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’.
