While the makers of the Indian Constitution rather acutely anticipated the notion of ‘human dignity as empowerment’ (Beyleveld and Brownsword 2001), it is no simple task to understand the precise place of human dignity within the constitutional scheme. Moreover, for a variety of reasons, grasping the ways in which dignity as empowerment has been put to work in the sixty-plus years of the Indian Constitution remains an even more hazardous narrative.

First, India's sixty-year-long freedom struggle was premised on the idea that sustained colonial predation and subjugation constituted an epic saga of humiliation – the Other of dignity. This Indian struggle for freedom, together with the Constitution that it eventually produced, offers a becoming and befitting response to the contemporary and ahistoric ‘digcrits’ discourse (questioning the conceptual and normative coherence of human dignity as well as its institutional viability).

Second, the freedom movement also generates a new telos of dignity for the subjects of violent social exclusion constituted by the discursive formations of the Hindu Dharma that disacknowledged moral capacity and legal subjectivity to India’s millennially humiliated peoples – the Untouchables, the indigenous peoples, and in a related yet distinct sense the masses of Indian women.