Scholars using a range of disciplines and methodologies have attempted to explain how the republic of India emerged so rapidly and so effectively from a colony to a fully functioning democracy with high levels of popular participation in largely fair and free elections. Khosla advances his explanation for this “most surprising democracy” via a deep study of the published debates of India’s Constituent Assembly (from November 1946 to December 1949) and the writings of many of its leading figures, and then by analyzing them primarily through constitutional theory. To contextualize his insightful examination, Khosla makes appropriate, but only occasional, “excursion[s] into intellectual history,” Euro-American legal theory, economics, sociology, and political science broadly (111). Throughout, he argues that the members of India’s Constituent Assembly collectively sought to create their constitution as “a pedagogical apparatus that can bring into being … the people as free citizens,” where hitherto the conditions for democracy...
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Autumn 2021
September 01 2021
India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy by Madhav Khosla
India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy
. By Madhav
Khosla
Cambridge, Mass.
, Harvard University Press
, 2020
) 240 pp. $45.00
Michael H. Fisher
Michael H. Fisher
Oberlin College
Search for other works by this author on:
Michael H. Fisher
Oberlin College
Online ISSN: 1530-9169
Print ISSN: 0022-1953
© 2021 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.
2021
by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2021) 52 (2): 310–312.
Citation
Michael H. Fisher; India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy by Madhav Khosla. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2021; 52 (2): 310–312. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01729
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