‘A Nation on the Move': The Indian Constitution, Life Writing and Cosmopolitanism

ABSTRACT

The Indian Constitution (IC) has been considered in terms of its intertextuality with preceding colonial documents such as the Government of India Act 1935. This essay relocates the IC in intertextual relationships with anti-colonial autobiographies and texts such as Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, showing the parallels between the way they dramatise self-rule and mix global, Indian and regional levels of identity. Both the IC and these texts are marked by processes of transnational and internal dialogue, and reflect transnational aspects of Indian print culture and the subject positions it gave rise to. Widening the discursive sites of the IC to include anti-colonial autobiographies raises questions about the IC as a species of autobiography itself, and it also gives us another perspective on the tensions within the IC, showing how the conflict between liberty and power is manifested in its linguistic cosmopolitanism and its approach to translation. Constitutions embody the aspirations of a nation's citizens, and the IC's verbal skills grade and structure these aspirations, plotting them along a spectrum of possible futures and grounding them in a variety of pasts. This concern with temporality has a parallel in some anti-colonial autobiographies where the consciousness of time is particularly acute. Finally, both the IC and Indian anti-colonial life writing can be seen as instances of South Asian literary modernity in terms of the style of their creative choices.

KEYWORDS:

• The Indian Constitution
• life writing
• cosmopolitanism
• citizenship narratives
• constitutions as literary texts
• transnationalism
• literary modernity

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this essay, focussing on the nature of Indian secularism, were presented at the Annual South Asia Conference in Madison, the University of Witwatersrand, the Open University and the University of Sunderland. The version of the essay published here was presented at a supportive workshop in Copenhagen University in May 2015. I am grateful to the participants and the organisers Astrid Rasch and Stuart Ward for their helpful comments at the time, and especially to Astrid Rasch for her subsequent comments on the paper. I also presented versions of this paper at the invitation of the South Asia Centre, LSE, to students and officers from India visiting LSE as part of the 125^th birth anniversary celebrations of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, at the High Commission of India in London in October and November 2015. Thanks to Mukulika Bannerjee, Nilanjan Sarkar, and the First Secretary (Protocol) M. P. Singh for organising the lectures, and the audience for their insightful questions and comments. I have not been able to address all the issues that were raised by them because of the constraints of space.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Javed Majeed is currently Professor of English and Comparative Literature at King's College London. His interdisciplinary research combines literary studies with the intellectual and cultural history of colonialism and postcolonialism in the Indian subcontinent. His book publications include Ungoverned Imaginings. James Mill's The History of British India and Orientalism (1992), Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity. Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal (2007), and Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism (2009). He has co-edited and translated with Christopher Shackle an Urdu epic poem, Hali's Musaddas. The Flow and Ebb of Islam (1997) and has written a number of articles on the intellectual, cultural and literary history of colonial India.