In this, the second in our series of special posts to mark the 75th anniversary of the Constitution of India, Javed Majeed unpacks the text through a nuanced analysis of its language and conscious choice of terms & phrases, to reveal a fundamentally cosmopolitan imagination of the nation.
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As Robert Ferguson noted, a Constitution is many things, but it is first a written text. It is ‘words arranged for all to see’, and it lives in the ‘vitality of its language’. It is striking that the Constitution of India is written in English, seen by many as a colonial imposition, and not in another Indian language. However, the kind of English the Indian Constitution is written in is testimony to its linguistic cosmopolitanism. My concern in this post is less with how India’s Constitution defines and sets out to manage her multilingualism, and more with how the very language in which it is written reflects both its cosmopolitan breadth and its nationalist focus.
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The Constitution is written in English as a world and imperial language, while incorporating lexical items from earlier imperial and cosmopolitan languages such as Latin and Persian, as well as terms from Indian languages. The distinctive texture of its English is evident from administrative (and other) terms transliterated from Indian languages such as panchayat, gram sabha, begar, jagir inam, muafi, janmam, ryotwari, raiyat, and devaswom (Articles 31A; 40, Part IX, Part IXA; 290A). Alongside these, it also uses Latin terms like habeas corpus, mandamus, quo warranto, and certiorari (Articles 32 clause 2; 139).
The vitality of its language stems from this process of linguistic multi-layering, which in turn reflects its readiness to draw on other Constitutions, combined with its rootedness in India. By drawing on other written Constitutions, the Indian Constitution participates in the global circulation of constitutions as ‘a contagious political genre’ across land and sea boundaries — as has been noted by others, the Constituent Assembly drew on the constitutional traditions of the US, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, and Ireland. Accordingly, in interpreting the Indian Constitution, case law from the US and other countries, as well as Indian precedents, have been drawn on by the Supreme Court. The influence of other Constitutions on India’s Constitution is also evident in the drafting of the Directive Principles of State Policy and Fundamental Rights. Other 20th century Constitutions, reflecting the rise of the idea of the welfare state, also stated such directives.
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The Indian Constitution’s English is a major instance of the Indianisation of English in the dynamic interaction between English and Indian languages. As Ramanujan noted, English ‘fits into the Sanskrit slot: it acquires many of the characteristics of Sanskrit’, particularly its ‘pan-Indian’ character as a medium of laws, science and administration, and its formulaic patterns — ‘it becomes part of Indian multiple diglossia’.
What is also striking about the Indian terms/words cited above is that they are transliterated, not translated, into English. This reflects the Constitution’s strong and unapologetic ownership of an Indian variant of English on its own terms. Rather than a deviant and lowly variant from standard metropolitan English, the text normalises its English as a standard in its own right. In doing so, as a document committed to social justice and rights, the Constitution participates in the historical dialectic that has characterised English as a global language since the 19th century, between its colonially oppressive usages and its progressive, emancipatory potential as a language that can be used in a worldwide rights-oriented culture (as noted by scholars like Ives and Alexander), including in India itself (see Kothari and Babu).
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As is well known, the Indian Constitution drew on the Government of India Act (1935), but it also departed from it in key respects. Chapter 2 of the Act uses terms/words like ryot, ryotwari and jagir but also includes other terms not found in India’s Constitution — like kist, inamdar, fasli, khot, khoti village, bhagdari, chaukidari tax, jhankar, ganda, kotwar, jagalia, mahar, watander patel and watander patwari, thekadar, deshmukh or deshpandia, lambardar, mahal, malik makbuza, kamil jama, sir land, khudkasht, haisiyat, kamil jama, malik makbuza, zaildar, sufedposh, and lambardar. Significantly, these terms occur in the Sixth Schedule of the 1935 Act dealing with Income and Property qualifications defining the limited franchise of Indians, and refer to property ownership and land revenue as well as local positions of power based on ownership of property.
In contrast, the Indian Constitution granted Indian citizens universal suffrage (Article 326) and therefore its lexicon does not have an extensive range of terms drawn from land revenue systems and property ownership that dominate the Sixth Schedule mentioned above. Importantly, the Right to Property (in the Constitution) was not taken as self-evident, and Article 31 (which dealt with this topic) was in fact one of the most intensely debated in the Constituent Assembly.
As expected, the legal Latin terms in India’s Constitution mentioned above have no place in the 1935 Act. While the Act seeks to clarify the administrative framework of India and limited mechanisms of political representation within that framework, the Constitution grapples with issues of liberty, legal and prerogative writs, judicial remedies, and the powers of review. Thus, while the Constitution’s lexicon of Indian and Latin terms overlaps in some respects with the Act, it also marks a significant departure from it.
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The departure from the 1935 Act is also marked by the Constitution’s orientation towards the creation of a democratic republic. On the one hand, as a linguistically multi-layered document, the Constitution is also a historically layered text which reworks the English of the colonial past while drawing on earlier world languages and their legal and administrative lexicons as well. At the same time, it also reflects how written Constitutions came to be ‘widely regarded as a trademark of a modern state’, and how they provided an opportunity ‘for advancing different and distinguishing interpretations of what was involved in being a state and a people, and what was involved in being modern’, as Colley puts it. This is reflected in the Directive Principles which show how the Indian Constitution is a future-oriented text, designed, in Ambedkar’s words, to give ‘certain directions to the future legislatures and the future executives to show in what manner they are to exercise the power which they will have’.
Another interesting nuance in the language of the Constitution is how the debates on some of the Articles mix time frames, drawing on different epochs simultaneously. When it came to the Right to Property, the framers drew on the theory enunciated by American jurists of ‘eminent domain’ though the Article was also discussed with reference to notions of property in ancient India. The text therefore draws on Indian and world historical pasts, a global present, and a progressive future.
As a future-oriented text, the Constitution evokes a layered sense of futurity through different verbal forms, thereby plotting a spectrum of futures as graded possibilities. For instance, in Part 1 on the Union and its Territory, the first Article states ‘India … shall be a Union of States’, and Articles 2 and 3 begin with ‘Parliament may by law’. This combination of ‘shall’ and ‘may’ expresses a mixture of definiteness and provisional openness to the future.
With regard to the Directive Principles, Articles 38 to 48A begin variously with
- ‘The State shall strive’
- ‘The State shall […] direct’
- ‘The State shall take steps’
- ‘The State shall endeavour to secure’
- ‘The State shall make provision’
- ‘The State shall endeavour to provide’
- ‘The State shall endeavour to organise’
- ‘The State shall endeavour to protect and improve’
- ‘The State shall endeavour to promote […] maintain […] foster […] encourage’
- ‘The State shall promote with special care’, and
- ‘The State shall regard’
Here, the Constitution expresses a complex sense of the future, broken down into possibilities, expressed by ‘shall’ to suggest an imperative, then further modified by infinitive verbs (‘to endeavour’, ‘to promote’, ‘to secure’, and so on). The result is a graded verbal orientation towards the future, an imperative qualified by other imperatives to suggest a grammatical and emotional mood grounded in a firm but open-ended determination. As Colley has remarked, Constitutions ‘hold out the enticing promise that the words and clauses contained within them will bring into being a new, improved reality. New constitutions offer, or can appear to offer, the prospect of benign and exciting transformations’. A Constitution embodies the aspirations of its inhabitants, and the Indian Constitution grades and structures these aspirations through forms of command, prescription and orientation, pointing to different degrees of futurity and a spectrum of transformative possibilities.
Kenneth Burke has remarked that a Constitution is ‘summational and converging’ but also ‘lends itself to contemplation as fully as does the statuesque’. India’s Constitution is not just statuesque in its carefully wrought and weighted prose; it is also a literary achievement displaying mastery of the Constitution as an art form and as a genre of writing which can be compared to other art forms and genres such as the epic and autobiography, as well as ‘drama’ (in Burke’s words).
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Constitutions are not just legal documents; they also create appropriate salutary effects through a mixture of tones. Here we might think of the Preamble with its carefully weighed punctuation of commas and semi-colons and its capitalisation of key terms, suggesting the momentous and stately nature of the event taking place. It reads like an invocation to the dramatic performance of the coming into being of a democratic republic, with the dramatis personae being the people of India themselves.
The linguistic cosmopolitanism of the Constitution of India plays a key role in its artfulness and, thus, can be styled as not just a political and legal, but also a linguistic and literary achievement.
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