Vintage Books
Sixteen Stormy Days
Key Metrics
- Tripurdaman Singh
- Vintage Books
- Hardcover
- 9780670092871
- 8.5 X 5.5 X 1.1 inches
- 0.9 pounds
- History > Asia - General
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Sixteen Stormy Days narrates the riveting story of the First Amendment to the Constitution of India-one of the pivotal events in Indian political and constitutional history, and its first great battle of ideas. Passed in June 1951 in the face of tremendous opposition within and outside Parliament, the subject of some of independent India's fiercest parliamentary debates, the First Amendment drastically curbed freedom of speech; enabled caste-based reservation by restricting freedom against discrimination; circumscribed the right to property and validated abolition of the zamindari system; and fashioned a special schedule of unconstitutional laws immune to judicial challenge.Enacted months before India's inaugural election, the amendment represents the most profound changes that the Constitution has ever seen. Faced with an expansively liberal Constitution that stood in the way of nearly every major socio-economic plan in the Congress party's manifesto, a judiciary vigorously upholding civil liberties, and a press fiercely resisting his attempt to control public discourse, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru reasserted executive supremacy, creating the constitutional architecture for repression and coercion.
What extraordinary set of events led the prime minister-who had championed the Constitution when it was passed in 1950 after three years of deliberation-to radically amend it after a mere sixteen days of debate in 1951?
Drawing on parliamentary debates, press reports, judicial pronouncements, official correspondence and existing scholarship, Sixteen Stormy Days challenges conventional wisdom on iconic figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru, B.R. Ambedkar, Rajendra Prasad, Sardar Patel and Shyama Prasad Mookerji, and lays bare the vast gulf between the liberal promise of India's Constitution and the authoritarian impulses of her first government.
Author Bio
Tripurdaman Singh is a historian, writer and public-speaker who works on the political and social history of early modern and modern South Asia. He splits his time between Agra, India – which is his hometown – and London, United Kingdom, where he is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London.
Born in 1988, Tripurdaman was schooled at St. Peter’s College, Agra, from where he graduated in 2006. He then went on to read Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, gaining a Bachelor of Arts with Honours. Subsequently, he earned an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies and a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and hopes to soon be elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society as well.
He has also previously held a postdoctoral fellowship from the Indian Council of Historical Research. Tripurdaman’s (constantly evolving) research interests and writing range from politics, history and international affairs to food, fashion, sport and aesthetics.
As a historian, he is particularly interested in (in no particular order) Rajput history, the decline of the Mughal empire, the early British empire in India, the Princely States, independence and the transfer of power, the writing of the Constitution and the birth of Indian democracy, and post-liberalisation politics in India. He is also interested in histories of colonial sports, fashion, clothing and aesthetics as well as broader themes of sovereignty, state formation, colonial identity, modernity and constitutionalism.
Tripurdaman also takes a keen interest in and occasionally writes and speaks about contemporary politics, particularly regarding issues connected to secularism, modernity, views on the Constitution, elections and electoral processes, the role of history in current political discourse and the historical antecedents of current issues. When not indulging in research or writing, Tripurdaman likes going on long rambling walks, riding horses, playing cricket, dabbling in politics, attempting to be healthy and watching re-runs of classic whodunnit shows.
Source: tripurdaman.com
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