This chapter is concerned with the limits of liberal constitutionalism. It examines these limits by describing Indian constitutionalism as a revolutionary project in state building – one that has been formally founded on the structural architecture of liberal democratic ideas for more than a hundred years, but has been continually faced with the limits of that architecture as it encounters and rubs against India’s autochthonous social and cultural traditions and epistemologies. Unable to draw on India’s own social understandings, it is argued, the institutional tropes and structures of liberal constitutionalism are operationalised by co-o pting autochthonous and organic social categories into constitutionally formalised identities.