Place · assembly chamber · India
Constitution Hall (Parliament House)
The circular Central Hall of Lutyens' Parliament House, where the Constituent Assembly sat for two years and eleven months from December 1946, and where power was transferred at midnight on 14 August 1947.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 28.617, 77.208
Worth knowing
The drafting committee under Ambedkar produced a document of 395 articles — the longest national constitution written — abolishing untouchability, guaranteeing universal adult franchise from the start, and doing it for a population that was around eighteen per cent literate.
Connections (4)
- Imperial administration ofJawaharlal Nehru
Nehru made the tryst with destiny speech in this chamber at midnight on 14 August 1947, and then governed from the building for seventeen years — the longest continuous prime ministership India has had, and the one in which the parliamentary system, the planning apparatus, the states reorganisation and non-alignment were all set. He also lost the 1962 war from here, and died two years later still in office.
- Imperial administration ofB. R. Ambedkar
Ambedkar chaired the drafting committee of a constitution that abolished untouchability in its seventeenth article, guaranteed universal adult franchise from the first election to a population around eighteen per cent literate, and gave the state the power to make special provision for backward classes. He had spent his career arguing the Congress could not be trusted with any of it, and he resigned from Nehru's cabinet in 1951 over the Hindu Code Bill.
- Site withinDelhi
Constitution Hall (Parliament House) lies within Delhi — the two sites sit about 0 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Constitution Hall (Parliament House) is one of the specific sites that give Delhi its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.
- Site withinParliament House / Sansad Bhavan
The Constitution Hall (Central Hall of Parliament House) sits within the 1927 Sansad Bhavan Parliament House in central New Delhi. The Central Hall was the venue of the Constituent Assembly's December 1946-January 1950 debates that drafted the Indian Constitution, and the room from which Nehru delivered the 'Tryst with Destiny' address on 15 August 1947. The hall remains the room where joint sessions of both Houses of Parliament are held.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Constitution of India”. Constituent Assembly Debates (Lok Sabha Secretariat, 12 vols, 1946–49); Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation.
Open Constitution Hall (Parliament House) in the repository →