In Johar, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which criminalized same-sex relations. The idea of transformative constitutionalism figured centrally, as did a piece of the global template of rights-protection—proportionality. In Johar, the Indian Constitution was envisioned as a transformative document, in two senses: anti-colonial and cosmopolitan. It gave birth to a radically new constitutional order that conferred citizenship and political power on the previously disenfranchised living under the yoke of British imperial rule. The Indian Constitution was also a cosmopolitan constitution in its fidelity to the universal principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. These two conceptions of transformative constitutionalism define the scope of admissible reasons for proportionality analysis. Section 377 of the Indian Penal was unconstitutional on the cosmopolitan ground that mere social morality was an insufficient reason to limit the right to engage in harmless, constitutionally protected activity, the basis on which courts around the world have struck down parallel provisions. I argue that Section 377 was also unconstitutional for the anti-colonial reason that it was an element of the Imperial constitutional order in British India in the period after the Indian Mutiny in 1857 of indirect colonial rule.