Review Essay: A “Countertenor’s” polyphonic rendition of the Constituent Assembly Debates

Abstract

The Indian Constituent Assembly Debates is a remarkable deliberative document to create the written constitution of the democratic republic of India based on an open society. By its very nature the text is polyphonic and had multifarious voices with a dominant and uniting trend to create a liberal constitutional state with Indian features suited to Indian conditions. The intention, and rightfully so, was not to bring about a “revolution” in the nature of a Russian, Chinese or even the French variant, soon slipping into dictatorships of either party or bureaucratic elites or charismatic individuals; but was to create a democratic polity based on liberal constitutional values drawing from India’s history and cultural conditions. This rich text running into few thousand pages is being explored in some of its aspects in the present work. Though, the tone and tenor of the present work is not representing the dominant voice of a soprano but that of a countertenor who is castrated to reach the higher octave.