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"The Colonial Constitution" by Arghya Sengupta delves into the historical and legal origins of the Indian Constitution, emphasizing its colonial roots and the impact on society. The book challenges the notion of the Indian Constitution as a holy text, suggesting it retains colonial characteristics. Sengupta explores the Constitution's transformative qualities while critiquing its limitations in protecting individual liberties. The author raises questions about the need for constitutional renewal and the role of majoritarianism in shaping new constitutional values, making it a crucial read for those interested in law, politics, or history. [Extracted from the article]

Over the last dozen years, Indian courts have formulated the idea that, inherent in the Indian Constitution, lies a type of morality referred to as constitutional morality (CM). CM acts as an interpretive device to help courts ascertain the meaning of the Constitution's text in contested cases. Fundamental questions around CM, however, remain unaddressed: What are the methodological moves that courts have adopted to deploy CM in case law? What judicial premises and logics are at work in CM? And, given CM's path dependence, what implications does CM have for Indian constitutional law and theory? This Article attempts to address these questions, using three levels of analysis. First, it explores the intellectual history of CM to ascertain how B.R. Ambedkar--the chief draftsperson of India's Constitution--conceptualized it. Second, it develops a framework that situates CM as understood by Indian courts. Courts have given two distinct meanings to CM: (i) CM as a fiction that anchors the meaning of "morality" understood as a restriction to fundamental rights, and (ii) as an obligation on institutional actors to follow ethical political practices even when the law does not guide their conduct. This Article charts out both accounts and analyzes them on their own terms. Finally, it sketches two problems that the development of CM presents for Indian constitutional theory. As the Indian Supreme Court gears up to commence hearings on whether courts may continue to use CM as an interpretive device, the normative attractiveness of CM will be under the scanner. The framework and analyses I have developed can act as a foundation on which critiques and defenses of CM can take place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I conceptualize the political theology at play in a recent popular uprising in Buenaventura, the main city-port in Colombia's pacific littoral. This political theology emerges from the testimonies of people who participated in the events, and the theo-political vocabulary they employ in narrating what happened. To elaborate on it, I follow the thread of the relation between Church and people which enabled the former's leadership in the uprising. First, I examine the oblique and uncertain relation between this spiritual memory and the tradition of liberation theology in Latin America. Secondly, I specify the distinctive constellation of sovereignty, antagonism and affective bonds performed in the uprising, by staging a counterpoint between these events and figures of the Europe-centered political theology tradition such as Schmitt and Durkheim. Through these two movements, the paper explores the singularity of the temporal and the affective experiences of this political process and event, and the force of its decolonial critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to his usual depiction as a modern secular thinker, heteronomous imaginaries of sacrality and kingship are pervasive in Rabindranath Tagore's plays. A return to these referents, as I show in this paper, releases Tagore's thought-world from the stranglehold of derivative categories and allows for his reconstruction as a political thinker. Eschewing the nationalist ideal of valiant and noble rulers shored up from histories and myths as legitimate alternatives to the colonial regime, Tagore aesthetically employed the imaginary of an "absent king" sourced from the Upanishads. Avoiding the tropes of spectrality of a dead king or an exceptional interregnal anarchic moment, emptiness was inscribed in the very heart of the monarchical model, thereby transfiguring it into a radical instituting imaginary of the social. This curiously brought together the apparently antithetical categories of sovereignty and freedom through an insistence on creative will and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will argue that B.R. Ambedkar attacked the social law of Hindu dharma for legalizing and legitimizing Brahminical sovereignty in the form of a birth-based caste order centred around the ambivalent sacrality of untouchability. Although Ambedkar inaugurated postcolonial India's transformative constitutional project, its juridical language of secular legality was not powerful enough an antidote against the social customs of caste and untouchability. Since these practices were ultimately grounded in a Hindu theology imputing responsibility for action to a fixed immutable being, Ambedkar sought to unsettle and destabilize it by proffering a counter-theology of Buddhism that delinked action from any substantial being, and thereby opened up sovereignty as an empty place of political power. His Buddhism though, was less a religion of selfless renunciation, and more a religion of rupture mediated by the political law of fraternal freedom, actualized in the excessive subjectivity of the Dalit community of converted Buddhists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]