duties owed by the king to his people.8 Abul Fazl’s work on the duty of the king or the badhshah to make every effort towards the welfare of the people.9 Similarly, it is the duty of the people to obey the badshah. These references require more careful philological and philosophical study.10 However, as this paper is concerned primarily with contemporary constitutional references to duties, the focus is on a narrower historical period: from 1895 to 1950. CA Bayly in his work, Recovering Liberties, takes the late eighteenth century as the starting point for a discussion on Indian political and constitutional ideas, tracing the meanings of liberalism from colonial India and tracking its transformation till 1950.11The paper follows Bayly’s periodisation and focus on modern Indian political thought in this period. In this period, several modern political thinkers, some of whom are prominent leaders of the Indian freedom movement, invoked the concept of duties while responding to the questions of caste, freedom, violence, and government. These include significant figures like Vivekananda, Tagore, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Nehru and Aurobindo.12 Other prominent figures include Muhammad Iqbal, Vinayak Savarkar, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Har Dayal and Sardar Patel.13 A fuller account of the evolution of the modern concept of duty in Indian political thought will need to give an account of key thinkers in this period. However, this paper focuses only on the invocation of fundamental or political duties in ‘constitutional discourse’ prior to the adoption of the Constitution of India 1950.14 Constitutional discourse in this period includes several proposals for a new constitution made by individuals as well as social and political groups. These proposals may be referred to as ‘historical’ or ‘antecedent’ constitutions.15 The formal process of Constitution making began with the creation of the Constituent Assembly in 1946, when the Assembly sat in session for the first time on 9 December 1946. Over the next two years and eleven months, the Assembly sat for 167 days to debate and frame the Indian Constitution as it came into force in 1950. The Assembly debated a number of issues, not all of which were included in the text of the Constitution. Patrick Olivelle, Manu’s Code of Law (Oxford University Press, 2005). Kamla, ‘Abul Fazl: Governance and Administration’, in MP Singh and Himanshu Roy (eds), Indian Political Thought (Pearson, 2011). 10 Ibid. 11 C.A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire(Cambridge University Press, 2011). 12 Shruti Kapila, Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age (Princeton University Press, 2021). 13 Ibid. 14 Niraja Jayal, Citizenship and its Discontents, (Harvard University Press, 2013). 15 Rohit De, ‘Constitutional Antecedents’, in Madhav Khosla, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Sujit Choudhry (eds), Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2016). 8 9 Journal of the National Human Rights Commission, Vol. 22, 2023 23