SANDIPTO DASGUPTA

Legalizing the Revolution
India and the Constitution of the Postcolony
 
Contents

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Introduction: Decolonization and Constitution

• To Legalize the Revolution

• Decolonizing Constitutions

• Constituting Decolonization

• Organization of the Book

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Part I: Revolution without a Revolution

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Chapter 1. The Anticolonial Movement

• Constitutional Liberalism

• Popular Sovereignty

• Governance

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Chapter 2. Transformations

• Colonial Economy

• Anticolonial Movement and the Social Question

• Nation as an Economic Space

• Centralization

• Planning and the Primacy of Growth

• Legitimacy

• Avoiding Conflict

• The Politics of Change

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Part II: Authors

 

Chapter 3. They, The People

• The Anticolonial People

• Outside the Palaces of Power

• Social and Political Theory of the Anticolonial Masses

• The Divergences

• The People Present

• The People Absent

• The People in the Constituent Assembly

• Active Absences

• The People Partitioned

• The People Demobilized

 

Chapter 4. The Constituent Administrator

• To Govern and to Constitute

• The Colonial Administrator

• Dominion of Legality

• Administrative Territories

• The Constitution of Order

• The Professionals and the Educated

• Wisdom and Knowledge

• The Functionalist Style

• The Missing Sovereign

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Part III: Institutions

 

Chapter 5. Democracy and Parliamentarism

• Universal Franchise

• The Anticolonial Parliament

• Mass Democracy, and the Plebiscitary Alternative

• Parliament and Social Transformation

• Accomplice or Author

• Political Articulation of Social Conflicts

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Chapter 6. Rights and Repression

• Rights and the Anticolonial Movement

• Permissible Limits

• Rights and Participation

• Horizontal Rights

• Reveries of Order

• The Persistence of Repression

• ‘Bloody Methods of Revolution’

• Editing Anticolonial Multiplicity

 

Chapter 7. Property and Labor​

• The Empire of Property

• The Landlords

• Land Reforms

• Constitution Against Property

• Free Labor

• Property in the Constitution

• Compensation

• The Administration of Property

• The Sovereignty of Property

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Chapter 8. Judiciary and Lawyers

• Lawyers in a Colonized World

• The Tocquevillian Conflict

• Lawyers versus Administrators in the Constituent Assembly

• First Amendment

• Purloined by Lawyers

• Lawyer's Decolonization

• Privatizing Social Transformation

• The Rigidity of the Written Word

• The End of Transformational Constitutionalism

 

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Conclusion: The Postcolonial Afterlives of Law and Revolution

• Foreboding and Hope

• The Dictatorship of Property

• Obituaries of Transformation

• The Gentle Betrayer of the Masses

• To Make the Postcolony Anticolonial

 

 

Epilogue: The Biographies of the Indian Constitution

• The Time of the Nation State

• The Time of Crisis

• The Time of Globalization

• The Time of the Ethnos