The sentinels of the Republic: Diamond jubilee tribute to the first six Supreme Court judges

As the final golden embers of 2025 descend upon the horizon, marking three-quarters of a century since the Indian Republic found its voice, we stand at a sacred intersection of memory and destiny.

It was in the shivering dawn of January 26, 1950 that a fledgling nation, still smelling of the midnight hour’s promise, birthed its highest temple of justice. While the Constitution breathed its first official air on the 26th, it was two days later that the Supreme Court of India emerged from the chrysalis of the colonial Federal Court, shedding the vestments of imperial dispensation to don the robes of sovereign guardianship.

Six men, titans of intellectual fortitude and architects of equity, ascended the Bench that day. They were the original law lords - Harilal J Kania, Saiyid Fazl Ali, M Patanjali Sastri, Mehr Chand Mahajan, Bijan Kumar Mukherjea and SR Das. To them was bequeathed a manuscript of dreams, the mother of all laws and a pitch that was, by all accounts, treacherous. They faced a terrain of virgin legal territory, where the pace of social upheaval, the bounce of political transition and the spin of ancient inequities converged simultaneously. Yet, with pens dipped in the ink of wisdom and hearts tethered to the pulse of "We the People", they began an innings that would define the moral architecture of a billion souls.

These six stalwarts did not merely interpret text; they exhaled life into the parchment. They recognised that a constitution is not a static monument of marble but a living, pulsating organism that requires nurturing to survive the winds of change. Through their early pronouncements, they laid the foundation stones of liberty and the scaffolding of equality, ensuring that the democratic experiment did not wither in the heat of newborn challenges. They were the gardeners of our rights, pruning the overgrowth of executive excess and watering the seeds of individual dignity.

As we journeyed through 75 years - a voyage of spectacular resilience punctuated only by a fleeting, dark eclipse of internal Emergency - the shadow of these pioneers remained our guiding light. Their legacy is the very air we breathe as a functioning democracy. It is easy, from the comfortable vantage point of the present, to engage in the academic luxury of nitpicking, to suggest where they might have leaned further or stood firmer. Yet, one must marvel at the sheer audacity of their task: to steer a massive, diverse and wounded civilisation toward the promise of a modern Republic.

Today, as India marches with rhythmic confidence toward its zenith, we owe our equilibrium to that initial poise.

The Supreme Court has remained the lighthouse in the tempest, the ballast in the storm. We salute those six lords of law who opened the innings on a tricky wicket, playing with such grace and mettle that the stadium of the world still watches in awe. We are where we are, and we shall become what we dream, because they first dared to hold the hand of the Constitution and walk it into the sunlight, for us, We the People!

Narasimhan Vijayaraghavan is an advocate practicing before the Madras High Court.