Prem Behari Narain Raizada Lettered the English Constitution of India by Hand, Nandalal Bose's Santiniketan Artists Illuminated It, and Both Handwritten Originals Have Sat in Nitrogen-Filled Glass Cases Since 1994

The Constitution of India exists first as two handwritten volumes. Prem Behari Narain Raizada lettered the English one in a flowing italic hand, Vasant Krishna Vaidya lettered the Hindi one, and Nandalal Bose led artists from Kala Bhavan, the art school at Santiniketan, in painting the borders and the picture that opens each of the 22 Parts. Since 1994 both volumes have been kept in sealed glass cases at the Parliament Library in New Delhi, and the gas in those cases is nitrogen.

This piece is about the manuscript as an object: how it was commissioned, who made which page, what the volumes weigh and how they are protected. What the text says, Part by Part and Schedule by Schedule, is in our guide to the Constitution at a glance, and the Assembly’s sittings are in our account of the Constituent Assembly at work.

Two volumes of hand-made paper

Two authors, D. K. Aswal and Ranjana Mehrotra, described the volumes in a 2018 letter to Current Science that is held in the repository of the CSIR-National Physical Laboratory (NPL). The English volume has 221 calligraphed sheets of hand-made parchment paper, each 45.7 cm by 58.4 cm, and weighs about 13 kg. The Hindi volume has 252 sheets and weighs about 14 kg. Both are bound in Morocco leather embossed with gold, and both carry the signatures of the framers. The Lalit Kala Akademi, the government’s national academy of art, describes the binding as black with gold patterns.

Other counts exist. The Internet Archive’s description of its scan gives 234 pages for the English volume, and Live History India gives 251. The Press Information Bureau’s 2021 factsheet says the text has 90,000 words, while Live History India says 117,369. None of these pages explains how it counted, so this article uses the NPL’s sheet figures and leaves the word count open.

Names vary too. The Lalit Kala Akademi writes the Hindi calligrapher as Vasant K. Vaidya, and the NPL letter writes Basantrao Vaidya. The NPL abstract’s last sentence credits Nand Lal Bose with calligraphing the English volume, though its first paragraph credits Raizada, and every other source treats Bose as the illuminator.

The letter of 21 October 1949

A Parliament Secretariat note of June 1950, which ThePrint quotes, says the calligraphy and artistic decoration of the authoritative copy began on the suggestion of K. T. Shah, a professor and member of the Constituent Assembly. On 21 October 1949 Rajendra Prasad, the Assembly’s president, wrote to Nandalal Bose that the Assembly wanted to present the first Parliament, on 26 January 1950, with an “illuminated manuscript of the entire Constitution”. He admitted that time was short, because the printed text ran to about 300 pages, and he suggested putting scenes from Indian history in the margins.

Bose replied that the margins were too narrow for historical scenes and offered ornamental designs spanning the whole period of Indian civilisation. The same note says he accepted the Prime Minister’s suggestion to skip multi-colour pictures in favour of real gold spray on the margins and a rectangular illuminated border.

The curator and critic R. Siva Kumar, who has worked through the Santiniketan records, adds in a July 2019 talk that Bose was approached in October 1949, before Raizada had been chosen as calligrapher, and that the work began no earlier than December 1949. Bose decided the paper, the page size, the border scrolls and the scheme of pictures, and he supervised the other artists. Text and decoration went ahead at the same time, with pages carried back and forth between the calligrapher and the artists.

One name at the foot of every page

According to the Lalit Kala Akademi, Raizada learned calligraphy from his grandfather and wrote the English volume over six months in a room in Constitution Hall, using hundreds of pen nibs. The Internet Archive description names the No. 303 nib. His signature, the single word Prem, sits at the lower left of the text on each page, and the Akademi calls it his only request. Siva Kumar says simply that Raizada charged nothing.

Live History India adds that Jawaharlal Nehru asked what fee he wanted, and that Raizada asked to write his name on every page and, on the last page, his grandfather’s name. No other source we opened has the grandfather detail. The Akademi also reproduces Vaidya’s signature from the Hindi volume.

About 16 artists, and a rule about signing

Bose had been head of Kala Bhavan since 1921, according to the Akademi. The school sits in Santiniketan, the subject of our piece on Tagore’s school and ashram. Siva Kumar says Bose chose to work with a team, as he did on public projects, and that five of the team were close family: his son Biswarup Bose, his daughters Gouri Bhanja and Jamuna Sen, his daughter-in-law Nibedita Bose and his granddaughter Bani Patel. The rest were colleagues and senior students, among them A. Perumal, Dhirendra Krishna Deb Barman, Kripal Singh Shekhawat and V. S. Masoji. About 16 artists can be identified from signatures in the margins and from other records.

Beohar Rammanohar Sinha, Bose’s senior-most student, designed the Preamble page. The Akademi says Bose sent him to Ajanta, Ellora, Sanchi, Sarnath and Mahabalipuram first, and that Bose approved the finished page without a change. A bull, an elephant, a horse and a tiger sit in its corners, and lotus runs through the border. Sinha at first refused to sign his work, the Akademi reports, and Bose insisted that he sign at least some pages so that later generations would know who had decorated the Constitution. The Preamble page carries the short signature Ram in the lower right corner.

Dinanath Bhargava drew the national emblem on the opening page. The Akademi says he spent months studying lions at the Kolkata zoo, and that Bose gave him the page only after approving his early sketches. Every page has a gold-specked border, Vinay Lal of the LSE South Asia Centre notes, and Siva Kumar says the borders follow Mughal examples.

The 22 pictures and what was cut

Siva Kumar lists the sequence. It begins at Part I with the bull on a seal from Mohenjo-daro and runs through a Vedic ashram, scenes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the Buddha, Mahavira, the spread of Buddhism under Ashoka, an Ajanta figure, the court of Vikramaditya and Nalanda. Then come the horse from Konark, the Chola Nataraja, which the Akademi credits to Gouri Bhanja, the descent of the Ganga after the Mahabalipuram relief, and Akbar with his architects. Portraits of Shivaji and Guru Gobind Singh, of Lakshmibai and Tipu Sultan, and of Subhas Chandra Bose follow, along with two images of Gandhi, on the Dandi march and at Noakhali. The last pages show the Himalayas, the desert and the ocean. The ocean page pairs a Mohenjo-daro seal at the top with a ninth-century relief from Borobudur at the bottom.

The Akademi and Siva Kumar both group the images under twelve headings, from the Mohenjo-daro period to natural features. Only a few pictures carry colour; Siva Kumar counts three, and the Akademi singles out Mahavira’s page as one of them. Siva Kumar says the pictures bear no direct relation to the Part each one opens, and that Bose chose the subjects himself.

A typed draft scheme that survives lists 20 subjects. One entry, a scene from Alexander’s invasion, is struck out, and three nature pictures were added in pen. Siva Kumar reads the later changes as Bose’s own: portraits of Rana Pratap and Ranjit Singh dropped, Akbar’s portrait with Shah Jahan replaced by Akbar with his architects, and pencil notes about portraits of Nehru and Patel that never reached the pages.

A deadline that passed, and pay by the page

On 24 January 1950 the Constituent Assembly’s debates record Prasad telling members that three copies lay ready: one in English, completely hand-written and illuminated by artists, one printed in English, and one hand-written in Hindi. Members signed all three. Other records suggest the artwork was not finished by then. ThePrint reports a Secretariat note of 17 January 1950 saying only half the calligraphy and border work would be done by 26 January and the rest would take at least another month after it. The Indian Express of 26 January 1950, as ThePrint quotes it, said the two handwritten volumes were signed but incomplete, and that the first pages of each Part and Schedule were still to be painted at Santiniketan under Bose. The unfinished work passed to the Parliament Secretariat under the Speaker.

No page we opened gives the day the last page was done. Siva Kumar says some signatures overrun the spaces left for them, which suggests decoration added after the signing, and that one drawing in Bose’s scrapbook is dated 12 November 1951. The Survey of India’s description says the original took nearly five years to produce.

On pay, the Secretariat note says the Speaker, with the Prime Minister’s agreement, set honoraria of Rs 400 for the cover and Rs 400 for the Preamble, Rs 200 for the opening of Part I, Rs 100 for each ornamented illustration and Rs 50 for each intermediate decorated page. ThePrint says what was finally paid is unclear. Siva Kumar cites a note among Bose’s papers that gives Rs 25 a page for the historical scenes, a figure the pages we opened do not reconcile with the Secretariat’s. Prasad wrote on 25 January 1950, ThePrint reports, that Bose had so far asked only for the actual cost of materials.

The 1,000 reproductions

The Survey of India’s offices at Dehra Dun photolithographed 1,000 reproductions of the original, its own description says. The Law Library of Congress showed one in a 2019 exhibition marking 150 years since Gandhi’s birth, and the Internet Archive hosts a scan of the English volume uploaded in August 2020.

What fills the cases at Parliament

In the mid-1980s the Parliament Library decided the volumes needed long-term protection. A report from the National Research Laboratory for Conservation of Cultural Property at Lucknow, based on optical tests of the paper and the gold, found both volumes in fairly sound condition. The Library then asked the NPL for a case, and the NPL proposed hermetically sealed glass cases holding an inert gas, to stop oxidation, damage from microbes and air pollution.

The first tries failed. Cases the NPL built in 1988 and 1989 were rejected because nobody could guarantee the seal for decades. In 1992 and 1993 an NPL scientist, Hari Kishan, had two more cases made at Saint-Gobain in Paris, one soldered and one with O-ring seals, and those failed on the same ground. Georges Amsel, a conservation specialist at the Louvre, pointed him to the Getty Conservation Institute in the United States, which had built similar cases in 1989 for the 27 royal mummies at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The NPL and the Getty signed an agreement in July 1993.

The terms, as the letter prints them, called for two identical cases, one for each volume, each 55 cm wide, 70 cm long and 25 cm high. Each would hold a nitrogen atmosphere with less than 1 per cent oxygen by volume and a relative humidity of 40 to 50 per cent. A vault-like room was to be built at the Parliament Library and kept at 20 degrees Celsius, give or take 2. The agreement had the Getty build the cases in the United States, and they were installed in March 1994 on polished stainless-steel stands with teak cabinets made at the NPL. A trace-oxygen analyser with a data logger was fitted to each case, and the cases were flushed with dry nitrogen until oxygen fell below 1,000 parts per million.

Popular accounts often say helium. The Law Library of Congress wrote in 2019 that the original sits in a helium-filled case, citing Survey of India information, and Live History India says the same. The institutions that built and keep the cases say nitrogen. The NPL letter says so, the Parliament Library’s brochure says the volumes have been kept since 1994 in two nitrogen-filled glass receptacles made by the NPL, and the Press Information Bureau’s 2021 factsheet also says nitrogen. The brochure, last updated in November 2022, is the most recent official description we found as of 2 November 2026. The NPL adds that its scientists evaluate the performance of the cases every year.