Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2026
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Anthropology
Advisor
Gary Wilder
Committee Members
Mandana Limbert
Ajantha Subramanian
Rohit De
Subject Categories
Comparative and Foreign Law | Constitutional Law | Legal History | Political History | Public Law and Legal Theory | Social and Cultural Anthropology
Keywords
Constitutional Ethnography, Northeastern India, Legal Anthropology, Tribes, Democracy, Resource Extraction
Abstract
The Savage Constitution is a constitutional ethnography of the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. The Sixth Schedule is a complex and technical appendix that accommodates tribal communities in northeastern India. The claims in this dissertation are grounded in two years of fieldwork in the city of Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya, the only state in the country where the Sixth Schedule has (nearly) universal jurisdiction. Understanding and analysing laws that govern groups often excluded from the constitutional imagination, I suggest, enables us to examine the paradoxes of neoliberal governance—not only in India, but around the world.
The Savage Constitution explores the dialectic between tribes and constitutions across time and space. The first half of this dissertation studies the genealogy of the Sixth Schedule in imperial governance and jurisprudence. It demonstrates the way in which the law produces its own archive—an archive that makes reference to chronological events and the historical record without considering itself bound by either. Precedent, I argue, is a powerful technology for historical erasure. These chapters compare the constitutional cultures of two empires—British India and the United States—to argue that tribes have historically been the people who must be dispossessed to make the people any constitution calls into being.
The second half of this dissertation explores the consequences of the Sixth Schedule on everyday life in the city of Shillong and its hinterlands. I establish the circular relationship between daily life and constitutional interpretation, demonstrating how they shape one another. I describe the lives of people left out of the Sixth Schedule, such as migrants, to illustrate how institutions intended to be inclusive can become tools for expropriation and exploitation. These chapters emphasise the limits of the law by focusing on conflicts that have endured despite repeated interventions by the courts. The contradictions of social life are usefully reflected and even heightened in the legal life of Shillong. The relationship between legal life and social life in the city poses questions—for legal analysis, the ethnographic imagination, and historical comparison—that resonate far beyond the region.
Recommended Citation
Ramachandran, Nandini, "The Savage Constitution" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6664
Included in
Comparative and Foreign Law Commons, Constitutional Law Commons, Legal History Commons, Political History Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons
