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‘After the Assembly: Constituting India’ commemorates the 75th anniversary of the Constitution of India, the longest living constitution in the global South. 

It tells the story of how the Indian Constitution was negotiated in the Constituent Assembly, its committees, as well as people’s voices beyond the Assembly, and how it has come to be owned by Indians today in myriad ways.

About the exhibition

To mark the 75th anniversary of the Constitution of India (1950), the exhibition ‘After the Assembly: Constituting India’ brings together an interactive display of a new digital research platform on the Indian Constituent Assembly debates (1946-49), alongside archival documents including petitions and correspondence from civil society organisations and members of the public. 

These will be displayed together with short films, photographs, and other creative outputs produced through our collaborative research process as part of an AHRC funded project Pluralist Agreement and Constitutional Transformation (PACT). The exhibition tells the story of how the Indian Constitution came to be made, and as well as of contemporary expressions of the ownership and remaking of the Constitution in India today.

Exhibition and academic resources on constitution-making have generally focused on cases from the global North, and on the role of founding fathers, often privileged men. The role of collective practices of petition, debate and protest by ordinary citizens and marginalised groups in the making of constitutions, and their remaking over time, remains largely invisible.

The curatorial team

The exhibition is curated by Professor Rochana Bajpai (SOAS) and designed by Oroon Das, an independent design practitioner based in New Delhi. Other members of the exhibition team include Dr Udit Bhatia (York), Dr Nicholas Cole (Oxford), Dr Lauren Davies (Oxford), Dr Manas Raturi (Oxford), Dr Nilanjan Sarkar (LSE), Alice Winters (SOAS/UCL), Vineeth Krishna (Centre for Law and Policy Research), Dr Chaitanya Sambrani (ANU) and Professor Sudhir Krishnaswamy (National Law School of India University).