Book Extract | Our Living Constitution: A Concise Introduction & Commentary by Shashi Tharoor

Many would have argued that the task was impossible— that India was too riven by contradictions to be considered one country at all.

Book Extract

Excerpted with permission from Our Living Constitution: A Concise Introduction & Commentary by Shashi Tharoor, published by Aleph Book Company.

The Vision of the Founders

The context behind the Constitution’s adoption was the world’s first major triumph of decolonization in the twentieth century, the birth of India as a free nation from the ashes of the British Raj. At midnight on 15 August 1947, independent India was born. Its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, described the hour as ‘a tryst with destiny…a moment… which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.’ With those words he launched India on a remarkable journey—remarkable because it was happening at all. ‘India,’ Winston Churchill had once snarled, ‘is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator.’ Although Churchill was often wrong about India, it is true that no other country in the world embraces the extraordinary mixture of ethnic groups, profusion of mutually incomprehensible languages, varieties of topography and climate, diversity of religions and cultural practices, and range of levels of economic development that India does. Could a united nation be welded from such a congeries, and what kind of Constitution could hope to hold it together while enabling progress and social transformation in an environment of freedom, human rights, and personal liberty?

Many would have argued that the task was impossible— that India was too riven by contradictions to be considered one country at all. Those contradictions were repeatedly stressed by British rulers in self-justification for their rule. Like Churchill, the British statesman and writer Benjamin Disraeli (who memorably said that ‘a nation is a work of art and a work of time’, gradually created by a variety of influences, including climate, soil, religion, customs, manners, historical incidents and accidents, and so on, which ‘form the national mind’), argued that India was not a nation: it lacked a common language, a common religion, a shared tradition, a historical experience, a cohesive majority, and a defined territory, all of which he regarded as the essential ingredients of a nation. But Indian nationalists had an effective riposte.

India is a country held together, in the words of Nehru, ‘by strong but invisible threads...a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive.’ (Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, Calcutta: Signet Press, 1946.) The challenge of defining India is immense. It is a land of snow peaks and tropical jungles, with twenty-two major languages (listed in the Constitution) and over 20,000 distinct ‘dialects’ (including some of which are spoken by more people than Swedish, Maori, or Estonian), inhabited in the middle of the third decade of the twenty-first century by more than 1.4 billion individuals of almost every ethnic extraction known to humanity. It has given birth to four major religions and offers a home to many more; it preaches doctrines of spirituality and wisdom, anchored in universalism and inclusivity, while still being afflicted by a caste system that visits grave disabilities upon millions of its people. It has two major classical music traditions (Carnatic and Hindustani) to go with innumerable folk disciplines; multiple classical dance forms (Kathakali, Kuchipudi, Bharata Natyam, Kathak, Manipuri, Odissi, and so on) that create a rich jambalaya of diverse cultures transmitted through gurus directly mentoring select students; and by far the largest film industry in the world.

In the phrase of the American poet Walt Whitman, it is vast; it contains multitudes. And yet, the notion of Bharatvarsha in the Rig Veda, of a land stretching from the Himalaya to the seas, contained the original territorial notion of India; for the bounds imposed by the mountains and the oceans created common bonds as well, making the conception of India as one civilization inhabiting a coherent territorial space and a shared history truly timeless. There are deep continuities, therefore, in the imagining of Indian nationhood, which transcend centuries of internal division. Even if ‘nationalism’ as a concept arose in Europe in the nineteenth century, people everywhere had a sense of belonging to communities larger than themselves: after all, the notion of the Muslim ummah, or the Vedanta philosopher Adi Shankaracharya’s conception of Hinduism’s sacred geography, both imply large communities that people could identify with. In this sense it is not contradictory to argue that India is an ‘old’ nation, even though ‘nation’ is a new concept. But the nation became a salient political category in India only with the anti-colonial struggle, the case for collective self-government, and the dawn of democracy.

So long as India was governed by monarchs or empires, Indians were subjects, and the question of identification was often more cultural than political. As Indians became citizens, the story changed. But the framers of the Constitution had to take the traditional idea of India and anchor it in a Constitution to create a modern nation based on a certain conception of human rights and citizenship, vigorously backed by a spirit of fraternity, and equality before the law. Earlier conceptions of India drew their inspiration from mythology and theology. The modern idea of India, despite the mystical influence of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore, and the spiritual and moral influences of Mahatma Gandhi, is a robustly secular and legal construct based upon the vision and intellect of our Founding Fathers, notably (in alphabetical order!) Ambedkar, Nehru, and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

Ambedkar, born an ‘untouchable’ (Dalit), a brilliant intellectual with degrees in economics and law from the finest US and British universities, envisioned a society based on equality, justice, and liberty. He emphasized the importance of constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the protection of individual rights, aiming to eradicate social inequalities, particularly untouchability, and to ‘annihilate’ the caste system. The patrician Nehru, born a child of privilege, rose to the pinnacle of the nationalist movement with a vision to build a secular, democratic, and industrialized India.

He championed parliamentary democracy, secularism, and socialism, focusing on economic development through state intervention and planning, and seeing the Constitution as an instrument of social and economic transformation. Patel, a doughty lawyer from farming stock, a steel-willed organizer and convinced Gandhian, shared few of the ideological views of the other two. His vision centred on national unity and strong governance, administrative efficiency and national security; with tough pragmatism, he played a crucial role in integrating the 565 ‘princely states’ into the Indian union. All three men converged on the core objectives of the Constitution: to constitute a nation, ensure its democracy, and enable its social and economic development. The Preamble of the Constitution itself is the most eloquent enumeration of their shared vision. In its description of the defining traits of the Indian republic, and its conception of justice, of liberty, of equality and fraternity, it firmly establishes the basis of the national project.

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Shashi Tharoor Our Living Constitution: A Concise Introduction & Commentary Aleph Book Company, 2025. Hb. Pp.128

The Constitution of India is of paramount importance to every Indian. It bestows fundamental rights on all citizens, speaks in their name, charges those it empowers to protect these rights, and seeks to shield the people from abusers of power and privilege. It creates the basic framework of our democracy, including the three main organs of the state—the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. The Constitution defines their powers, delimits their jurisdictions, demarcates their responsibilities, and regulates their relationships with one another, and with the people. It privileges an idea of India that transcends religious, ethnic, linguistic, and other sub-national identities. In the words of its principal architect, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar: ‘Our Constitution provides us a magnificent structure beneath which all Indians, of all castes, creeds and languages, can equally seek shelter.’

Yet, despite its significance and value, and the fact that it seems to be in vogue at the moment, not many have a proper understanding of the various aspects of the Constitution that are currently being debated and challenged. Although there have been numerous studies and interpretations of the Constitution there are few accessible books available to intelligent lay readers to enable them to familiarize themselves with its essential elements, history, and immeasurable grandeur. Our Living Constitution seeks to fill that gap.

With the clear-eyed scholarship, cogent arguments, and readable prose that are the hallmarks of his books, bestselling writer and leading public intellectual Shashi Tharoor provides readers with a compelling narrative about the world’s longest written national Constitution. He describes the various parts of the Constitution, beginning with its resounding preamble and then goes on to explain its historical roots. He explores the civic nationalism that animated India’s Founding Fathers, which in turn invested the Constitution with its progressiveness, pluralism, tolerance, liberalism, and concern for the individual. He analyses how it has been able to resist attempts by autocrats and religious fanatics to change its basic structure. However, the perils remain—in the twenty-first century, the growth of sectarianism and illiberalism has threatened to undermine Indian society, and the Constitution which undergirds it, and constant vigilance is necessary to ensure these threats to the idea of India do not succeed. Yet, as the author writes: ‘There is no reason to lose hope. Over the past five years, democracy- and liberty-loving citizens of India have risen to reclaim our republic....’ Will they prevail? Will the Constitution continue to protect and advance the idea of India? Our Living Constitution provides nuanced answers to these important questions. Informative, learned, and lucid, this is a book that must be read by all Indians to gain an understanding of the Constitution that safeguards every aspect of our lives.

Shashi Tharoor is the bestselling author of twenty-seven books, both fiction and non-fiction. His latest books are A Wonderland of Words: Around the Word in 101 Essays, Pride, Prejudice, and Punditry: The Essential Shashi Tharoor, and Ambedkar: A Life.

He is a former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and a former Minister of State for Human Resource Development, and Minister of State for External Affairs in the Government of India. In his fourth term, he is the longest-serving member of the Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram and has chaired Parliament’s Standing Committees on External Affairs and on Information Technology. He has won numerous literary awards, including the Sahitya Akademi Award, Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Books (non-fiction), Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award.