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.
