Linda Colley, 'The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World', 2021:
“…There was yet another massive Asian empire in constitutional flux at this time – British India. Unlike the others, it did not erupt into revolution in the decades immediately before 1914. But levels of activism and resistance increased, and so did the production of innovative constitutional texts. Pressure for change and reform had been growing here since the repression of the Indian Revolt of 1857. Some of the military rebels that year had themselves produced a twelve-point political document, the Dastur-ul Amal, an embryonic constitution. There were also attempts from the 1860s onwards in some of the Indian princely states to draft local written constitutions. But the first major, though unofficial, attempt at writing a full-scale political constitution for the Indian subcontinent as a whole was the Swaraj (or Self-rule) Bill of 1895.
This text seems to have been mainly the work of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, an educationalist and journalist from western India, who was deeply conservative on the matter of women’s rights but influential in his early nationalism, and from 1890 a member of the Indian National Congress. Tilak planned that – were his Swaraj Bill to pass – the resulting act would be called the ‘Constitution of India Act’. Moreover, as the draft introduction to the bill made clear, this legislation was to extend ‘to the whole of India’. Its 110 articles included broad provisions for rights. There was to be freedom of speech and written expression in India. There was to be a right to petition, equality before the law and free state education. And, as in the Meiji constitution, all citizens (which in practice meant men) were to enjoy equal access to public employments, and to have a duty to bear arms if need be.
Indian historians have yet to investigate the echoes between these and other provisions in the Swaraj Bill of 1895 and the Meiji constitution six years earlier. Yet that these should have existed was hardly surprising. The detailed commentary published on Japan’s constitution in 1889 had been issued in an English translation, while the text itself was widely reported on and extracted in the British and Indian press. A highly educated man like Tilak would have found it easy, and, given his interests and ambitions, irresistible, to familiarise himself with a pioneering east Asian example of engineered constitutional reconfiguration, along with British and American political and legal writings.
Recognising this helps to explain why the Swaraj Bill strives for some of the compromises between modernity, conservatism and tradition that also appealed to the Meiji elite. In Tilak’s plan there was to be a bicameral parliament for the ‘Indian nation’, just as Itō Hirobumi and his allies had sought a bicameral parliament to give expression to a remodelled and reinvigorated Japanese nation. But, as in Meiji Japan, formal sovereign power in Tilak’s reformed India was to be invested in a monarch, in this case, the Empress of India, Britain’s Queen Victoria. Like the emperor in Japan, she was to function in India as a still point in a fast evolving realm….”
Meiji Constitution promulgation, 1889 by Toyohara Chikanobu
