The Constituent Assembly of India was convened for the first time on 9th December 1946, in a mammoth task to draft and give to ourselves the Constitution of India. The draft of the Constitution was formally approved on 26th November 1949 (hence Law Day). The Constituent Assembly also functioned as the ‘Provisional Parliament of India’ till elections were held in 1952. Some of the most profound and visionary discussions, on the future of our nation, were held in the Constituent Assembly. And most of them would have been locked in the libraries across the world, had not one man decided to reduce the reams of papers into a pithy, easy to digest book called The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation.
Granville Austin, an independent research scholar from United States, came to India in the early 1960s to conduct research on the Constituent Assembly Debates. Austin found favour among the living legends of India then, and Pandit Nehru, K M Munshi and Dr Rajendra Prasad, among others, opened their libraries and correspondence to him. What resulted was one of the finest pieces of scholarly work in the form of Cornerstone that could be read not just as a research work, but as a story of the Constitution of India.
First published by Oxford Press in 1966, Cornerstone, received worldwide acclaim. The Economist read “Austin has done for the Indian Constitution what C.A. Beard and other scholars have done for the Constitution of the United States. The author’s reading has been vast and he has undertaken much research in unpublished material….There is something majestic in the scale of the work that is appropriate to the subject-matter.” In fact, Cornerstone still gets cited before the courts and is the first go-to book whenever there is a need to figure out the intent of a constitutional provision.
Many critics, have labelled our Constitution as a cut-paste job of not only its predecessor, the Government of India Act, 1935, but also of various other Constitutions of the World, while Austin defended his view that India’s Constitution is “first and foremost a social document, one that embodied the objectives of a social revolution.”
Austin was back in India, to pen the history of post constitutional developments in a country that refused to be torn by various power struggles, self-assertion by the legislature, internal emergency imposed in 1975, secessionist movements across the nation, the issue of languages and those of various States. Austin must have found the glue that kept India together, a weird mix. And reading his second book Working a Democratic Constitution: The Indian Experience, which starts from where he ended Cornerstone, will make you believe in the strength of the argument that our Constitution is indeed a social document that has in its own, and surely, successful way, penned social revolution for millions in this nation.
Constitutional expert and Senior Advocate, Fali S. Nariman says, “Working a Democratic Constitution offers an intense critical insight into four decades of India’s constitutional history. Superbly written with a buoyant empathy, it is a testament of hope, not of despair. With intimate knowledge gained by living in India for long periods, and talking to people who have seen it all happen, Granville Austin unfolds the triumphs and strains of working a truly democratic Constitution. The richly personalized account flows effortlessly. It pulls no punches, and the gripping narrative tempts the reader on, from one chapter to the next. It is a truly inspiring work.”
The Government of India decorated Granville Austin with the Padma Shree in 2011, for his works on the Constitution of India.
He passed away recently. The seminal work that breathes in the two tomes, however, will continue to live.
Constitutional scholar, Arvind Elangovan puts it beautifully when he says “In recent times, when India has witnessed a recrudescence of nationalism, Austin’s account remains a sobering antidote that could potentially reveal an alternative genealogy of a nationalist, who could well be an aspirational figure for the future, if not of the past. For this remarkable contribution, Austin must not be forgotten.”
(Harshvardhan Bhatkuly is a lawyer, writer and reluctant social commentator).
