THE INDIAN CONSTITUTION: CORNERSTONE OF A NATION.

By Granville Austin '50. London: Clarendon Press,1966. 390 pp. 45 shillings.

In Granville Austin's definitive study of the making of India's constitution, Norwich, Hanover High, Dartmouth, Oxford, and the Institute of Current World Affairs have a source of high pride.

This exceptional book is first a classic in modern history. Dr. Austin reconstructs the political setting in which India's Constituent Assembly functioned, portrays the personality and philosophy of key participants, and vividly details the play of practical politics leading to accommodation and decision. It would be hard to recommend a better introduction to modern Indian politics than this study of constitutional origins twenty years ago.

Next, this is comparative constitutional analysis in the great tradition. To the issues familiar to an American reader - basic rights and their limits, due process, checks and balances, federalism Vs. regionalism - Dr. Austin adds two important dimensions of the Indian constitution: its goal of achieving social revolution through lawful means; and its open-ended approach to language differences. His knowledge of constitutional precedents makes him willing to render judgments, in reasoned tone, sharpening the book's value to both expert and lay readers.

Austin emphasizes that India's achievement in fashioning an effective modern constitution was no accident of colonial inheritance, but founded in the "rich, deep, and undogmatic" roots of her intellectual culture and in the ideals of consensus and accommodation, "India's original contributions to constitution-making." He is particularly perceptive in assessing the quality of accommodation. "Indians can accommodate such apparently conflicting principles by seeing them at different levels of value, ... sufficiently separate so that a concept can operate freely within its own sphere and not conflict with another operating in a separate sphere." He shows how the Congress Party achieved variety of representation in the Assembly and approached issues in a practical way. "Like the American founding fathers, they had put their minds to use in the national cause." The decision to found government on adult suffrage he calls "a gong, a single note, whose reverberations might awaken" an illiterate society. "The Constitution has thus created another norm, one of democratic political behaviour based on the belief that man can shape his own destiny."

This will be recognized as interpretive writing at its best. The volume is testimony to the ability of an individual to gain valid understanding of an unfamiliar culture and society, its processes and institutions, and, as Red Austin and Walter Rogers intended, "to interpret a people to itself and to others." The ability is founded on a zest for differences, keen objectivity, and a motivation to understand new ways and concepts. It is founded also, in this case, in the open receptivity of Indian politicians, lawyers, and scholars to dispassionate study by a friendly mind: a receptivity which Austin acknowledges made it possible to delve deep and communicate well.

Notably, the book is a pleasure to read. Designed around apt quotations from Nehru, Gandhi, and their colleagues, it is lucid and free-flowing in style even on intricate legal matters. Touched with brisk, sometimes eloquent phrases, it has "verve," an Indian friend commented to me yesterday.

If the Constituent Assembly of India created a living vehicle of modern democracy, Granville Austin's exegesis carries the philosophy and verve of democracy yet another pace forward.

Now at the School of Planning and Architecture, indraprastha Estate, New Delhi, India, Mr. Morse is Senior International Economist of the Stanford Research Institute,Menlo Park, Calif.