ON THE EVE OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE’S DISSOLUTION, the Indian subcontinent was administratively fragmented. There were three primary political formations — eleven British-governed provinces, 585 princely states which were semi-autonomous and bound to the Crown through various treaties and alliances, and several frontier agencies (like the North-East Frontier Agency or modern day Arunachal Pradesh), that were under direct British administration but operated outside the jurisdiction of provincial governance.
On the eve of Independence, some provinces were transferred to the dominion of India, while others went to Pakistan, and some others divided between the two nations. However, each princely state could assert itself as a sovereign of its own. Historian Rama Sundari Mantena has argued that following the Empire’s dissolution, the princely states were not merely administrative units - they were also actors capable of negotiating with the emerging Indian state ‘in their own right’. In the absence of a unifying national identity at this juncture, competing claims—territorial, cultural, and linguistic—came to define the political landscape.
Linguistic identity was one of the most salient features distinguishing the administrative units from one another. These linguistic distinctions were not only embedded in local histories but were also central to the political negotiations between communities and their respective provincial authority and princely sovereigns. As local communities and the princely states navigated their status within the larger framework of the emerging nation-state, their claims were mediated by overlapping and often semi-permeable categories of citizenship—structured by caste, class, religion, profession, and language.
Academic Mahmood Mamdani contends that within postcolonial states, minorities are tolerated only so long as they accept their subordinated status and refrain from making political claims that threaten the foundational character of the State— a barter exchange of foregoing community sovereignty for citizenship. Similarly in India, in the shadow of the nation-state’s emergence, the princely states were competing for sovereignty, not only through identity assertions, but by contesting State power and legitimacy.
These competing visions of sovereignty between various princely states, often expressed through the politics of language assertions, seeped into the Constitution-making process as well. In the annals of Indian legal history, this was a crucial juncture, these contests on provincial identity and princely sovereignty eventually shaping how language policy, and our legal outlook on language, would come to be in a post-Constitution India. In current times, where language has become also a tool of dominant and majoritarian impositions, it is an inquiry of substantial political consequence.
What did linguistic politics in the Constituent assembly look like? How did they reflect the searing tensions of identity and sovereignty in an emerging India? And why do these queries hold so much weight in dissecting the linguistic majoritarianisms of our time?
How did these competing visions of statehood reflect in the Constitution-making process?
In a fascinating paper brought out last year, legal historians Rohit De and Ornit Shani noted that in the years during which the Constitution was being framed, alongside the formal deliberations in the Constituent Assembly in Delhi, multiple princely states were engaging in parallel constitution-making exercises. De and Shani term this as “competing constitutionalism”.
These princely processes involved direct negotiations between the princely sovereigns and their respective citizenry groups, reflecting anxieties, aspirations, and competing visions of statehood. Consequently, the Indian Constitution, though centralised in its final form, has had to draw from these decentralised negotiations as a part of nation-building. The emergence of an Indian intellectual class—recognised by the British—alongside the decline of princely authority, served as the socio-political backdrop against which these competing constitutional visions were forged.
Another critical instance of these competing visions can be observed in the linguistic and symbolic politics surrounding the naming of states.
The Constituent Assembly, created after elections to provincial assemblies, consisted of members who were indirectly elected by these assemblies. Naturally, many of the Assembly’s deliberations were shaped by provincial political dynamics. In most instances, the positions put forward by Assembly members reflected either the interests of provincial actors or the communities they represented.
The naming of two states in particular - United Provinces (modern day Uttar Pradesh) and Orissa (modern day Odisha) - exemplifies the depth of provincial linguistic politics.
In the case of the United Provinces, attempts were made to rename the province along cultural or mythic lines. In November, 1949, R.K. Sidhwa moved a proposal to rename it as “Samyukt Pradesh,” “Avadh,” or “Ayodhya.” Earlier proposals to name U.P. as “Aryavarta” or “Hindustani” had been rejected, including by the Indian National Congress in 1938, on the grounds that the northern province could not symbolically represent the entire nation and thus should not monopolise national identity.
A similar debate played out in the case of Orissa, where Loknath Misra passionately argued, in interest of the upper-caste community of eastern Odisha in the Constituent Assembly, for renaming the province to “Utkal”, which he claimed evoked a more ancient and cultural essence of “Bharatvarsha”. At the same time, the south-western region of Orissa—Sambalpur—was witnessing a long-standing agitation under the banner of “Kosala,” by a largely Adivasi demographic, grounded in historical grievances over resource inequality and exploitation between eastern and western Odisha. When the name “Odisha” was finally adopted, it was as a compromise which reflected a collective Odia identity based on linguistic similarities between east and west of Odisha while pre-empting separatist fragmentation. The term, ‘Utkal’ continues to survive as a nomenclature often evoked to symbolise Odia statehood.
Linguistic differences, though not always accurate or neat, were a primary consideration of the British Empire during the creation of the provinces as administrative units. Thus, some vernacular languages emerged as a unifying shared identity and tool for political mobilisation against the British.
The official language of a province shaped access to administrative and legal spaces and being a linguistic minority meant confronting certain marginalisations. The Indian subcontinent had long been marked by a fluid sway of multiple sovereign powers, each leaving indelible marks on territorial boundaries, administrative structures, and cultural practices. These sovereigns introduced distinct courtly languages, culinary traditions, caste and religious practices, which were gradually adopted through their interaction with the subjects.
However, when the European colonial powers arrived—especially the British, French, and Portuguese—they encountered a landscape of decentralised authority and intricate networks of negotiation. Anthropologist Anastasia Piliavsky describes this as an indigenous system of “plunder policing,” where sovereigns (patrons), enforcers (the plunder police), and local communities engaged in a constant process of bargaining. This flexible but precarious system of shifting loyalties and fragmented sovereignties confounded colonial administrators, who attempted instead to impose a uniform, bureaucratised governance model—a move that disrupted indigenous balances and left lasting effects. The result was a palimpsest of assimilated identities shaped by both imposition and negotiation. These assimilated identity groups took unique positions based on their loyalties and interests with respect to the emerging nation state and became a foreground for postcolonial federalisms.
As argued above, the Constituent Assembly, though presented as a national body, was deeply influenced by these provincial and princely dynamics in the years preceding India’s independence. At various junctures, Assembly members adopted positions that advanced either the interests of their provinces or the identity claims of their respective communities. The Assembly thus also represented a site of ongoing negotiation between provincial political imaginaries and national integration.
Whether the Indian constitution-making process was elitist or colonial remains of contemporary interest among academics of constitutional theory and history. There are those, in the Hindu far-right particularly, who have deployed contorted versions of this critique to falsely denounce the Constitution as a colonial imposition in order. As argued by other legal scholars, I presuppose that a critical engagement with the Constitution of India involves recognising and critiquing its colonial and conservative legacies, while simultaneously harnessing its transformative potential to advance the progressive realisation of rights within a liberal constitutional framework. As legal academic Mari Matsuda puts it, there are moments when one must stand outside the courtroom to challenge the system in its entirety and others when one must stand within it to defend individual rights. The simultaneous enforcement and critique of the Constitution remains a political tool for asserting citizenry within the Indian state.
In light of this, it becomes critical to foreground a nuanced, pluralistic conception of Indian citizenship—one that resists the assimilatory pressures of Hindu nationalist rhetoric and instead embraces the constitutional legacy of linguistic and cultural diversity.
To unpack these tensions, we turn to the framework of ‘Competing Constitutionalism’ alongside a lens that foregrounds linguistic assertions as political strategies within rival constitutional imaginaries. Through this, we can better understand how constitutional negotiations at the provincial and princely level have shaped—and continue to shape—the political identity of Indian citizenry groups. And perhaps one of the most important forms of constitutional negotiation was language and the politics around it.
The linguistic politics inherent in our Constitution
The Indian Constitution does not declare any language as the national language. However, Schedule VIII, which has undergone four amendments since its inception, currently recognises twenty-two official languages. The Sitakant Mohapatra Committee Report—submitted in 2004 but still pending consideration by the Central Government—documented demands for the inclusion of 38 additional languages to Schedule VIII. Despite these documented linguistic aspirations, the Union government has repeatedly raised administrative concerns in favour of maintaining its arguably assimilatory language policies.
In the same breath Article 351 of the Constitution of India casts a non-enforceable Directive Principle of State Policy on the Government for the promotion of the Hindi language. The increasing imposition of the Hindi language by the State is thus often justified by evoking Article 351 (a provision, which in principle shares a particular ethno-nationalist personality resembling Article 48).
The significance of Schedule VIII, as argued by linguist Hany Babu, is that it created a hierarchical arrangement resembling the chaturvarna - a four tiered language structure with Sanskrit on the top, followed by Hindi, scheduled and non-scheduled languages. Babu states that this has caused an inter-lingual dynamic, wherein vernacular languages are being subsumed under other regional dominant languages leading to the former’s erasure. Given that the Sitakant Mahapatro Committee Report has been under consideration for more than eleven years now and the Government has refused to provide a timeline for the consideration of the Report, different linguistic communities have been forced to undertake political assertions for the survival of their linguistic traditions. The inclusion of a language in Schedule VIII has further consequences like adoption of the language as a state language used for official purposes, medium of instruction in government schools, a paper in the UPSC Examination, or employability in the public sector.
Demands for inclusion of new languages are often rooted in the interest of institutionalised promotion of the language, assertion of the community’s right and a refusal of the imposition of the dominant languages due to historical marginalisation.
Iliyas Husain, an Indian history academic, has proposed in his scholarship that the Constituent Assembly could be divided into three different groups - those who wished for the adoption of the Sanskritised Hindi language with the Devanagari script as the official language, those who pushed for the adoption of Hindustani in Hindi and Urdu script and those, particularly from Southern India, who preferred this question to be deferred. However, the literature capturing the origins of these arguments has inherently been provincial in nature.
As political movements and protests continue across India in defence of linguistic diversity, the pressures of homogenising language policies—such as the three-language policy proposal in the New Education Policy and the increasing imposition of Hindi—threaten long-standing vernacular traditions. These assertions are not merely symbolic but reflect deeper historical grievances and constitutional anxieties. In this context, revisiting the provincial dynamics of the Constituent Assembly becomes crucial.
By tracing how debates over language unfolded within and beyond the Assembly, we gain insight into the enduring tension between centralising impulses and regional constitutional imaginaries. Reviving these historical narratives amid contemporary assimilatory rhetoric is vital for fostering an empathetic and inclusive model of citizenship—one in which marginalised linguistic communities are not merely accommodated, but recognised as integral to the pluralistic vision of the Indian Constitution. This research thus employs the lens of provincial democracy and competing constitutionalism to interrogate how these foundational tensions continue to shape linguistic assertion and democratic participation in India today.
Note: This article is the first in a multi-part series exploring how competing constitutionalism around language, princely states and provinces shaped the Constitution-framing process, and their reflections in modern-day India. The next part will explore how competing claims of the Hindi identity, expressed within the Constituent Assembly, played a role in the naming of Uttar Pradesh.
