Republic

Bismil's closest friend and co-accused, hanged four days after him at Faizabad. The two of them were, deliberately and publicly, a Hindu and a Muslim who could not be split.

Find it on the floor: The Constitution Drafting Room

Tibetan and Nepali monasteries preserved Sanskrit Buddhist texts that were lost in India entirely. Whole libraries survive today only because somebody walked north with them.

Find it on the floor: The Constitution Drafting Room

One member resigned, one died, one was abroad, one was busy with state affairs. As another member later put it in the Assembly, the burden of actually producing the document fell almost entirely on its chairman.

Find it on the floor: The Constitution Drafting Room

Made films about Partition that were too raw to be commercially viable and too good to be forgotten. Taught at the Film Institute in Pune, where he shaped a generation who went on to be far more successful than him.

Find it on the floor: The Constitution Drafting Room

Went to jail in the salt satyagraha at eighteen, qualified as a lawyer, argued in the Assembly for legal aid and women's education, and later founded the Central Social Welfare Board.

Find it on the floor: The Constitution Drafting Room

A biometric identity system built at a scale nobody had attempted, which underpins direct benefit transfers and, indirectly, the payments revolution. It has also been argued about in the Supreme Court for a decade.

Find it on the floor: The Constitution Drafting Room

Written off early as unglamorous, she rebuilt herself completely and became the most magnetic screen presence of her generation, then declined to explain any of it to anybody for the next forty years.

Find it on the floor: The Constitution Drafting Room

Untouchability abolished outright in Article 17. Equality before law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to move the Supreme Court directly to enforce any of it — which its chairman called the soul of the whole document.

Find it on the floor: The Constitution Drafting Room

Calligraphed the entire Constitution in flowing italic over six months and refused any payment. He asked only that his name appear on every page, and that his grandfather's appear on the last one.

Find it on the floor: The Constitution Drafting Room

Two years, eleven months and eighteen days of drafting; 395 articles at the start; the longest written constitution of any sovereign country. The original was hand-lettered by a calligrapher in Delhi and then illuminated, page by page, by Nandalal Bose’s artists at Santiniketan.

Find it on the floor: The Constitution Drafting Room

He and his students at Santiniketan decorated every part with borders drawn from Indian art across three thousand years — Mohenjo-daro seals, Ajanta, Mughal miniatures — so that the document looked like the place it was for.

Find it on the floor: The Constitution Drafting Room

Ran the world's largest election in 1951–52 with 173 million voters, over 80% of whom could not read. His fix: give every party a picture symbol and print separate ballot boxes. It worked, and it is still the system.

Find it on the floor: The Constitution Drafting Room

Sixty-eight phases across not quite four months, 224,000 polling booths, 2.2 million steel ballot boxes, and officials crossing rivers and snow passes to reach voters. Universal adult franchise from day one, which almost no other new country attempted.

Find it on the floor: The Constitution Drafting Room

From Karnal to NASA, flying her second shuttle mission when Columbia broke up on re-entry. Seven Indian schools and one satellite constellation are named after her.

Find it on the floor: The Constitution Drafting Room

Designed the automatic flood gates at Khadakvasla, built the Krishnaraja Sagar dam, served as Diwan of Mysore, and worked until he was a hundred. Engineers' Day in India is his birthday.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Designed for heat and monsoon rather than against them — open-to-sky space, deep shade, cross-ventilation — at a time when the fashion was sealed glass boxes. Co-authored the proposal for Navi Mumbai with Pravina Mehta and Shirish Patel, on the argument that the old city could not absorb another million people, and served as its chief architect.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Worked for Le Corbusier in Paris, came back to build low-cost housing, campuses and studios across India from a base in Ahmedabad, and won the Pritzker at ninety. His own studio is half buried in the ground because that is the cheapest way to keep a room cool in Ahmedabad.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Wrote a letter in 1944 proposing that India should build a nuclear programme from nothing, got the money from the Tatas, and did it. Also collected modern art and had rather good taste in architecture.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Argued that a poor country needed space technology precisely because it was poor — for weather, for communications, for education by satellite. Started the whole thing from a church in a fishing village in Kerala.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

A British Quaker who came to India, stayed sixty years, took citizenship, and built houses out of exposed brick, salvaged material and jali walls for a fraction of what anyone else charged. Turned away clients who wanted to be seen spending money.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Painted cinema hoardings in Bombay before joining the Progressive Artists' Group, and never quite lost the billboard scale or speed. Worked barefoot, painted horses obsessively, and spent his last years in self-imposed exile after threats over his mythological work.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Members of the great South Indian merchant guilds left inscriptions from Karnataka to Sumatra. Multinational trade, complete with a standard contract, several centuries before the joint-stock company.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Set up in a former detention camp for political prisoners, which is a decent metaphor for how the entrance exam feels. Sixteen more followed.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Worked out how to read a star's temperature from its spectrum, which is the foundation of modern astrophysics. Also sat in Parliament and chaired the committee that reformed the Indian calendar.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Spent most of his working life in France painting increasingly abstract landscapes, then reduced everything to a single black circle — the bindu — and built the rest of his career outward from it. Returned to India in his late eighties.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

India's first nuclear test, conducted in the Rajasthan desert and described officially as a peaceful nuclear explosion, a phrase that convinced approximately nobody.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Sent a rejected paper directly to Einstein, who translated it into German himself and got it published. An entire class of particles — bosons — is named after him. He never received a Nobel Prize.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Told the Prime Minister in April 1971 that the army was not ready and would go in when the ground was dry. She waited. In December it took thirteen days.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Made his name on a photograph of a donkey and spent the next six decades documenting India at close range — Bhopal after the gas leak, Mother Teresa's order, everyday Delhi. Works the street rather than the studio.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Nationalised the banks, oversaw the 1971 war and the first nuclear test, and then declared an Emergency in 1975 that suspended civil liberties for twenty-one months. Lost the election that followed and was back in office by January 1980.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Wrote fiction about Adivasi and bonded-labour communities and then spent as much time organising among them as writing about them. Considered the activism and the novels to be one job, and got irritated when asked to separate them.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Thirteen days, after nine months of refugees crossing the border at a rate India could not absorb. It ended with the largest military surrender since the Second World War and a new country.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Wrote Urdu fiction about what women actually said to each other when men left the room, and was tried for obscenity in Lahore for one story. Refused to apologise, won the case, and kept writing.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Bhakra, Hirakud, Nagarjuna Sagar. Enormous, transformative, and displacing hundreds of thousands of people whose story took another forty years to be heard properly.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Wrote in English and in Malayalam under a pen name, and was frank about desire and marriage in a way that scandalised readers in both languages. Converted to Islam late in life, which scandalised them again.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Punjabi poet and novelist who wrote the defining literary response to Partition's violence against women, then spent a long career refusing to live the way she was expected to. The first woman to win the Sahitya Akademi Award in any language, in 1956.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Wrote short, brutal stories about Partition and the Bombay underworld and was tried for obscenity six times, on both sides of the new border. Drank himself to death at forty-two, having written some of the sharpest prose in Urdu.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Presided over the empire at its most comfortable: gold coins, safe roads, and a court that could afford to keep poets. Fa Hien walked across it and reported, slightly amazed, that he had not been robbed.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

Elections suspended, press censored, opposition leaders jailed. Then it was put to a vote in 1977 and comprehensively rejected — which is, in its own grim way, the strongest thing the Republic has ever done.

Find it on the floor: Nation-Building Workshop

The parrot picks a card, the astrologer interprets it, and the customer hears what they came to hear. A complete service industry with two employees, one of them a bird.

Find it on the floor: Green & White Revolution Dairy

Hungarian-Indian, trained in Paris, and impatient with everything she found in both places. Turned from European salon painting to the hill villages of Himachal, her father's estate in the United Provinces and a long tour of the south, painting rural women with a gravity and stillness nobody had given them before. Dead at twenty-eight.

Find it on the floor: Green & White Revolution Dairy

Sent to Anand on a government bond he did not want, stayed forty years, and built a cooperative that made India the largest milk producer on earth — owned by the farmers, not by him.

Find it on the floor: Green & White Revolution Dairy

Opened a school for girls in 1848 and one for Dalit children soon after, in the face of a social boycott severe enough that his own father threw him out. Coined the term Dalit in its modern political sense.

Find it on the floor: Green & White Revolution Dairy

Has surveyed all fourteen counters before taking a single plate, and has a route. The route ends at the ice cream and doubles back to the chaat.

Find it on the floor: Green & White Revolution Dairy

India went from importing grain under emergency aid to self-sufficiency in about a decade. It also brought groundwater depletion, monoculture and a debt crisis that the country is still working through.

Find it on the floor: Green & White Revolution Dairy

Took a gamble on a seed variety nobody in the village had grown before. The 1968 harvest was so large that schools had to be closed to store the grain.

Find it on the floor: Green & White Revolution Dairy

Studied engineering in Manipal, went to the US for a master's, and now runs one of the largest technology companies on earth. He is one of a striking number of Indian-born CEOs in Silicon Valley.

Find it on the floor: Green & White Revolution Dairy

A superb instructor whose reputation rests uneasily on one request he made of a student he refused to teach.

Find it on the floor: Green & White Revolution Dairy

Produces the richest milk of any dairy animal, has strong opinions about being moved, and is worth more than the family motorcycle.

Find it on the floor: Green & White Revolution Dairy

The largest dairy development programme ever run. Around 16 million farmers in cooperatives, and a nation that had queued for milk in 1970 became the world's biggest producer by 1998.

Find it on the floor: Green & White Revolution Dairy