London: Profile Books, 2021, pp 502, ₹ 2,280 (hardcover). This wide-ranging and insightful book challenges our understanding of the nature and uses of political constitutions. We are used to thinking of modern constitutions as something that arise out of popular struggles for freedom—individual, social, national—and self-governance. Examples from the dawn of the modern age that come immediately to mind are the United States (US) constitution that was framed after the war of independence against the British imperial rule. And the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Cit...