R ohit D e . A People’s Constitution

In this eloquent and far-reaching book, Rohit De offers an important intervention into legal history while also providing a new understanding of the understudied subject of India’s Constitution. A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (2018) shifts our gaze from the courtroom and its legal specialists, showing how, in the first decades after independence, the Indian Constitution took shape in the minds of everyday people, and their legal actions played an outsize role in producing constitutional law. De is the first scholar to have gained access to India’s Supreme Court archive, and he uses this opportunity to bring unexpected actors to the fore. The book is structured through a series of four case studies, each of which highlights how a different group articulated and pursued their fundamental rights against the state. Eschewing both an earlier scholar-activist critique of the limits of law in producing social...

Constitution · Everyday life · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Subject (documents) · Supreme court · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies