The building that came to house Indian democracy was not designed as the centre of a sovereign nation. New Delhi was planned around the Viceroy, the Secretariat and the ceremonial projection of imperial authority. A separate legislative building entered the scheme belatedly, after the Government of India Act, 1919, enlarged the machinery of colonial representation. Even when it opened in 1927, the British avoided calling it parliament. “Council House” better expressed the limits of an institution in which representatives could debate while executive authority remained elsewhere.That reversal gives Sobhana K. Nair’s Housing the Republic its animating idea. The book follows the Council House as it is occupied, altered and gradually made central to the constitutional life of independent India. Its democratic meaning did not reside in the intentions of its architects. It accumulated through political use.Nair says the book arose from “anticipatory grief” as the old parliament’s active life was nearing its end. It is part biography, part institutional history and part farewell. Yet its affection is supported by extensive research, not sentiment alone. Drawing upon official correspondence, parliamentary debates, memoirs, architectural records and her experience as a parliamentary journalist, she reconstructs both the building’s public history and its untidy inner life.Sobhana K. Nair, Housing the Republic: A Biography of the Indian Parliament. Bloomsbury India; Rs 699, 238 pages.She is at her best when entering large constitutional questions through small material details. A foul smell in the Rajya Sabha leads into sealed ventilators, forgotten passages and decades of negligent alteration. A telephone-directory entry placing federal court judges under the home department reveals how a new judiciary struggled to establish even the appearance of independence from the executive. Disputes over rooms, libraries, doors and keys become disputes over institutional authority.This movement from the apparently trivial to the constitutional is one of the book’s principal pleasures. Nair approaches files with a reporter’s eye for vanity, absurdity and unintended consequence. Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker appear not only as architects of empire but as quarrelsome men whose professional resentments affected a public monument. Bureaucratic records rarely remain bureaucratic for long.The richness of this material sometimes makes the narrative discursive. A portrait, personality or administrative disagreement may open into an extended miniature history before Parliament House reappears. But the looseness largely suits a work that presents the building as a life rather than a structure: conceived amid dispute, repeatedly altered, adapted to new occupants and burdened with memories its designers could not have foreseen.The chapters on the making of New Delhi establish the irony at the heart of that life. The legislature was subordinate within a capital organised around executive power. Baker’s triangular proposal gave way to a circular building after arguments in which geometry, imperial symbolism and personal rivalry became entangled. Contemporary observers compared the completed structure to a gasometer, a bullring and a mill wheel. Nair does not claim that the circle secretly anticipated democracy. Her point is more persuasive: political history compelled an imperial building to answer purposes for which it had not been designed.That transformation began before Independence, when Central Hall, originally intended as a shared library and common space, became the chamber of the Constituent Assembly. It accelerated after 1947. A building made for a restricted colonial electorate had to accommodate a Lok Sabha chosen through universal adult franchise. Desks were removed, seats added and inherited conventions repeatedly adjusted to the needs of mass representation.India neither discarded its parliamentary inheritance nor accepted it intact. Ceremonial wigs and robes disappeared; desk-thumping and the red and green chambers survived. Sound amplification, electronic voting and simultaneous interpretation were introduced gradually. Broadcasting, long resisted for fear that cameras would encourage performance, eventually carried parliament into citizens’ homes. Transparency expanded, but so did political theatre.Central HallThese adaptations support one of Nair’s most compelling insights: institutions do not arrive complete with their founding texts. Their authority is built through everyday contests over procedure, space, access and control. Independence changed the source of legitimacy, but the Republic still had to learn how to inhabit what it had inherited.No space illustrates this process more vividly than Central Hall. It hosted the Constituent Assembly, joint sittings and national ceremonies, but its importance extended beyond formal occasions. It became the parliament’s backstage: a shared ground where adversaries spoke after confronting one another in the chambers, journalists gathered information, leadership contests unfolded and deadlocks were negotiated over coffee.Nair treats this sociability as part of parliamentary democracy’s working infrastructure. A legislature requires rules and votes, but it also needs places where opponents remain capable of conversation. Central Hall belonged exclusively to neither House nor party, and its political significance grew through habit rather than design.The author does not wholly sentimentalise that culture. Jawaharlal Nehru complained that Central Hall had become a “bazaar” of visitors, journalists and gossip. Informal exchange could create trust, but it could also produce elite bargains beyond public scrutiny. Even so, the book persuasively distinguishes physical provision from institutional practice. A courtyard or dining area in the new parliament can offer a place to meet; it cannot immediately reproduce habits accumulated over generations.The same concern with access runs through Nair’s accounts of the visitors’ galleries, parliamentary security and broadcasting. From Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt’s 1929 bombing of the Central Legislative Assembly, to later protests from the galleries, parliament repeatedly became a site where dissenters sought to address an institution that claimed to speak for them. Nair’s comparisons are sometimes provocative, but they serve an important question running through the book: how close can the parliament remain to the public without treating public presence primarily as a security threat?Parliament House also became a theatre in which the nation arranged its memory. Portraits, statues and murals did not enter its precincts according to any settled measure of historical importance. Their inclusion reflected political influence, organised mobilisation, family claims and ideological change.Gandhi’s portrait, once excluded from a Royal Academy exhibition in Britain, became the first to occupy republican Central Hall. B.R. Ambedkar, despite his foundational place in India’s constitutional history, waited decades for comparable recognition. His statue on the parliament’s lawns emerged from sustained Dalit mobilisation; with a book in one hand and the other raised, he appears at once as legislator, teacher and accuser.Other memorials show how commemoration can alter what it claims to preserve. Bhagat Singh, who died at 23 and is widely remembered in a felt hat, was represented as an older, turbaned nationalist figure. Savarkar’s portrait facing Gandhi turned Central Hall into a visible encounter between profoundly different visions of India. The parliament, in Nair’s account, does not merely conserve national memory. It selects, rearranges and sometimes remakes it.The new buildingThe book’s final movement turns to the new parliament. Nair does not deny the practical pressures behind it. The old building had endured repeated alterations, inadequate services and increasing demands upon space. It could not easily accommodate the expansion of the Lok Sabha expected after delimitation. Bimal Patel’s triangular structure provides every member with a desk, incorporates contemporary technology and anticipates future numerical growth. Its materials and chamber colours establish a deliberate relationship with its predecessor.Nair’s objections concern the process through which it was created, the political ownership conveyed by its ceremonies and the kind of parliamentary life encouraged by its scale. Major decisions preceded meaningful consultation. Construction advanced during the pandemic, when Parliament met infrequently and press access was restricted. She draws attention to the President’s absence from both the foundation and inauguration ceremonies, and questions the historical narrative used to install the Sengol beside the Speaker’s chair.Her architectural criticism is more ambitious. The old chambers were cramped and uncomfortable, but their scale created proximity. Members could see expressions, register reactions, interrupt and persuade. The new Lok Sabha seats 888 and can accommodate 1,272 during joint sittings. It prepares for numerical expansion but increases the distance between participants. Members and journalists often rely upon screens to observe proceedings closely. In Nair’s memorable formulation, the chamber appears designed for “numbers, not noise”.The argument has force, though architecture cannot determine the quality of politics by itself. Physical proximity did not prevent the old parliament from becoming polarised, disrupted or dominated by the executive. Nor must a larger chamber extinguish deliberation. Some of the distance Nair identifies may arise from security arrangements, camera practices and contemporary political culture rather than from design alone.The new parliament is also being judged before much history has accumulated within it. The Council House did not acquire democratic meaning from Baker’s plan. That meaning developed through decades of argument, adaptation, ceremony, dissent and ordinary parliamentary work. The new building may similarly acquire conventions and associations its architects and patrons cannot control.This is the book’s principal tension. Nair records the old parliament’s colonial origins, exclusions, physical inadequacies and neglect, but accumulated memory lends those defects a forgiving glow. The new building, by contrast, occasionally bears the full political burden of the moment in which it was commissioned. Her attachment to the former can become elegiac, while her judgment of the latter sometimes moves faster than its brief institutional life permits.Yet, this tension also clarifies the book’s central achievement. Architecture, symbolism and inauguration ceremonies cannot secure democratic meaning on their own. Such meaning accumulates through argument, compromise, protest, adaptation and repeated use. The Council House became Parliament because political life exceeded the intentions of those who designed it.Deeply researched, vividly narrated and attentive to histories often lost between architectural scholarship and political chronicle, Housing the Republic makes a familiar monument newly legible. Its abundance occasionally loosens the narrative, and its affection for the old building sometimes shades into nostalgia. But Nair succeeds in showing how Parliament House became more than sandstone, chambers and corridors: a constitutional habitat made and remade by those who occupied, contested and remembered it.The two parliament buildings now stand beside one another, separated by a narrow space and nearly a century of history. One carries the sediment of democratic life; the other is only beginning to acquire it. Nair’s timely and rewarding book explains why a parliament can be constructed, but a parliamentary culture must be lived.Sahil Hussain Choudhury is an advocate and Constitutional law researcher from Assam. He holds an LL.M. in constitutional law from the Hamdard Institute of Legal Studies and Research (HILSR), Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi.