The postcolonial revolution, we have long been told, failed. But what exactly was the revolution, and how did it fail? In Legalizing the Revolution, Sandipto Dasgupta offers a penetrating and deeply researched response, richly detailed, lucidly written, and persuasively argued. Working in the intervals between legal and political theory, the book offers an unflinching analysis of Indian anticolonialism’s lapse into postcolonial stasis. It’s a story of lost promise. In the wake of the First World War, the Gandhian Congress’ mass actions propelled the Indian independence movement forward, ultimately leading to colonialism’s demise. The Constituent Assembly was formed to steer the transition to self-rule by designing a constitutional framework translating popular sovereignty into political power.

That was the aspiration. The reality, Dasgupta forcefully argues, is that the constitutional project didn’t channel the demos’ will as much as contain it within the safe confines of the administrative state, shepherding India toward autonomy without all the brouhaha of mass mobilization. The ascendence to postcolonial independence traded anticolonialism’s bottom-up democratic energies for top-down bureaucratic planning. The subcontinent’s social transformation, the constitution-makers determined, would bypass the threat of civil unrest through expert steering, opting for ‘change without conflict, progress without violence, history without its battles. It was to be a revolution without a revolution’ (p. 20).

Dasgupta prosecutes the case with admirable thoroughness in three parts detailing how the assemblymen throttled the anticolonial movement’s democratic grounding for fear of its excesses. For the professionals at the tiller, constitution-making was an anxious business haunted by the ever-present specter of popular violence. Little surprise, then, that they adopted the colonial legal architecture intended to quell just this violence, integrating much of the British 1935 Government of India Act into the future state. The movement from colonial to postcolonial governance was thus marked by continuity rather than rupture. The constitution was crafted by elites, for the masses—but largely away from the masses, and replete with elite apprehensions. It spoke for the people without ever speaking to them, let alone letting them speak for themselves (recent studies by Rohit De and Ornit Shani (2024) suggest otherwise).

Dasgupta tracks the implications of this constitutional straitjacketing across Indian social, political, and economic life. Chapter 1 follows the independence movement’s evolution, from its early liberalism, through Gandhian mass mobilizations, to Congress’ eventual slide into bureaucratic self-isolation. Along the way, socialists and communists were sidelined, defanged, or conscripted into the Congress’ government in waiting. Chapter 2 examines India’s coalescence as a cohesive national economic space, and how state-directed economic planning came to supersede the social question of economic and property-based justice. Development trumped redistribution, and the common enemy of colonial power enabled governing cadres to paper over Indian society’s deep inequalities.

Chapter 3 addresses the political consolidation of a ‘people’ and its distance from the Constituent Assembly meant to represent its interests. This was a constitutive absence—a people originated and excluded—as the orderly business of state-making fell to indirectly rather than popularly elected representatives. Chapter 4 traces the administrative apparatus’ persistence, as the ‘vast shadows of the Government of India Act’ (p. 157), a prevailing civil service, and the sway of professionalized elites stretched from pre- to post-independence governance. A less obvious but no less consequential inheritance was the constitution’s functionalism, as purpose-driven toward securing social stability rather than popular power. Chapter 5 delves into the assembly’s tinkering to devise a system of government forceful enough to drive the developmental project forward without tipping into autocracy. The result was a parliament more amenable to administrators than constituents (pp. 201–202).

Chapter 6 offers, to my mind, the sharpest indictment of the assembly’s timorousness. Echoing the colonial concerns it was meant to transcend, the constitution’s schedule of rights came with its own limitations, enabling the criminalization of the very extra-legal forms of civil resistance that led to independence. The constitution’s world-leading word count—over 146,000—attests to its authors’ trepidations regarding not only their concitoyens’ unruliness but also prospective judicial review. Better to head that off at the constitutional level than leave it to the vagaries of future judges and citizens. Chapter 7 shows how property regimes annexed to the colonial state were unperturbed by the shift to independence. This sets the stage for the book’s concluding argument that the postcolonial state’s failure to enact land reform remains at the root of India’s deep stratifications. Finally, Chapter 8, on judiciaries and lawyers, is both somewhat extraneous and legalistic, sketching the court’s conservative influence in the march toward self-government.

There are different ways of understanding what makes a revolution, even an unrevolutionary revolution of the kind Legalizing chronicles. The obvious candidate here is the Gramscian view of passive revolution fruitfully deployed by such scholars as, among others, Partha Chatterjee (1986) and Sudipta Kaviraj (1988) in the Indian context. For Subaltern Studies, passive revolution offered a framework to comprehend decolonization’s failure to alter India’s class structure. But despite the seeming affinities, this doesn’t seem to be what Dasgupta has in mind since it’s only mentioned in the book’s closing pages, and there in passing. It’s not clear why, since Kaviraj, for instance, treats Nehru’s capitulation to bureaucracy and Congress’ demobilization of the masses—the precise dynamics Legalizing addresses—as instantiating passive revolution (1988, p. 2433). The Gramscian account also explains why the Indian peasantry might not agitate for the agrarian reform whose failure the book posits as among decolonization’s principal shortfalls (more on that below). Dasgupta’s notion of revolution appears by comparison somewhat murkier, or conceptually underspecified.

Two other thoughts. First, Dasgupta depicts the constitution-makers as choosing between two clear options: either channel the democratic energies of the masses into the constitutional project or submit it to the strong direction of the administrative state (p. 143). This may, however, overstate their cohesiveness and purposiveness. The assembly was a fragmented body, with different actors of differing ideological persuasions making different choices about different issues at different times, in the trying circumstances of Partition’s spectacular violence and in the wake of catastrophic global war. Their determinations may have been less coherent, and their implications less obvious, than Dasgupta suggests. This isn’t to defend their bureaucratic conservatism, or the elitism of process and actors, or the distance between them and the populace. It is, rather, to note that the clarity of the options—mobilize the masses or hand the keys to the experts—may to some extent be a product of retrospection.

Second, there’s a certain tension in the book’s concluding pages on the choice that got passed up. Most of Legalizing shows how anticolonial radicalism was stifled as it became routed into the corridors of bureaucracy. The diagnosis here is that the constitution’s shortcomings lay in its drift from the masses. The solution: more democracy, more mobilization, more popular will. But in the book’s conclusion, there’s another culprit (the real one, one senses) which is the constitution’s failure to tackle ‘the dictatorship of property’ (p. 200). Without dismantling Indian systems of land tenure—the power of landlords passed from zamindars to large-scale farmers—it left intact the material basis for iniquitous social relations. In this case, what was required was not more democracy, but more forceful legislation to raze the grounds of economic inequality, as Gunnar Myrdal observed in the 1960s (p. 303). But, Dasgupta recognizes (p. 304), these alternatives are in tension: inequality might be stemmed by more democracy or by more top-led economic planning, but it doesn’t seem like it can be both. The problem, then, isn’t that the postcolonial project wasn’t democratic enough. It’s that it wasn’t materialist enough.

The answer, in good Marxist form, lies in the mobilization of the masses (pp. 308–310). But to mobilize is not necessarily terribly democratic. It is to loosen hegemony’s grip and move the multitude toward its supposed interests—to lead a horse to water through education, galvanization, and organization. From this standpoint, the sticking point isn’t that the people’s energies were repressed through administration. It’s that they weren’t directed toward the right end. They were incorrectly, or insufficiently, mobilized. The greatest mover of masses was, of course, Gandhi, and there was nothing remotely democratic in his mobilizations. From tip to tail, they were entirely of his design, based on his estimation of what swaraj required at a given moment, and subject to his confounding idiosyncrasies. He had his reasons—some good, some bad—for doing so but he ran the independence movement with military exactitude, down to the detailed comportments of jailed satyagrahis, how adherents should behave at train stations, the precise purposes of fasting, and much more. Mobilization isn’t necessarily democratic, and democracy doesn’t necessarily yield economic justice.

For seventy-five years, studies of Indian democracy, often in a liberal key, have carried a whiff of celebratory triumphalism—the world’s largest democracy, the crowning achievement of nonviolent civil disobedience, a site of unparalleled religious pluralism and toleration, its constitutional innovativeness. This is not false, but incomplete. Legalizing the Revolution reminds us that constitutions, like all political artifacts, carry the traces of their origins—not just those who wrote them, but also those written out of them.