Remedying Historical Wrongs: Plain-speaking in the Time of India's Rise

While adjudicating a gender justice question in the Supreme Court in 2018, Dr. Justice D.Y. Chandrachud made a profound observation about the circumstances in which the Constitution of India had come into being.He held that the Constitution was the "end product" of not just the well-known struggle against colonial rule but also "a struggle of social emancipation going on since centuries and which still continues".The reference to the social struggle as one of the two causative factors is indeed profound, especially since this complexity has been largely missed by historians.The omission on their part is despite the telltale sign that the freedom fighters who dominated the Constituent Assembly chose a caste equality champion, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, to play the crucial role of chairing its drafting committee.It was therefore apt that Justice Chandrachud recalled his 2018 judgment in a lecture he delivered at Brandeis University five years later on the subject of "remedying historical wrongs".Of the several insights offered by him in his lecture on 22 October 2023, this one jumped out at me because of a personal reason.My recently published book, Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India, revealed some of the legal aspects of the social struggles that had preceded and followed the making of the Constitution.The significance he attached to the social struggle vindicated, to my mind, the revelations made by my book.At the same time, there is a divergence too.It's on the unlikely but remarkable progress made during the colonial period on the social front, in terms of norm-setting and extending the concept of equality to the lowest layer in the caste hierarchy.Given that these legal developments were hitherto overlooked, it is understandable that Justice Chandrachud does not touch upon them.Instead, he makes this otherwise unexceptionable remark that "the legal system has often played a pivotal role in perpetuating historical wrongs against marginalised social groups".The systemic bias was most glaring in the case of "the laws in ancient and medieval India" which had,