Dr Rajendra Prasad, President of the Constituent Assembly of India, addressed the Assembly one last time on November 26, 1949, before the Constitution was formally adopted. In that iconic speech, he expressed “two regrets” – one, that there were no qualifications laid down for legislators, and two, that the Assembly could not produce the draft Constitution in an Indian language. While acknowledging that the “difficulties in both cases were practical and proved insurmountable”, he said that it does not make the regret any less poignant.

In the decades that followed the commencement of the Constitution, a substantial body of scholarship emerged on the making of the Indian Constitution. Among the earliest and most authoritative contributions was B. Shiva Rao’s monumental six-volume work, ‘Th

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