When you come to Arali Health Centre, you will be greeted by this beautiful framed preamble.
If you look closely, you can see something interesting about it.
For reference, here is how the original preamble looks in the 1950 Constitution, from the copy preserved by ServantsOfKnowledge on archive.org:
The words “socialist”, “secular”, and “and integrity” were added only in the 42nd amendment of the Constitution in 1976. And therefore, the original preamble doesn’t have it.
The original preamble came with beautiful artwork as you can see. According to Lalit Kala Akademi, the art work on this page is by Beohar Rammanohar Singa. They also say how the calligraphic writing in the Constitution is by Prem Behari Narayan Raizada, but I’m not sure who among them wrote the text on the preamble page. In any case, it is handwritten.
So, after 1976, people had two choices when they had to show the preamble anywhere. Either use the original preamble with the artwork (which would be outdated because of the amendment), or show the updated preamble without the artwork.
If you’ve seen NCERT textbooks, you’ve probably seen one version like this:
You may also have seen some variants that try to preserve as much art
It is in this context that on 21 April, 2024, I wanted to run a campaign to put preamble as profile picture for Indian general election.
I wanted to preserve as much art from the original preamble as possible and decided to do my own editing in GIMP.
I noticed that all the letters I needed for SOCIALIST and SECULAR where already present in SOVEREIGN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC JUSTICE EQUALITY. Similarly, “and integrity” could be built from nearby words.
By hand-picking letters and constructing words, one could do justice to the handwritten original.
The watermark had to be restored which I did by picking up a vector of the emblem of India and placing it in places where the original didn’t have it (because of text overlay).
Eventually, I ended up with this:
My friend Subin had made a fun video of me explaining this process.
When I started the profile picture campaign, Vinay Kumar of Reclaim Constitution immediately noticed what I had done.
After a few months, I received this message from Vinay:
Here is the link to the Wikimedia Commons file.
Since Wikipedia comes up when people search for preamble, and the page has been edited to include this edited preamble version, people are now using this for making preamble themed gifts.
And yesterday, Swathi spoke at the book discussion organized by APCR.
After the talk she received the framed preamble as a memento.
And that is now adorning the wall of our clinic.
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