The Indian Constitution was designed as a document that would facilitate fundamental social reform. However, what was the character of the people in whose name this dramatic transition would be legitimately carried out? This paper argues that the task of imagining a people was fashioned primarily in colonial conditions as a project of education and carried into the contemporary constitution without significant change. However, the call to become a people founds constitutional institutions but sits uneasily with Indian social intuitions which task that this paper takes it upon itself to elaborate.