as assertions-assertions based on a history of discrimination, but also on a claim around numbers," he explained....