Abstract

Sandipto Dasgupta will speak on his book, Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony. Following decolonisation, the challenge was to give institutional form to the varied and ambitious ideas of freedom generated by the anticolonial struggles. Through an original and comprehensive account of India’s anticolonial movement and constitution making, Legalizing the Revolution explores the unique promises, challenges, and contradictions of that task. In contrast to the familiar liberal constitutional templates derived from the metropole, the book theorises the distinctively postcolonial constitution through an innovative synthesis of the history of decolonisation and constitutional theory. A contribution to postcolonial political thought, the book excavates the unrealised futures imagined during decolonisation. At the same time, through a critical account of the making of the postcolonial constitutional order, it offers keys to understanding the present crisis of that order, including and especially in India.

Speaker

Sandipto Dasgupta

Sandipto Dasgupta is Assistant Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He is a political theorist working on empire, decolonisation, and postcolonial presents.

Chair

Niraja Gopal Jayal

Niraja Gopal Jayal joined King’s India Institute as Avantha Chair in October 2021. She was formerly Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and presently also Centennial Professor (2019-23) at The London School of Economics, in the Department of Gender Studies.

Her book Citizenship and Its Discontents (Harvard University Press and Permanent Black, 2013) won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association of Asian Studies in 2015. She is also the author of Representing India: Ethnic Diversity and the Governance of Public Institutions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Democracy and the State: Welfare, Secularism and Development in Contemporary India (OUP, 1999). She has co-edited The Oxford Companion to Politics in India, and edited, among several others, Democracy in India (OUP, 2001) and Re-Forming India: The Nation Today. (Penguin Random House, 2019) Her most recent book is Citizenship Imperilled: India’s Fragile Democracy (Permanent Black).

Jayal delivered the Radhakrishnan Memorial Lectures at All Souls College, Oxford in 2009, and was Vice-President of the American Political Science Association. (2011-12). During her career she has held visiting appointments at, among others, Princeton University, King’s College, London, and the EHESS, Paris.