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Welcome to the Quill Project home page. Here you can find more information
about the project, what can be achieved on the platform and the team behind it.

We work to research the history and enhance understanding of some of the world's foundational legal texts.
A negotiated text is the product of a formal decision-making process where a text has been negotiated and drafted over a
period of time.
Think of the process as made up of four elements — people, procedures, documents, and decisions.

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Welcome to

Indian Constitution 1950

The Quill Project is proud to announce a ground-breaking collaborative project, Pluralist Agreement and Constitutional Transformation (PACT) that has just received a major AHRC grant (2022-2025).

Learn More

Time Period
1946-1950
Project Partners

Welcome to PACT & Quill's Collaborative Project

PACT will create a new digital research platform to facilitate scholarship, teaching and public engagement with Indian constitution-making, inspired by the values of a digital commons that is universal, free, and creative. The construction of an advanced digital platform on the making of the Indian constitution is embedded in an ambitious new research agenda that will explore constitution-making as an alternative source of democratic legitimacy to elections for pluralist politics, for enabling the negotiation of differences across lines of social division. Our research will draw lessons from the Indian example while critically analysing its unfulfilled potential for pluralism and democracy in the present.

Using the methodologies and software developed at Pembroke College by the Quill Project, the group will create an extensive digital record of the proceedings from 1946 to 1949 that led to the formation of the Indian constitution. Alongside these plenary debates of the Indian Constituent Assembly, the project will also include committee discussions, petitions, public responses and the wider debate of the period. This broad collection of sources will allow further study into the context of public opinion against which the Indian constitution was authored.

View Negotiations View Collections Read introduction

The Team

  • Professor Rochana Bajpai

    Principal Investigator

    Rochana Bajpai (MPhil DPhil Oxf) is Professor of Politics. Rochana is the author of Debating Difference (Oxford University Press 2011) and of numerous journal articles and book chapters on the Indian Constituent Assembly debates; minority rights, secularism and pluralism in India; social justice and affirmative action in India and Malaysia. She has also published on democratic authoritarianism, liberal ideas in India, interdisciplinary methods in political theory and comparative political thought.

    Read introduction

  • Dr Nicholas Cole

    Co-Investigator

    Dr Nicholas Cole (MA MPhil DPhil Oxf) studies the political thought of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and is working on a digitial project that looks at the way constitutions and treaties have been negotiated over the last two hundred years..

  • Dr Udit Bhatia

    Co-Investigator

    Udit Bhatia is a political theorist whose research focuses on normative democratic theory, constitutionalism, and political epistemology. Some of his recent papers have examined the legal and normative status of political parties, asking how their internal rules should be configured. In other work, he has engaged with epistocracy, the notion that competent persons should enjoy exclusive or disproportionate political power. He is also interested in the history of political thought, especially in relation to democratic institutions.

  • Professor Sudir Krishnaswamy

    Co-Investigator

    Dr. Sudhir Krishnaswamy is the Vice-Chancellor of NLSIU, Bengaluru and the Director of the Department of Professional and Continuing Education (PACE), NLSIU. He is also the Co-founder and trustee of the not-for-profit research trust, Centre for Law and Policy Research. Previously, he was the Director of the School of Policy and Governance, and Professor of Law and Politics at Azim Premji University. He is the recipient of the Infosys Prize 2022 in the Humanities category.

  • Vineeth Krishna

    Project Partner

    Vineeth Krishna E is a Senior Research Associate & Editor at the Centre for Law and Policy Research (CLPR), Bangalore, India where he leads the Constitutional Culture team. The team engages in interdisciplinary academic research and civic education around the Indian Constitution. At CLPR, Vineeth helped set up the constitutionofIndia.net website, and the Supreme Court Observer website which was incubated at CLPR. He currently leads the team that runs the ConstitutionofIndia.net website. Vineeth is interested in studying Indian Constitutionalism through intellectual history and political theory.

  • Lauren Davis Jarnach

    Senior Documentary Editor

    As the Senior Documentary Editor of the PACT project, Lauren Davis Jarnach (MSt, Oxford) manages the archival research, editorial standards, and online data entry into the Quill Platform (Quill Project, Pembroke College) of information regarding the negotiation process surrounding the drafting of the Constitution of India from 1946-1950. She has done similar work on the United States state and federal constitutions and Bill of Rights and U.K. Brexit legislation. Her research interests include digital humanities, data and archive management, text-based analysis, negotiated texts, material texts, and digital curation and editing.

    Read PACT blog post

  • Manas Raturi

    PDRA

    Manas is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate for PACT at Quill. He manages independent academic research and administrative activities in the area of Indian constitutional history and law.

  • Sarfaraz Hamid

    Research Assistant

    Sarfaraz Hamid is a Delhi-based researcher specialising in Archival Research. He has a degree in Master of Arts in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His expertise includes navigating historical records from the National Archives of India and other state and private archives. Sarfaraz has collaborated on numerous research projects with leading academics from around the world. In addition to his research endeavours, he is also passionate about heritage conservation and conducts engaging heritage walks in and around Delhi.

  • Student Researchers

    Research and Modelling

    The project also involves ongoing collaboration with colleagues in India, for both archival and educational work.

The Negotiations

The Resource Collections

Related Videos

Introducing PACT - Pluralist Agreement and Constitutional Transformation

A short film introducing the AHRC-funded collaborative research project on the making of the Indian constitution. Pluralist Agreement and Constitutional Transformation lead from SOAS.

PACT 2024 - Year in Review

A look at what the PACT project has accomplished in 2024, the penultimate year of the project.

PACT 2023 - Year in Review

A look at what the PACT project has accomplished in 2023.