“A Language Which Is Foreign to Us”: Continuities and Anxieties in the Making of the Indian Constitution

Dasgupta’s essay revisits the long-standing debate about colonial continuity in postcolonial India’s constitutional system. The Indian constitution makers sought to produce a system embodying a transformational constitutional vision—that is, a constitutional structure that could mediate a thoroughgoing transformation of social conditions in a controlled and deliberate manner. Therefore, they sought to maintain continuities with the executive apparatus of the colonial state for two reasons: one, to maintain a coherent state machinery that was capable of intervening and transforming the society; and two, to ensure that all contestation about the transformational project was channeled through constitutional paths, by repressing any extraconstitutional forms of agitation. Finally, the essay delineates the centrality of the administrator’s point of view and proceduralism in the constituent imagination of India.