Unlike the fifty-five delegates who attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 and are revered as the ‘founding fathers’ of the United States of America or the members of the storied Constituent Assembly in the wake of the French Revolution, the architects of India's Constitution are largely forgotten. Only the many statues of Bhim Rao Ambedkar – often referred to as the ‘father of the Indian Constitution’ – with the Constitution in one hand that dot cities and towns across India serve as a reminder of the founding document of Indian democracy. Although Ambedkar, chairman of the drafting committee in the Constituent Assembly, is most remembered for piloting the Indian Constitution, he was one among twenty or so members who were most influential in shaping the Constitution.

The Constituent Assembly itself was created from members elected under the 1935 Government of India Act, which was the last of a series of constitutional experiments that began in 1861, partly triggered by the 1857 uprising. Though there were some, including a few members of the Constituent Assembly, who had spoken about the ancient origins of Indian democracy and the need to look beyond Western and British models, arguably ‘constitutionalism in India, as in other parts of Asia and Africa, is a modern project, whose origins can be traced to much more recent times’. There has long been an intense debate on the British contribution to Indian democratic institutions and the Indian Constitution. There are several scholars who have observed, in Christopher Bayly's words, that ‘Indian democracy was neither an inheritance from India's past nor a gift of British rule’. More recently, Madhav Khosla has argued in regard to the Indian Constitution that it should be seen as a ‘repudiation’ of the colonial legacy and not as part of a process of ‘evolution’.