B R Ambedkar’s Multiple Consciousness and the Framing of the Indian Constitution

Abstract

This article will analyze the way in which B R Ambedkar's lived experience and jurisprudential commitments framed the discursive structure of the Indian Constitution and reformulated prevailing conceptions of liberal constitutionalism to reflect the specific and historically contingent context in which it was formed. Whereas prevailing notions of political rights in Western liberalism were conceived as abstract protections of individuals against the state, Ambedkar attempted to reframe the idea of rights as including correlative duties and accounting for material conditions of inequality and systemic discrimination. Heblurred the distinction between the higher-order law and everyday politics, and conceptualized rights as horizontal in addition to vertical in character. Finally, he included a temporal reorientation of the liberal constitutional paradigm by incorporating permissive constitutional structures. This article analyzes his approach to constitutional jurisprudence within the framework of Mari Matsuda’s notion of multiple consciousness.