The M. K. Nambyar Chair on Constitutional Law is hosting Rohit De and Ornit Shani to speak on their recently released book, Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History. The talk will take place at the Basement, NLSIU Library, between 5:30 and 6:30 PM on Monday, December 15, 2025.

The event will begin with a panel discussion, followed by an audience Q&A.

About the Book

De and Shani’s book challenges canonical understandings of the making of India’s Constitution. Most scholarship has foregrounded the work of the Constituent Assembly, assuming that “constitutional politics and details were beyond the imagination, interest and capacity of the Indian people, and that this process did not occupy their concerns” (7). By contrast, De and Shani argue that the Constitution was fit together through “disparate and simultaneous constitution-making efforts across the country,” stemming from “large and diverse publics” (13-14). In other words, the people contributed to the assembling of India’s Constitution.

Authors

• Rohit De is a legal historian at Yale’s Department of History. He was awarded the J. Willard Hurst Prize for his last book, A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic.
• Ornit Shani teaches Modern Indian History at the Department of South Asian Studies, University of Haifa. Her previous book, How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise won the 2019 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay New India Foundation Prize

Panellists

• Aparna Chandra heads the M. K. Nambyar Chair on Constitutional Law at the National Law School. She primarily teaches constitutional law and comparative public law. Her last book, Court on Trial: A Data Driven Account of the Supreme Court of India, builds on a decade of original empirical research to interrogate the functioning of the Indian Supreme Court.
• Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav is an intellectual historian of Modern South Asia at the National Law School. In her first book, Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood, she challenges the idea that Lajpat Rai can be reduced to an ideological ancestor of modern Hindutva.

Moderator

Jai Brunner teaches constitutional law and jurisprudence at the National Law School. His current research interests lie in using legal theory to identify problems of indeterminacy in Indian Supreme Court reasoning.

We invite curious and interested students, parents, schools, and career counsellors, to the open house on the NLS BA (Hons) programme at Hyderabad on Saturday, December 13, 2025.

This conversation will revolve around BA education and practice, focussing on the multidisciplinary curriculum and pedagogy of what NLS has to offer in this programme. The session will be hosted from 11 am to 1 pm. It is intended to guide students in their Class XI and XII in making an informed decision about their higher education journey.

The open house will be conducted by our faculty member Dr. Parashar Kulkarni, Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Inclusion (CSSI).

Kindly register ahead for the open house by filling out this form. 

About the NLS BA (Hons) Programme

NLSIU pioneered and developed an integrated 5-year BA LLB (Hons.) degree that transformed Indian legal education. Several NLS graduates have pursued further degrees in humanities, social sciences, and business and then embarked on very successful careers in these fields.

As NLSIU develops into a multi-disciplinary university, in line with national and state education policies, the NLS BA (Hons.) programme draws on 35 years of experience in offering the integrated 5-year BA LLB (Hons.) programme. The NLS BA (Hons.) programme curriculum has been carefully designed by faculty teams after extensive stakeholder consultations with eminent academics and practitioners from across the country’s top universities to provide their inputs and advice on the curriculum.

Our faculty come from leading universities within India and beyond. We have faculty strength in the following areas:

• History: Modern South Asia, Urban History, Labour History, Global History, Post-Independent India, Development and Planning, Indian National Movement (19th and 20th century)
• Politics: Western Political Thought, Tagore, Gandhi, Periyar and Indian Political Thought, Political Economy, Urban Politics, Land, Indigeneity, Political Parties, The Indian State and Democracy, Comparative Methods in Political Research
• Sociology and Anthropology: Social Theory, Caste and Tribe, Capitalisms, Development, Land Politics, Cinema and Popular Culture, Religion, Urban Anthropology, Ecology
• Economics: Development Economics, Environmental Economics, Labour Economics, Econometrics, Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, History of Economic Thought, Game Theory

Our faculty have rich research agendas and publication records across law and the social sciences which will inform classroom teaching and learning.

Read more about the programme.

The Chair on Consumer Law and Practice, NLSIU and  the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) organised an online panel discussion on ‘India’s Emerging Digital Data Protection Architecture: Possibilities and Concerns’ on December 12, 2025.

Watch The Full Video

Panellists 

• Ghanashyam Hegde – Vice President & General Counsel, Indian Sub-Continent, Australia & New Zealand at Procter & Gamble
• Lagna Panda, Partner, AP & Partners
• Manisha Kapoor, CEO & Secretary General, ASCI
• Shashank Mohan, Associate Director, Centre for Communication Governance, NLU Delhi

Moderator 

Dr. Garima Gupta, Assistant Professor, NLSIU

About the Session

The Supreme Court of India has declared privacy and informational self-determination as fundamental rights. Taking this into account, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDPA) provides for a framework to balance between individual autonomy and legitimate public and commercial uses of data. The Act governs the processing of digital personal data.

It seeks to balance two objectives:

* Protecting an individual’s right to privacy; and
* Ensuring that personal data can be used for legitimate and lawful purposes.

The Act also establishes a unified legal framework for how entities in India collect, store and process digital personal data with the twin aims of protecting individual autonomy and enabling responsible, data-driven economic growth. The DPDP Act, 2023 and the recently notified DPDP Rules, 2025, together represent the most significant attempt yet to articulate a unified legal architecture for this balance.

While the DPDPA laid down broad principles around rights of data principals, duties of Data Fiduciaries, cross-border transfer constraints and the institutional creation of the Data Protection Board, the DPDP Rules, 2025 provides for a compliance architecture.

The goal of this panel discussion is to explore how India’s new DPDP Act can be put into practice in a way that protects people’s rights, builds trust in how organisations use data and still allows India’s digital economy and innovation to grow.

Ten years ago, we lost Priya Thangarajah — an aspiring young lawyer and activist who had worked both in India and her native Sri Lanka on issues of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, violence and human rights — when she took her life. Priya was a graduate of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru, and Georgetown University, Washington DC, where she was also a Fulbright scholar.

To commemorate her life and work, this Human Rights Day, the Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism (QAMRA) at NLSIU will revisit three reports Priya authored during her lifetime. Specialists will offer contemporary reflections on the themes they cover, to create a festschrift, a selection of deliberations on her legacy as a scholar.

These themes are:

• Queer couples and Habeas Corpus in India (co-authored with Ponni Arasu);
• Tamil – Muslim relations in Sri Lanka (co-authored with Mirak Raheem);
• Legal protections for queer persons in Sri Lanka

In addition, the panel will also cover a fourth theme, i.e. d. Queerness and mental health, with a focus on suicide.

Panellists

Our distinguished panel of specialists, which will reflect on Priya’s life and work, includes:

• RUMI HARISH is a musician, and a social justice and human rights activist. He identifies as a queer transmasculine person. Rumi has written four play scripts and has worked as a music director for various documentary films and theatre productions. He is a regular columnist for different media outlets, including previous columns in Kannada Prabha and Agni Patrika. His biography was recently written by Dadapeer Jyman, a young writer and theatre director. In 2023, Rumi received the Karnataka State Sahitya Academy Award, Sahityasree.
• MANAVI ATRI is a human rights lawyer and researcher working at Alternative Law Forum, Bengaluru, India. She works with the LGBTQIA+ community on issues of self-identification, harassment and the realization of the community’s fundamental rights. Her co-authored work includes Asserting Dignity in Times of COVID, Right to Love, Wages of Hate: Journalism in Dark Times, and Criminalizing the Practice of Faith, and From Communal Policing to Hate Crimes, a report on Dakshina Kannada.
• SHREEN SAROOR is a Sri Lankan peace and women’s rights activist. She founded the Mannar Women’s Development Federation (MWDF) to support women affected by the Sri Lankan Civil War, which MWDF assisted women experiencing war-related gender issues such as widowing, wartime rape and child soldier recruitment. After the War ended, she formed Women’s Action Network (WAN) in 2010 to advocate for women’s issues throughout Sri Lanka, including through law reform and legal assistance. Her work also includes micro-credit loan programs, domestic violence advocacy and support, and reconciliation between Sri Lanka’s ethnic and religious groups. She also advocates for reforms to Sri Lanka’s Muslim laws, campaigns for the rights of female workers, and fights against Islamophobia.
• SARALA EMMANUEL is a feminist activist, researcher and experimental filmmaker based in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. She is an integral part of diverse movements, including farmer and fisherwomen’s groups, women living with disabilities, grassroots queer collectives, autonomous peace movements, and trade unions. She is also part of regional networks such as Asia Pacific Forum on Women Law and Development, SANGAT South Asia, and DAWN. She is a founder member of the Feminist Collective for Economic Justice and currently acts on the Sub Committee on Gender and SOGI of the Human Rights Commission Sri Lanka.
• ERMIZA TEGAL is a senior Attorney at Law in Sri Lanka leading a chamber in public law and family law. Her practice works closely with victims of torture and domestic violence. Her work involves law reform and human rights advocacy, including protection for victims of torture and gender-based violence, family law reform,  plantation workers’ rights, and a feminist perspective on economic justice for Sri Lanka in the context of the economic crisis. She has served as a legal expert on State advisory committees on law reform. She holds a Masters in Law from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. She was the lead Counsel for several mental health professionals and experts who intervened in the decriminalization case heard by the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka in 2023.
• PASAN JAYASINGHE is a queer researcher, writer and activist from Colombo, Sri Lanka. In these capacities, he has worked as a policy advisor, legal researcher and election monitor in the past. He is currently completing a PhD in Political Science at University College London.
• VINAY CHANDRAN is Executive Director of Swabhava Trust, established in 1999, an NGO in Bengaluru, India, offering support services to LGBTQIA+ people. He is also a peer counsellor, a trainer on gender, sexuality and sexual health issues, as well as a researcher. He has written extensively on the mental health concerns of queer people and is co-editor of the book, Nothing to Fix: Medicalisation of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, and author of several articles at the intersection of sexuality, medicine and mental health.
• KAUSHIKI RAO trained in Bengaluru, India, as a mental health counsellor in 2017 and has been practicing since. She recently completed further training at the Toronto Institute for Relational Psychotherapy and currently practices as a psychotherapist in Toronto, Canada.  She primarily works from an intersubjective and self-psychology lens. She is particularly interested in how relational (social) structures such as caste, gender, race, class generate and inform intrapsychic dynamics.

Introduced by: Siddharth Narrain | Moderated by: Mario da Penha

This will be a hybrid event, with the in-person component at the NLSIU campus, and a virtual arm on Zoom ( Join here)

The Green Room at NLSIU is organising a screening of the play Frankenstein (National Theatre Live) on Wednesday, December 3, 2025 (6 – 8 PM) at NAB 101.

Directed by Danny Boyle, this acclaimed staging features Benedict Cumberbatch in a riveting performance as the Creature.

About the Production

This National Theatre Live adaptation is celebrated for its visceral, cinematic staging. One of its most notable features is its alternating cast: Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller switch roles between Victor Frankenstein and the Creature in different performances. Our screening features Cumberbatch as the Creature, offering a powerful and emotionally layered interpretation of the role.

Danny Boyle’s direction employs minimalist yet dynamic design, expressive lighting, and a striking soundscape to trace the Creature’s journey from birth to betrayal. The nearly wordless opening sequence—depicting the Creature’s first moments of life—remains a landmark moment in physical theatre, demonstrating how movement, light, and spatial design can drive narrative with extraordinary force.

About the Playwright and the Play

Mary Shelley (1797–1851) published Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus when she was just twenty, and the novel has since become one of the most influential texts in English literature. Blending gothic horror, early science fiction, and philosophical inquiry, Shelley’s story interrogates enduring questions of creation, moral responsibility, alienation, and the boundaries of the human. The tale of Victor Frankenstein—who animates life from dead matter only to abandon the being he creates—continues to shape global conversations around scientific ethics, vulnerability, and monstrosity.

In this week’s faculty seminar, Dr. Srikrishna Ayyangar, Associate Professor of Social Science, presented his paper titled ‘Pragmatism and the Populist Challenge in India’s Democracy.’

Abstract

Populist politics are, well, popular, because its supporters and adherents argue that such politics are practical and effective. This paper argues that there is something more fundamental at stake, which is at the heart of our democratic system, liberal promise, left-right wing perspectives, and policy practices. The paper argues that when the rug under Ambedkar’s pragmatism is pulled, everything else comes down along with it. And conflating practicality with pragmatism is perhaps the first inadvertent step in that direction.

The NLS Library Committee organised a Book Talk on the book Justice Making, Justice Spaces & Justice Users published by Goa 1556 in collaboration with Kokum Design Trust. The book is edited by Dean D’ Cruz, Reboni Saha, Siddhrath Peter de Souza, Varsha Aithala and Naomi Jose. The talk took place at the Ground Floor Conference Hall at the NLSIU Training Centre on Monday, December 1, 2025.

About the book

The book reimagines how justice systems can be reshaped to better serve the people, especially those historically disadvantaged. Focussing on public spaces in Goa like courtrooms, police stations, protest sites, and classrooms, this collection brings together voices of practitioners, activists, and researchers to ask: How are these spaces structured, and what must change for them to truly support those seeking justice?

The book contains grounded case studies and thoughtful reflections from the digitalisation of courts to protest movements and planning law and aims to offer a compelling and people-centred vision of justice.

About the Panellists

• Varsha Aithala is an Assistant Professor of Law and a doctoral candidate at the National Law School of India University. Her doctoral work focusses on legal aid in India. She is a partner at Justice Adda, a law and design thinking based social enterprise. Her teaching and research interests cover areas of access to justice, law and technology and private law. Varsha has significant corporate practice experience in India and the United Kingdom. She is qualified as a solicitor in England and Wales and as an advocate in India.
• Dr. Siddharth Peter de Souza is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, Warwick University. His work explores how data is governed globally in contested, and plural settings. He is also the founder at Justice Adda.
• Dr. Siddharth Narrain is an Assistant Professor of Law at the National Law School of India University, whose work focusses on public law, law and media, human rights law, and gender and sexuality related law. Siddharth’s Ph.D. thesis titled Facebook’s Crowds and Publics: Law, Virality & the Regulation of Hate Speech Online in Contemporary India (UNSW, Sydney 2023) investigates how virality has enabled digital harms including hate speech online that has led to serious challenges to platform governance in the Indian context.

Gallery

The National Human Rights Commission Chair on Human Rights, NLSIU in collaboration with Pacta, a Bengaluru-based law firm, organised a panel discussion on ‘Access to Justice’ based on a recently released report, on Wednesday, November 26, 2025.

The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 (RPwD Act) guarantees access to justice for persons with disabilities. Pacta’s ‘Access to Justice for Persons with Disabilities: A Data-informed Report’ examines how well that guarantee has translated into improved access across four critical pillars of the Indian Justice System: Police, Prisons, Judiciary and Legal Aid. The report primarily focusses on the lack of data across the system, which invisibilises the struggles (such as inaccessible infrastructure, lack of sensitivity within institutions, disparate mandates at various levels, and non-uniform practices across States) faced by persons with disabilities. This leads to a gap in awareness at an institutional level, making it challenging to take corrective measures.

This panel discussion began by sharing some of the major findings from the report. This includes a brief overview of the mandates for inclusion and data collection across the four pillars, the availability of data based on specific indicators and sub-indicators, some of the major issues that have been identified and recommendations to mitigate them. The discussion then turned to the diverse group of panellists, to seek their views on the inaccessibility plaguing our justice system, the utility of data-availability to tackle systemic challenges and analyse potential solutions to improve access to justice for persons with disabilities.

Panellists

Dr. Viswesh Sekhar, a senior advocate specialising in disability law. He has a Ph.D. from Symbiosis International University, on “Reasonable Accommodation and Accessibility as Human Rights of the Physically Disabled Person in India”. Dr. Sekhar has contributed to key reports and legal reforms, including the “Finding Sizes for All: A Report on the Status of the Right to Accessibility in India” report of the CDS Centre NALSAR, commissioned by the Supreme Court and quoted in the landmark Rajive Rathuri judgment. He was the only lawyer in the 16-member team of NGO representatives from India who attended the CRPD Committee at the United Nations, Geneva in 2019.

Mr. Shreehari Paliath, India Justice Report. Formerly, as a journalist, he has reported on social justice issues including labour, migration and criminal justice, and public policy, using public data. He won the Laadli Media & Advertising Awards for Gender Sensitivity in 2023 and 2025, and is a recipient of MSF’s Without Borders Media Fellowship.

Ms. Darshana Mitra, Assistant Professor of Law and Director-Clinics at NLSIU. Darshana has previously taught at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (WBNUJS), Kolkata, and has worked as a researcher at the Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore. She is also the co-founder and director of Parichay, a collaborative legal aid clinic that works on citizenship deprivation and statelessness in Assam. At Columbia, she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and a recipient of the Human Rights Fellowship, the Fulbright-Nehru Master’s Fellowship, and the 2019 Human Rights Institute Commendation for Leadership and Commitment in Human Rights. Her interests lie in citizenship and immigration law, human rights law, gender, child rights, and clinical legal education.

Ms. Varsha Aithala, Assistant Professor of Law and a doctoral candidate at NLSIU. She has worked as a corporate lawyer in leading Indian law firms and has significant corporate practice experience in India and the United Kingdom. Previously, she was a research fellow and faculty at the School of Policy and Governance, Azim Premji University. Her teaching and research interests cover the areas of access to justice, law and technology, private law and social investment. Varsha is qualified as a solicitor in England and Wales and as an advocate in India. Her doctoral work focuses on legal aid and courts in India.

Mr. Mohammad Abdurazak, a first-year LLB (Hons.) student at NLSIU who holds a BA in English from St. Joseph’s University, Bangalore. A para-athlete who has represented Karnataka at the National Paralympics in swimming, he has also written on disability and allied subjects, with publications in the Museum of Art and Photography and other outlets. His research interests include disability praxis and critical disability studies.