THE CALCUTTA HOWRAH RAILWAY STATION WAS BUSTLING with thousands of travellers on the cool early Thursday morning of 26 February 1948. Many stopped at A. H. Wheelers, the station’s bookstall and newsagent, to purchase reading for their daily commute. Wheelers, which had branches in most of the major railway stations across India, was known for the remarkable breadth and quality of curated books available for sale. That morning, in addition to newspapers and magazines in English and vernacular languages, and books by Gandhi, Kipling, Mulk Raj Anand, Tolstoy, and Zola, customers could also purchase for the modest sum of Rs. 1, a freshly printed booklet containing the draft constitution of India. And should the booklet itself escape customers’ notice, the front pages of the stacks of daily newspapers announced, ‘Draft Constitution of Republic of India Published’ or, in all-caps, ‘INDIA IS TO BE A “SOVEREIGN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC” UNDER THE DRAFT CONSTITUTION RELEASED TO THE PRESS TODAY’.
Evidently, by that point the public constitutional fervour infected the Drafting Committee and the president of the Assembly. The president of the Assembly ‘ordered’ that ‘copies should be made available to the public at a cheap, if not nominal price,’ and was ‘very particular’ that ‘copies should be available on sale throughout India,’ ‘even at railway station book stalls’.
The booklet would be published by Government of India Press and bear ‘the new seal of the Government of India’ [the Coats of Arms], rather than the emblem of the Constituent Assembly The controller of Printing and Stationery issued special orders so that the government press could work night shifts, or on a Sunday if necessary, to meet the publication deadline. Anticipating ‘a great demand’, the secretariat of the Constituent Assembly asked the press for the letterpress printing to be ‘kept standing to enable additional copies to be printed for sale whenever required’.
Once published, copies of the draft constitution were distributed widely to anywhere Government of India publications were sold (including railway bookstalls). Since there were no authorised agents for the sale of Government of India publications in most of the princely states, arrangements were made for an alternative distribution. The Constituent Assembly also sent copies to parliaments across the world. Readers for whom one rupee was too dear could either pick up a copy in a Gazette Extraordinary for the price of one anna or read a twenty-four-page summary released to the newspapers. The original version was published in English, but authorised Hindi and Urdu translations appeared by September 1948. Demand was heavy, and the first 10,000 copies moved quickly. In response to a ‘rush of interest from all over India’, Government of India Press issued two reprints of 5,000 copies each within less than a month. By September, the draft had gone through at least four more reprints, as time and time again distributors reported that their stock ‘has entirely been exhausted’ yet again.
The draft constitution entered into a media environment ripe for its publication. Newspapers, magazines, and radio programmes closely tracked the constitution-making process, and as we have seen, many members of the public who shared their constitutional ideas and demands with the Constituent Assembly stated that they read about it in the press. Once the constitutional debates started, newspapers reported in key moments from the Assembly, including excerpts from speeches of assembly members, sometimes even with close captions such as ‘(Loud cheers)’, ‘(Renewed cheers’), attempting to convey the response and atmosphere in Constitution Hall. They also provided helpful summaries, for example, under the heading ‘Constituent Assembly Snippets’.
The practice of reading newspapers aloud in public or telling others about the news they had read meant that the reports reached the non-literate. Indians could also learn about the proceedings from the broadcasts of All India Radio, which devoted significant programming time to constitutional issues. With broadcasts that combined recordings of speeches in Constitution Hall with ‘eye-witness’ accounts, All India Radio produced what The Hindustan Times described as ‘a composite sound picture of the proceedings’.
The network moreover offered programming that provided background and commentary on constitutional issues. In October 1946, for example, AIR Lucknow, began broadcasting a series called ‘Assembly Ke Qaide’ (Assembly Rules). The ten-minute evening programme covered such themes such as ‘Khas rawayaten’ (special conventions), ‘Speaker’, ‘sawal jawab’ (question answer), ‘Opposition’, ‘Memberon ke haq’ (rights of members), and ‘Prastav Aur Tahriken’ (proposals and motions).
From early May 1947, AIR broadcasted a weekly review of the Assembly proceedings every Sunday morning. Listeners in Delhi, Bombay, Lahore, Jullundur, Peshawar, Trichy, Madras, Cuttack, and Nagpur could hear a similar range of programmes broadcast in English, Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, and Urdu.
Among them were the ‘Constituent Assembly Ki Karvai’ (Actions of the Constituent Assembly). Radio talks about the work of the Constituent Assembly appeared in the Women’s Programme of AIR Delhi, and even in the children’s programme, ‘Bachchon Ka Program,’ and in the ‘School Broadcast’. Through radio waves carrying voices from the debates, Indians could get a feel of the tone, mood and thus attitudes of assembly members beyond the thick descriptions in the press. The emotions this experience infused extended from inside homes to the public sphere. Sumana Chandavarkar, as seventeen-year-old, recalled how she ‘crowded around the radio with her family in Bombay to listen to the Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, give his speech’ on 14 August 1947 just ahead of the midnight that ushered in India’s independence. ‘He sounded very eloquent and dramatic.’They were so inspired that the whole family, the nine of them, ‘packed into a five-seater car to drive around the city’, joining ‘the people swarming the streets, banging drums, yelling and lighting firecrackers’.
The dramatic sound of thunderous chorus that reverberated around Constitution Hall after the last stroke of midnight, when all members of the Assembly loudly declaimed in unison their names, while reciting their pledge of dedications in Hindi, Urdu, and English, must have evoked similar emotions among radio listeners across India.
A draft Constitution for all languages
Tapping into obvious public demand, enterprising publishers, and private individuals translated constitutional texts into a multitude of vernacular languages. Offers and requests for permission to translate the draft constitution into almost every Indian language started arriving at the Constituent Assembly within a week of the draft’s publication.
For instance, the Oriental Languages Bureau in Bombay offered to translate the draft into Gujarati, Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kanarese (Kannada), Sindhi, Assamese, and Oriya. K. G. Chaubal, a Marathi journalist from Bombay, offered his services as a Marathi translator to ‘serve the motherland’ so that people could learn of ‘her valuable political grammar’.
And the Modi Power Printing Works in Bangalore asked permission to produce a ‘faithful translation’ in Kannada in the ‘public interest’, which was ‘necessary’ for the ‘major Kannada knowing public in South India ... for the information of such who are not conversant with the English language’.
In South India, in particular, many did not wait for permission from the authorities. The Hindamata Publishing House in Dharwad, for instance, had already translated the draft into Kannada before writing to the Constituent Assembly; they were writing to request that their version be recognised as an official translation. M. Krishnaswami from Turaiyur (Tiruchirapalli District) not only translated the draft constitution into Tamil, but also included extracts from constitutions of the USA, Russia, Canada, Switzerland, South Africa, and Mexico. He offered to sell print copies for Rs. 1 (the same price as the English draft), with the profits donated to the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Fund. Citizen translations began to circulate in Tamil, Sanskrit, and Telugu.
At least three organisations couched their desire to translate the draft constitution in terms of national unity. Dr C. Kunhan Raja, the director of the Adyar Library at the Theosophical Society in Madras, argued in May 1948 that the constitution should be translated into Sanskrit verse, so that ‘it could be rendered into the various languages of India in a uniform way’. Sanskrit works on science and philosophy had been traditionally written in verse, with the metre bringing it compactness and precision. Accordingly, Raja translated the constitution, or Bharata-Rasthra-Sangathana, into Sanskrit verse.
However, as he noted, ‘A Sanskrit rendering was not meant as a legal docu- ment’, and he did not intend the work to contest the authority of the text that was enacted by the Constituent Assembly. The point of the rendering was rather to help Indians understand the contents of the law. His stated aim was to avoid ‘dry, mechanical devises’, like the new ‘manufactured’ term ‘antararashtriya’ (international) and reclaim forgotten phrases, like, for instance, ‘Pauraksatra’ for the Republic.
Another organization, the Romaka-Lipi-Samiti (Roman Letters Society), requested permission to render the official Hindi translation into Roman script. The society had long advocated for the use of roman script to cultivate Indian unity by making language learning easier. The president of the society, Prof Suniti Kumar Chatterji, pointed out that Roman script was already in use, whether to help non-native readers decipher ancient Indian languages like Sanskrit, Pali, and the Prakrits; modern languages like Tamil and Urdu; or the largely oral aboriginal languages. The Roman script was ‘simple in shape’, easy to write and vocalize, would link India to the greater part of the world, and defuse the competition between the Hindi and Urdu scripts. In offering to translate the Hindi draft constitution into Roman script, the Samiti was committed to strengthening the ‘fundamental unity that underlay India’s provincial and local diversities’.
A Hindustani vision for the Constitution
The most high-powered effort to translate the constitution to the language of the everyday came from the heart of the Congress Party, which claimed that Hindustani alone was ‘a worthy instrument of self-expression by a free and democratic people’. Gandhi, who had long campaigned for Hindustani to be the lingua franca of the people, tried to persuade the president of the Constituent Assembly to produce a common Hindustani draft constitution instead of two separate Hindi and Urdu translations. When the Constituent Assembly declined, the Hindustani Prachar Sabha nonetheless moved ahead, meeting at Wardha in July 1948 to prepare a Hindustani translation of the constitution. In a letter appealing to the Constituent Assembly, they stated that ‘according to the preamble of the constitution, it is the People of India who adopt, enact and give themselves this constitution’, therefore, ‘a democratic constitution which is based on the will of the people should be expressed in the language of the people’.
Noting Hindustani’s ‘simple grammar, and a wide range of mellifluous and easily pronounceable sounds’, the Hindustani Prachar Sabha explained that the language offered the best option for assimilating words from many origins, including English. In the memorandum that they sent to all members of the Constituent Assembly, they suggested that Hindustani terms stood in stark contrast to the unwieldiness of the Hindi and Urdu phrases. To take one example, the heading in the draft constitution on ‘Provisions in Cases of Grave Emergencies’, was translated as ‘Gambhir Sanghsktirya Sthithi Visheyak Pravdhan’ in Hindi, ‘Shadi Naghani Surto ke liye Bandobast’ in Urdu, and ‘Achanak aur Gehre Sankat Ki Surat Main Intezam’ in Hindustani, a phrasing that closely aligns with the spoken language in the streets.
Bureaucrats within the Constituent Assembly responded to the appearance of these numerous translations with surprise and some degree of alarm. They insisted that those enquiring be informed that it was not ‘proposed to translate or publish the draft constitution in any other language besides English, Hindi, and Urdu.’
The Constituent Assembly lacked the resources to evaluate translations rendered in multiple Indian languages. Its leaders moreover insisted that unauthorised translations of the draft should not be encouraged, as the document was likely to be changed. This disagreement points to the depth of the misunderstanding between the Constituent Assembly and the Indian public when it came to the constitutional process. For the bureaucrats in the Constituent Assembly, the point of translation was to disseminate the constitution after it had been finalised. For ordinary Indians, translations at every stage were essential for them to engage with the process.
The buzz of constitutional conversations could be heard well beyond Constitution Hall. The loud calls of vendors at railway stations and newspaper stands announcing the draft constitution for sale for only one rupee, and the short radio programmes in multiple languages at different hours of the day between Ghazals and the news, produced a soundtrack of constitutionalism. The draft constitution followed both the rhythms of formal Sanskrit verse and the beats of the street. The piles of books and pamphlets on various aspects of the Constituent Assembly and the constitution, and the copies, sometimes stencilled, of the evolving assembly debates and the Constituent Assembly’s committees’ reports, all of which appeared in authorised and unauthorised translations, made a bazaar of constitutionalism.
This is an excerpt from ‘Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History’, published in September, 2025 by Penguin Allen Lane.