Book Review: What Happens When a Living Constitution Is Treated as a Monument in Shashi Tharoor’s Underworked Book
✍️ Written by Saket Suman
There is a revealing gap between what Our Living Constitution by Shashi Tharoor promises and what it delivers. The promise is commentary but the delivery is amateur recital. Over and over again, the book approaches moments of genuine constitutional consequence only to retreat into reverent summary, as though the mere act of repeating what the Constitution says were itself an act of interpretation.
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| Image Source: Tharoorian on X |
The words are allowed to do all the work but there is really no sustained inquiry into how fraternity was historically the most fragile of these promises, nor how Ambedkar himself warned that political equality without social equality would turn democracy into a shell. The book makes a vague gesture towards this tension but it declines to sit with it or allow the reader to be absorbed into this nuance.
The reader, as a result, is left with uplift where argument is required.
This pattern recurs with striking consistency throughout the much-hyped book by the sitting parliamnetarian. The Constitution is described as an incredible document that defined the rights of the people as well as their relationship with the state. These formulations appears in the text almost exactly as such but the relationship between citizen and state is never anatomised beyond generalities.
The mechanics of power, such as how rights are limited, suspended, or reshaped, are acknowledged only in outline whereas enumeration substitutes for evaluation.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the discussion of the First Constitutional Amendment (1951). The book notes its existence, names Articles 31A and 31B, mentions the Ninth Schedule, and moves on. The amendment is treated only as a fact and not as a rupture.
There is no engagement with the extraordinary reality that within a year of the Constitution’s adoption, the Indian Parliament amended it to override adverse judicial decisions and shield laws from review. A reader, as most readers, particularly those from the younger generation, are, unfamiliar with constitutional history would not learn that this moment decisively altered the balance between rights and the state.
The book records the amendment but it once again refuses to engage with it. This refusal to linger defines the book’s style from the first page to the last. The reader is repeatedly reminded that the Constitution is “the longest written Constitution in the world,” with its original “395 Articles, 22 Parts and 8 Schedules,” later expanded by amendments.
These facts are accurate and also inert. Length is invoked as a badge of seriousness, but never interrogated as a symptom of distrust, compromise, or centralisation. Complexity is celebrated and not questioned. For a general reader, the experience often resembles an extended, polished Wikipedia entry rather than an original constitutional commentary.
When scholars are introduced, even they are rarely engaged. Granville Austin’s description of the Constitution as a vehicle for “social revolution” is cited approvingly. But the revolution itself is never traced through its failures. The texts by Tharoor does not ask, or even attempts to ask, how land reform, caste abolition, or equality jurisprudence repeatedly ran aground on political resistance and judicial hesitation. Austin’s phrase becomes an incantation but not an analytical framework. That is another serious drawback of the book.
The book’s prose frequently reaches for metaphor when argument would be inconvenient. The Constitution is likened to a “work of art,” India to a “rich jambalaya” of cultures, pluralism to an organic inheritance flowing effortlessly from antiquity to the modern state.
These images are pleasant but we have read them over and over in Tharoor's previous works. They also obscure conflict. Ancient republics are invoked, the gana sanghas, the Lichchhavis, as evidence of an indigenous democratic instinct but the historical discontinuities between those formations and a modern constitutional republic are not addressed. Antiquity is pressed into service as reassurance.
Even when the author acknowledges strain, the language softens the blow and the reasons are best known to the author. The author not only fails to address the strains in detail but is willingly reluctant to observe or record what has been an almost routine affair in the recent past.
The book acknowledges, in passing, that equality and social justice remain unrealised ideals. These are large admissions but are quickly neutralised. The book does not ask how constitutional design itself enabled some of these failures, or how power learned to speak the language of the Constitution while hollowing out its substance. Coming from a sitting parliamentarian with a large readership, this restraint raises uncomfortable questions about the responsibilities that accompany such literary influence.
The tone occasionally shifts into contemporary commentary, but here too the treatment is ironically glancing. Political speeches are described as making ritual genuflections to the Constitution. The phrase is clever but it is also unearned. No example is dissected, no speech is thoroughly analysed, no contradiction is vividly exposed. The reader is invited to nod along rather than think seriously, which is expected from a book of this kind.
What ultimately weakens Our Living Constitution is the economy of effort. This is a book that knows the right authorities to cite, the right phrases to repeat and the right reverence to perform. It explains the obvious but avoids the difficult. It prefers counting to questioning, quotation to confrontation and ceremony to critique. The Constitution emerges only as a sacred text to be admired and not as an instrument to be argued over.
For an author who has previously demonstrated the ability to synthesise history, politics, and ideas with genuine rigour, this restraint feels less like discipline and more like calculation. The book leans heavily on the author’s public stature and on the Constitution’s unquestioned moral weight. Together, they do much of the selling.
What is missing is the labour that would justify the reverence. A bit of sustained analysis, uncomfortable conclusions, and the courage to treat the Constitution not just as a monument but also as a battlefield could have given the book a much longer shelf life than the public persona of the author concerned.
As a result, Our Living Constitution reads less like a commentary than like a polished civics lecture which is solemn, fluent and finally absurdly evasive.
For readers familiar with the author’s earlier work, the deepest disappointment lies in the refusal to engage honestly with a demanding subject and the reluctance to confront the constitutional conflicts shaping India’s present political moment.