SANDIPTO DASGUPTA

Anticolonial movements of the twentieth century generated audacious ideas of freedom. Following decolonization, the challenge was to give institutional form to those ideas. Through an original and comprehensive account of India’s anticolonial movement and constitution making, Legalizing the Revolution explores the unique promises, challenges, and contradictions of that task.

 

In contrast to the familiar liberal constitutional templates derived from the metropole, the book theorizes the distinctively postcolonial constitution through an innovative synthesis of the history of decolonization and constitutional theory.

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A major contribution to postcolonial political theory, the book excavates the unrealized futures imagined during decolonization. At the same time, through a critical account of the making of the postcolonial constitutional order, it offers keys to understanding the present crisis of that order, including and especially in India.​​

The book is available in the US here or here. 

In the UK here or here. 

 

In India here. 

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The online version of the book is available here. 

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View the table of contents here. 

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An excerpt from the introduction can be read here. 

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Reviews and interviews can be found here.  

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Reviews and Endorsements

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This  account of the origins of the Indian constitution is nothing short of heroic, and its relevance to our global present is plain. Arrestingly, Sandipto Dasgupta lifts promotional and romanticizing frames — however appealing in the face of far-right politics today — in order to recapture the promise of postcolonial democracy without ignoring imperial legacies of constitutionalism itself and material realities that elite legalism confirmed as much as challenged. Lurking beneath contemporary appropriations that excessively center rights and judges rather than class and parliamentarism, Dasgupta provides authentic access to the stakes of the moment — and our own.

Samuel Moyn, Yale University

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In this important contribution to political and constitutional theory, Sandipto Dasgupta tracks the distinctive character and logic of the postcolonial constitution. Rather than closing a revolution, constitutions in the decolonizing worldwere designed to facilitate the revolution to come. Examining the antinomies of this “transformational constitutionalism” to prompt a wider reconsideration of the ends of constitutionalism, Legalizing the Revolution models postcolonial political theory at its best.

Adom Getachew, University of Chicago

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In this remarkable new study Sandipto Dasgupta offers a fascinating examination of a great paradox of modern history – how in the process of decolonization, a revolution – the activity maximally opposed to legal order – seeks to produce, out of itself, a constitution, the primary device for the creation of an expansive, stable legal system. The argument of the book joins together two strands of analysis rarely brought together – the tumultuous history of the events of decolonization and the tranquil discussion of provisions of effective legality. It follows the acts of the double authors of the constitutional document – the people in whose name it is written, and the actual writers who shape its detailed provisions. This is an intelligent and insightful exploration of the founding moment of the world’s largest democracy – an important contribution to the political theory of decolonization. ​

 

Sudipta Kaviraj, Columbia University

 

​Legalizing the Revolution offers a richly textured account of the deliberations of the Indian Constituent Assembly and the social and political tumult that surrounded its work. For Dasgupta, the Assembly’s deliberations serve at once as an archive of the extraordinary dissensus through which this process of postcolonial founding unfolded and a lens through which to refract the dilemmas of postcolonial freedom and the contradictory institutions that anticolonial movements built to sustain it. If much of anti- and postcolonial political theory has been organized around readings of its major figures, Dasgupta’s account seeks to restore the plurality of anticolonial freedom projects [...[ But Dasgupta’s attention to these plural visions of freedom is also an analytic wager: that reading the Indian Constitution as the product of a set of specific political conjunctures enables a political theory of postcolonial constitutionalism less encumbered by the questions of either Anglophone legal theory or the romance of anticolonial agency. Against the hermeneutic pressures to affirm the Constitution as a bulwark of liberal democratic freedoms or an object of disappointed emancipatory attachments, this critical vantage makes it possible to ask which visions of emancipation were affirmed—and which displaced—by the Constitution’s institution of political freedom, and in so doing to analyze the Indian Constitution as a freedom project that bears the political and social contradictions of its contested genesis.

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Joy Wang, University of Chicago

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The postcolonial revolution, we have long been told, failed. But what exactly was the revolution, and how did it fail? In Legalizing the Revolution, Sandipto Dasgupta offers a penetrating and deeply researched response, richly detailed, lucidly written, and persuasively argued. Working in the intervals between legal and political theory, the book offers an unflinching analysis of Indian anticolonialism’s lapse into postcolonial stasis.

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Inder S. Marwah, McMaster University