When the draft Constitution hit railway station bookstores

THE CALCUTTA HOWRAH RAILWAY STATION WAS BUSTLING with thousands of travellers on the cool early Thursday morning of 26 February 1948. Many stopped at A. H. Wheelers, the station’s bookstall and newsagent, to purchase reading for their daily commute. Wheelers, which had branches in most of the major railway stations across India, was known for the remarkable breadth and quality of curated books available for sale. That morning, in addition to newspapers and magazines in English and vernacular languages, and books by Gandhi, Kipling, Mulk Raj Anand, Tolstoy, and Zola, customers could also purchase for the modest sum of Rs. 1, a freshly printed booklet containing the draft constitution of India. And should the booklet itself escape customers’ notice, the front pages of the stacks of daily newspapers announced, ‘Draft Constitution of Republic of India Published’ or, in all-caps, ‘INDIA IS TO BE A “SOVEREIGN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC” UNDER THE DRAFT CONSTITUTION RELEASED TO THE PRESS TODAY’.

Evidently, by that point the public constitutional fervour infected the Drafting Committee and the president of the Assembly. The president of the Assembly ‘ordered’ that ‘copies should be made available to the public at a cheap, if not nominal price,’ and was ‘very particular’ that ‘copies should be available on sale throughout India,’ ‘even at railway station book stalls’.

The booklet would be published by Government of India Press and bear ‘the new seal of the Government of India’ [the Coats of Arms], rather than the emblem of the Constituent Assembly The controller of Printing and Stationery issued special orders so that the government press could work night shifts, or on a Sunday if necessary, to meet the publication deadline. Anticipating ‘a great demand’, the secretariat of the Constituent Assembly asked the press for the letterpress printing to be ‘kept standing to enable additional copies to be printed for sale whenever required’.

Once published, copies of the draft constitution were distributed widely to anywhere Government of India publications were sold (including railway bookstalls). Since there were no authorised agents for the sale of Government of India publications in most of the princely states, arrangements were made for an alternative distribution. The Constituent Assembly also sent copies to parliaments across the world. Readers for whom one rupee was too dear could either pick up a copy in a Gazette Extraordinary for the price of one anna or read a twenty-four-page summary released to the newspapers. The original version was published in English, but authorised Hindi and Urdu translations appeared by September 1948. Demand was heavy, and the first 10,000 copies moved quickly. In response to a ‘rush of interest from all over India’, Government of India Press issued two reprints of 5,000 copies each within less than a month. By September, the draft had gone through at least four more reprints, as time and time again distributors reported that their stock ‘has entirely been exhausted’ yet again.