Reorganization of States and the Politicsof Official Languages in India

Mahendra Prasad Singh and Ramesh Chandra Dhussa

ContentsLanguage, Geography, and Politics in Contemporary India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Concluding Observations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

AbstractIndia is one of the most linguistically plural nations of the world, with as many as22 recognized languages in the national constitution and myriad micro-linguisticminority languages recognized in some state laws. This situation is explained bythe pattern of state formation in India in which independent regional statesabounded and subcontinental states like those of the Mauryas, Mughals, andthe British were few and far between through much of its history despite a vast butreasonably compact landmass between the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean.Indian languages owe their origins to four major linguistic families: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, and Tibeto-Burman, plus Persian and English,which came with medieval Muslim and modern British conquerors. There hasalso persisted a distinct gap between the languages of the elite – Sanskrit, Persian,and English – and the vernacular Indian languages in the past and the present.Territorial distribution of languages has been used as a major criterion, amongothers, for reorganization of the states of the Union of India founded in 1950 to

M. P. Singh (*)University of Delhi, New Delhi, India

Centre for Multilevel Federalism, Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi, India

National Fellow, Indian Institution of Advanced Study, Shimla, Indiae-mail: profmpsingh@gmail.com

R. C. DhussaDepartment for the Study of Culture and Society, Drake University, Des Moines, IA, USAe-mail: ramesh.dhussa@drake.edu

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019S. D. Brunn, R. Kehrein (eds.), Handbook of the Changing World Language Map,https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73400-2_85-1

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make them as unilingual in population as possible. Nevertheless, all 29 states and7 union territories today still have a considerable number of linguistic minorities,sizeable among whom enjoy the right to primary education in their mothertongues under the constitution and laws of the land. States generally follow thepractice of making the dominant language of the region the official language forgovernmental and educational purposes. Hindi and English serve as the officiallanguages of the Union government and as the official link languages for inter-governmental communication. English still continues as the language of theSupreme Court and the High Courts and of higher education and research, byand large. The multilingualism tempered by bilingualism seems unlikely tochange in the foreseeable future.

KeywordsIndia · Official language · Regional language · Link language · Intergovernmentalcommunication · Unilingualism · Bilingualism · Multilingualism · Politicalculture

Language, Geography, and Politics in Contemporary India

India harbors four major linguistic families: (i) Indo-Aryan with root in Sanskrit,(ii) Dravidian, (iii) Austro-Asiatic, and (iv) Tibeto-Burman. All north Indian lan-guages belong to the first, all south Indian language to the second, all inland northerntribal languages to the third, and all the northeastern and some northwestern lan-guages to the fourth of these linguistic families (Baldridge 1996). The number oflanguages belonging to each of these families and proportion of their speakers as perthe 1981 census can be seen in Table 1.

Vedic Sanskrit is the oldest Indo-Aryan language, with a history that goes back tothe Rig Veda (a collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns 1500 B.C.), the earliest of thefour Vedas, the others being Sama, Yajur, and Atharva. Vedic Sanskrit passedthrough successive phases of linguistic forms called (i) Prakrit (about 500 B.C.,meaning “natural” or “common”); (ii) Sanskrit, meaning “refined” by the greatgrammarian Panini into a literary language around 400 B.C.; and (iii) Apabhransh(meaning “corrupt”) during the last few centuries of the first millennium A.D. It wasaround the thirteenth century that the modern Indian languages of the Indo-Aryanfamily we are now familiar with evolved from the various apabhransh linguisticforms (Baldridge 1996). These modern north Indian languages include Hindi,Gujarati, Halabi, Konkani, Marathi, Bhili, Khandesi, Urdu, Assamese, Bengali,Oriya or Odia, Dogri, Kashmiri, Nepali, Punjabi, Sindhi, etc.

The origin of Dravidian linguistic family is obscure, though it is supposed to havesome relationship with Uralic and Altaic languages. It is postulated that from anunknown original Dravidian language two branches emerged as Andhra andDravida, from which the modern Dravidian languages originated: Telugu fromAndhra; and Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada from Dravida. Tamil has the olderliterary tradition among these languages; it has one of the oldest unbroken literary

2 M. P. Singh and R. C. Dhussa

traditions (Baldridge 1996). Along with Sanskrit, Tamil claims the status of one ofthe two “classical languages” of India.

Austro-Asiatic languages have two main divisions: Mon-Khmer which includesKhasi and Munda which comprises Ho, Kharia, Korku, Munda, Mundari, Santhali,and Savara (Baldridge 1996).

The four major divisions of the Tibeto-Burman languages are as follows withtheir respective subgroup members: (i) Bodo-Naga-Kachin (Garo, Kabui, Mao,Tangkhul, Thodo); (ii) Gyarung-Mishmi (Adi, Dafla, Kinnauri); (iii) Naga-Kuki-Chin (Angami, Ao, Konyok, Lotha, Lushai-Mizo, Manipuri, Sema, Tripuri), and(iv) Tibetan (Ladakhi, Tibetan) (Baldridge 1996).

According to the decennial survey of 2011 conducted by the Government of India(not fully reported yet), there are about 122 languages, counting only those spokenby more than 10,000 people. However, an unofficial People’s Linguistic Survey ofIndia (PLSI) directed by Dr. G.N. Devy has surveyed languages spoken by less than10,000 people, whose results are under publication. According to their count thereare 780 languages and 66 different scripts in India. The PLSI is a rights-basedmovement carrying out a nationwide survey of Indian languages. It claims thatover the past half a century several hundred languages have simply disappearedfrom the scene and the process of extinction is still continuing (S.S. Singh 2013).

The Constitution of India originally enlisted the following 14 languages as“scheduled” languages, so called as this official listing is done in the EighthSchedule of the Constitution. These 14 languages were Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati,Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil,Telugu, and Urdu. Subsequently, under the pressure of political demands fromtime to time, eight new languages were added to the Eighth Schedule throughconstitutional amendments. These are Bodo, Dogri, Konkani, Maithili, Manipuri,Nepali, Santhali, and Sindhi (Fig. 1).

The Eighth Schedule languages are the major spoken languages in variousregions or subregions in contemporary India, with the exception of Sanskrit, andSindhi. The former is no longer spoken anywhere but is a classical language withgreat literary and philosophical significance globally and religious symbolism forHindus. The latter is the spoken language of Sindh which is now a part of Pakistan,but there is a sizeable Sindhi Hindu population in some north Indian cities, especiallyMumbai. Goods manufactured by the “USA” (Ullhasnagar Sindhi Association) havea good market regionally.

Table 1 Major linguistic families in India (Baldridge 1996)

Families No. of speakers % Population

Indo-Aryan 491,086,116 73.3

Dravidian 157,836,723 23.9

Austro-Asiatic 7,705,011 1.2

Tibeto-Burman 4,071,701 0.6

Reorganization of States and the Politics of Official Languages in India 3

Out of 22 scheduled languages, 13 have states of the Indian Union associatedwith them in the sense that they are the major languages spoken by the people there:Hindi in eight states plus one union territory (Delhi), Assamese in Assam, Bengali inWest Bengal, Gujarati in Gujarat, Kannada in Karnataka, Malayalam in Kerala,Manipuri in Manipur, Marathi in Maharashtra, Odia in Odisha, Punjabi in Punjab,Tamil in Tamil Nadu, and Telugu in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. All theselanguages are formally designated as the “official language” of these states, respec-tively. Kashmiri is the spoken language of the major region, the Muslim-majorityKashmir valley, in the state of Jammu & Kashmir, but the state has adopted Urdu as

Fig. 1 India languages. (Map by Dick Gilbreath, University of Kentucky Gyula Pauer Center forCartography and GIS; commissioned by the authors)

4 M. P. Singh and R. C. Dhussa

its official language. Similarly, some Christian-majority tribal states in the north-eastern region of India have over dozens of spoken tribal or mixed languages butthey have adopted English as their official language, e.g., Mizoram and Nagaland.

Next to religion, categories of language, tribe, and caste have been the majorethnic identities in modern India. Salience of the religious cleavage in British Indiahas arguably superseded by linguistic, caste, and tribal cleavages in independentIndia, following the partition of the country between Hindu-majority India andMuslim-majority Pakistan in 1947. Provincial or state boundaries in pre-Britishand British periods of Indian history were reflective of patterns of conquests inwars and administrative convenience of rulers. However, the British rulers had donesome reorganization of their incrementally conquered territories from time to time.For example, Assam remained a part of the Bengal Presidency (the term is anextension from Presidency towns, the earliest British coastal settlements in Calcutta,Madras, and Bombay) or province under a governor from 1826 to 1873; it was madeinto a separate chief commissioner’s province from 1874 to 1905 when it becamea part of the new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam under a lieutenant governor;a new chief commissioner’s province of Assam (plus Sylhet) was created in 1912.Sindh, after its conquest by the British in 1843, was made a part of the BombayPresidency; in 1936 it was bifurcated into the separate province of Sindh. Similarly,a new province of Bihar and Orissa was created out of the Bengal Presidency, thelargest of earliest three coastal Presidencies of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay, partlyprompted by the considerations of weakening the forces of Indian nationalism inBengal and partly by a movement for a new province of Bihar complaining againstBengali domination. In 1912, Orissa was bifurcated as a new province. These newprovinces were primarily or ultimately based on linguistic considerations favoringunilingualism, except Eastern Bengal and Assam, and Bihar and Orissa (both werebilingual). Also, the 1905 division of Bengal was indeed primarily motivated bybifurcating the Muslim-majority eastern part from the Hindu-dominated westernpart. In the same year (1912), the capital of British India was shifted from Calcuttato Delhi probably to escape from a highly “nationalized” region to a relativelyplacid part.

British partition of the Bengal province in 1905 into Hindu-majority West Bengaland Muslim-majority East Bengal in pursuit of their imperial colonial policy of“divide and rule” stirred up a great protest movement in Bengal called Swadeshimovement, which forced Governor General Lord Curzon to retrace this step. Itrevealed the mobilizational potentiality of the linguistic identity for the nationalistcause. Guided by Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Indian National Congress, which wasfounded in 1885 as a pressure group by the English-educated Indian middle classesand was gradually turning into a mass movement by the turn of the century, passeda resolution demanding reorganization of provincial boundaries on linguistic lines in1920, and decided to amend its own constitution and reorganize its organizationalstructure along unilingual lines. Departing from its previous organizational structurebased on the British Indian provinces, the Congress then decided to base its prantiyaor Pradeshik (Provincial) units on natural linguistic-cultural boundaries (except forthe huge Hindi heartland where the British administrative provincial boundarieswere continued to be followed).

Reorganization of States and the Politics of Official Languages in India 5

Congress after India’s independence and coming to power in India and all itsprovinces that come to be called “states” under the 1950 Constitution, however,changed its policy on the issue of linguistic states (i.e., state-boundaries coincidingwith linguistic boundaries). The Nehru Government wished to maintain the multi-lingual states inherited from the British Raj to discourage fissiparous tendencies andto promote national integration. However, that was not to be. Demands for creationof unilingual states by dividing larger multilingual and bilingual states backed bymass movements or agitations became recurrent soon after independence. The Uniongovernment after initial reluctance and resistance was compelled to go through themotions of creating a new state of Telugu-speaking Andhra in 1953, the firstlinguistic state in independent India out of the Madras state. Nehru now alsoproceeded to appoint a States’ Reorganization Commission (SRC) chaired by JusticeSaiyed Fazl Ali in 1953, which submitted its report in 1955. The Commissionoutlined four principles that guided its recommendation: (i) India’s national unityand security; (ii) linguistic and cultural homogeneity of states; (iii) financial, eco-nomic, and administrative viability; and (iv) national developmental planning. Itsrecommendations regarding reorganization of states included:

1. Cochin, Vindhya Pradesh, Ajmer, Bhopal, Coorg, Himachal Pradesh, Cutch, andTripura should all be abolished.

2. Three new states – Karnataka, Kerala, and Vidarbha – should be created.3. The existing states of Bombay, Madhya Pradesh (MP), Madras, Punjab, and

Hyderabad should be extensively reorganized territorially.4. The existing states of Andhra, Assam, Bihar, West Bengal, and Rajasthan should

undergo minor boundary adjustments with the adjacent states.5. The states of Odisha, Uttar Pradesh (UP), and Jammu & Kashmir (which were

beyond the Terms of Reference of the Commission) would retain their thenexisting boundaries (Kudaisya 2014: XXVIII–XXIX).

Territorial changes brought about by the States Reorganization Act, 1956, in thewake of the States Reorganization Commission Report (1956), included the follow-ing: (i) The former princely state of Hyderabad was merged with Andhra and theemergent entity was renamed Andhra Pradesh. This was premised on the fact thatTelugu was the common spoken language in both the areas; (ii) Tamil-speaking partsof the former princely state of Travancore-Cochin were merged with Tamil-speakingMadras; (iii) a new Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala was carved out of Madras;(iv) a new Kannada-speaking state of Mysore was created by making the formerprincely states of Mysore as its territorial hub and merging Kannada-speaking areasfrom the neighboring states with it; (v) enlarged the preexisting bilingual (Marathiand Gujarati) state of Saurashtra by merging some Marathi-speaking areas fromsome adjacent states with it; (vi) created a new state of Madhya Pradesh by mergingwith it some erstwhile Hindi-speaking princely states and Hindi-speaking parts ofneighboring states; and (vii) created the Union Territory of Laccadive, Minicoy, andAmindivi, with a largely tribal population, separating them from Madras state (“Act37” 1956).

6 M. P. Singh and R. C. Dhussa

The linguistic movements that broke out in post-independence India and pro-pelled the process of reorganization of states must be seen and sought to beunderstood in the background of what happened in colonial India. Paul Brass(1974) who has studied the linkages between language, religion, and politics inIndia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries offers a good point of entree into howthe two major symbols of group identity – religion and language – were manipulatedby political elites to promote communal and regional and national politics bothbefore and after 1947. The Hindu-Muslim communal politics was superimposed onHindi-Urdu language politics that predominated the politics of the country in anoverarching way before India’s independence. With the partition and independencethere was a transformation of sorts that opened the way for linguistic politics as amajor political discourse that was seen as less threatening to national unity in thenew federal democratic republic of India. In an interesting comparative study of themovement for the Punjabi suba (province) out of the united bilingual Indian Punjabby the Shromani Akali Dal and the demand for a Maithili language-based Mithilastate out of Bihar, Brass tried to show why the former succeeded in 1966 while thelatter failed. Speakers of Maithili and other dialects in Bihar were united in theirHindu religious identification, besides being numerically smaller than Sikhs. Theattempt of the Sikhs to reinforce their religious differentiation from Hindus by theirstrong identification with Punjabi in Gurumukhi script but tried to cloak theirdemand for a Sikh-majority state by the ruse of presenting it as a Punjabilanguage-majority state. This, however, had the effect of making the Hindus inPunjab to change their linguistic identification from Punjabi to Hindi. Nevertheless,the post-Nehru Congress party with its declining electoral prospects during the earlydays of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sought to placate the Sikhs in a border state byconceding their demand for a “Punjabi suba.”

The States Reorganization Act (SRA), 1956, and concomitant constitutionalamendments had already opened the gates for creation of unilingual states thatcontinued later during the 1960s. The major factor during this phase of reorganiza-tion of states was largely linguistic in nature in the sense that the major direction ofchange was creation of unilingual states, mostly in the South and marginally in theNorth.

In a trenchant critique of the territorial reorganization recommended by SRC(1955), B. R. Ambedkar (1989), who had been closely associated with the making ofIndia’s Constitution as the chairman of the drafting committee of the ConstituentAssembly, opined that its consequences would be disastrous for national unity andfederal democratic governance. For the SRA had kept some Hindi-speaking stateslike Uttar Pradesh and Bihar intact and created two more Hindi-speaking statesof Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Moreover, it had also retained the bilingual(Marathi and Gujarati) state of Maharashtra, broadly also in the North. It had,on the other hand, “balkanized” the multilingual state of Madras into unilingualTamil-, Telugu-, Kannada-, and Malayalam-speaking states of Madras (later TamilNadu), Andhra Pradesh, Mysore (later Karnataka), and Kerala. Moreover, the SRAhad made no attempt to equalize the size of the states in terms of population andterritory in a Constitution that is not based, unlike the Constitution of the USA,

Reorganization of States and the Politics of Official Languages in India 7

on the basis of equality of states in representation in the federal second chamber(senate) nor on the principle of parity of powers – in gross if not precise terms –between the two parliamentary chambers, again unlike the USA. This imbalance waspregnant with North-South conflict and even civil war, Ambedkar contended. Theway out suggested by Ambedkar was the rejection of the idea of multilingual statesaltogether for adopting the principle of “one state, one major language” (not to beconfused with “one language, one state” as it must be tempered with administrativeefficiency, popular sentiments, and majority-minority proportion). He proposedconstitutional amendments to “prevent the tyranny of the majority,” e.g., system ofplural representative (two or three) constituencies with cumulative voting. He wenton to make somewhat concrete proposals to divide Uttar Pradesh into three partswith capitals in Meerut, Allahabad, and Kanpur; Bihar into two parts with capitals inPatna and Ranchi; Madhya Pradesh into two parts (northern and southern); andMaharashtra into four parts (Bombay, western, central, and eastern, not countingGujarat which would be a unilingual Gujarati-speaking state which is not mentionedas it goes without saying as per his principle outlined above). All these new stateswould have been unilingual – seven Hindi-speaking, four Marathi-speaking, and oneGujarati-speaking.

Another aspect of linguistic phenomena in the North and the South is worthpointing out here. This relates to the phenomenon of integration of a variety ofcontiguous dialects (indeed some even language-like with fairly rich poetic traditionlike Brajbhasha, Avadhi, and Maithili) into a standard form. This is more in evidencein the North than in the South, where despite the common Dravidian Movementbased in the Tamil part of the South could not evoke any notable responsive echo inother Dravidian languages. In the North this phenomenon worked for Urdu in theeighteenth century but turned toward Hindi by the beginning of the twentiethcentury. Both these languages owe to the dominant Muslim and Hindu elites in theNorth in the context of a great deal of variety of languages and dialects out of whicha standard form of Urdu or Hindi was consciously sought to be developed andpromoted. The respective movements were led by the traditionalist Islamic academyin Deoband and modernist Aligarh Muslim University in Western UP, on the onehand, and Nagri Pracharini Sabha in Varanasi in eastern UP and Hindi SahityaSammelan in Prayag (Allahabad) in central UP, on the other. Linguistically, thetwo movements drew their inspiration from Persian/Arabic or Sanskrit, respectively.The vernacular dialects in both cases were prompted to adopt the dialects ofHindustani or khari boli (standard speech) in and around Delhi and Hyderabadsought to be Persianized or Sanskritized respectively. The traditionally privilegedMuslim elite had greater success initially which gradually got neutralized or demo-cratically reversed by 1900 when the movement for Hindi in Devanagari script ledby Madan Mohan Malaviya, who also founded the Kashi Hindu University inBenaras (Varanasi), succeeded in getting the British government concede the adop-tion of Hindi as a language of subordinate administration and school educationcoequal with Urdu. At higher levels English continued to reign supreme.

This process was further reinforced after the adoption of Hindi in Devanagariscript as the official language coequal with English under the Constitution of India in1950.There is no parallel to this process in the South where the four major languages

8 M. P. Singh and R. C. Dhussa

retained their separate identities and scripts. This contrast can be explained partly byreference to the superimposition of religious identification on linguistic identificationin the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the North (Brass 2009, pp. 184–185) andpartly by pointing out that there is greater family resemblance among languages inthe North, especially dialects in the Hindi heartland, than in the South. Moreover,Brass (2009, p. 187) remarks: “The extent of displacement or subordination of suchsubsidiary languages and dialects to Hindi may be discerned even now, in the 1991census, where, under the heading of Hindi, forty-eight ‘languages and mothertongues’ were subsumed, along with an unspecified number of ‘others’.” Brassgoes on to say that these were recorded as separate languages in the massiveLinguistic Survey of Northern Hindustan by the British administrator-linguistGeorge Grierson around the turn of the nineteenth into twentieth century, and thatsome of them like Bhojpuri, the largest with 20,102,050 speakers exceeded in thatyear 7 of the 18 scheduled languages in the Constitution. Indeed, as Swartzberg(1985, p. 172) observes, authorities after independence helped in the process ofconsolidation of some dialects into language by their decision to discourage fluctu-ating returns by deciding to aggregate the returns for Hindi, Rajasthani, Bihari, andPahari into one category in the 1971 census.

Incidentally, this phenomenon of integration of dialects into languages is also lessevident in the inland as well as northeastern tribal belts. In Nagaland, for example,we gather from friends teaching social sciences there that there are about 15 Nagadialects plus one mixed with Assamese which has come to be known as“Nagamese.” Noble and Dhussa (1983) observe a similar though probably lessdurable phenomenon in Dumka town of the then south Bihar and now Jharkhandstate where migration and settlement pattern in a rather small space has createdlimited linguistic segregation as well as admixture (Fig. 2).

In another assessment of linguistic reorganization of states during the 1950s tomid-1980s, Swartzberg (1985, p. 182) correctly wrote: “Further changes alongpurely linguistic lines are not likely to be great.” He also went on to make a fewevaluative comments that the process has “preserved the essential unity of thenation,” rather than contributed to initially apprehended Balkanization, and “pro-vided a local political milieu that is conducive to the flowering of manylinguistically-rooted cultures and thereby evolved a system which greatly enrichesthe cultural life of the nation as a whole.” He added, “Whether or not the states thathave evolved to this point, however, represent the most efficient territorial vehiclesfor the future economic progress of the nation is debatable” (Swartzberg 1985,p. 182).

Demands for new states in the Northeast were ignored both by States’ Reorgani-zation Commission of 1955 and States’ Reorganization Act of 1956. Demands ofminority groups in Assam since India’s independence for autonomous states ofNagaland, Meghalaya, and Mizoram were not conceded then. These tribal tractsduring the British rule were segregated from the scope of the general law andadministration of the country by being placed in what were called “ExcludedAreas” or “Partially Excluded Areas.” No provincial or central legislation wasdirectly or automatically applicable to them, unless the Governor General of India

Reorganization of States and the Politics of Official Languages in India 9

Fig. 2 Dumka languages. (Map by Dick Gilbreath, University of Kentucky Gyula Pauer Center forCartography and GIS; commissioned by the authors)

10 M. P. Singh and R. C. Dhussa

or Governor of the province concerned specially so directed. On India’s indepen-dence in 1947, all these areas were merged with the state of Assam. The onlyexception was the tribal tract called the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA),a part of British India and thereafter of the Republic of India under the same nameuntil 1972, when it became the Union Territory of Arunachal Pradesh. Nagas werethe first in the Northeast to acquire statehood within the Union of India in 1963.Other tribal areas too gradually moved toward statehood via the Union territorystatus: Meghalaya in 1971, Arunachal Pradesh 1982, and Mizoram in 1987.

The story of state formation in the northeast would remain incomplete withoutnarrating the stories of Tripura, Manipur, and Sikkim. The first two were princelystates during the British period under the paramountcy of the British Crown. The twovolitionally and legally merged with the Indian Union in 1947 after the Britishwithdrawal. They were initially categorized as Central Government AdministrativeAgencies. Recommended by SRC (1955) to be merged with the state of Assam, theybecame part of Assam under SRA (1956). They were granted statehood in 1972 (Rayand Agarwal 1996). Previously a sovereign Himalayan Kingdom, Sikkim became aprotectorate of India in 1950. In the 1974 Sikkimese elections, the India-friendlySikkim National Congress won the polls. Its government demanded extension ofcivil rights and liberties but the King, called Chogyal, sought to suppress thedemand. In 1974 the Sikkimese Parliament adopted a new Constitution providingfor accession to India, which the King reluctantly signed. With the approval of theaccession by the Parliament of India in 1975, Sikkim became the 22nd state of theIndian Union (Datta-Rao 2003).

The latest round of reorganization of states occurred after a gap of close to threedecades or more in 2000 when three new states were created in the north: Jharkhand,Uttarakhand, and Chhattisgarh; and in 2014 Andhra Pradesh was bifurcated to carveout Telangana. The notable fact from the perspective of this chapter in these cases isthat all three go against the prevailing norm of linguistic states as all three have beenseparated from the parent states that predominantly speak the same language as thesuccessor states: Bihar and Jharkhand (Hindi), Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand(Hindi), Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh (Hindi), and Andhra Pradesh andTelangana (Telugu), though there is a significant proportion of tribal population inJharkhand (26.3% in 2001 census) and Chhattisgarh (32.5% in 1991 census) andsome history of demand for a separate tribal state in the former. The recent commonnarrative in these cases has been grievance against the parent states of keeping theirdeparting backward regions perpetually backward by discriminatory treatment. SeeTable 2 for the present number of states in India.

In the opinion of Loise Tillin (2013, p. 13):

Witness the creation of the new linguistic states in the 1950s and the process of creating newstates that continues to this day. It should be noted that that although the creation of threestates (Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh) in 2000 was not based on language, it didreflect the logic of political representation of diversities, for these states gave better repre-sentation to tribal population (Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh) or otherwise sociologically differentgroups (Uttarakhand).

Reorganization of States and the Politics of Official Languages in India 11

About the last case, she might have at least partly also emphasized the geograph-ical (hills and plains) difference rather than only sociological difference.

The relative position of various scheduled languages by the numbers of peoplespeaking them and their percentage to the total population of India may be seen at aglance in Table 3. Hindi spoken by 41.03% of the people in the largest language ofthe country, followed in the second position by Bengali with 8.11% of speakers. Theother linguistic communities having statehood of their own within the Indian Unionrange from 7.19% Telugus to 0.14% Manipuris (see Table 2).

Although the speakers of Hindi refer to their language as the rashtra-bhasha(national language), this is not the formal position either in the Constitution or anylaw. Part XVII of the Constitution with the caption “Official Language,” uses insteadthe terms like “language of the Union” and “regional languages.” Article 343(1) ofthe Constitution provides: “The official language of the Union shall be Hindi inDevanagri script.” It adds: “The forms of numerals to be used for the officialpurposes of the Union shall be the international form of Indian numerals.” Article343 also stipulated that the switchover to Hindi from English would take place after15 years from the commencement of the Constitution on January 26, 1950. Whenthis designated date of shift to Hindi approached nearer, there occurred mild toviolent protests in the South, especially in Tamil Nadu. Under the pressure of extra-parliamentary mass protest, the Congress Party Government led by Prime MinisterNehru worked out a political consensus to postpone the switch on to the Hindi as thesole official language of the Union indefinitely and let English to continue as the

Table 2 States and union territories of India in 2016 and their date(s) of creation or change

States Orissa (1950, 1960)

Andhra Pradesh (1953, 1956, 1959, 2014) Punjab (1950, 1956, 1960, 1966)

Arunachal Pradesh (1971) Rajasthan (1950, 1956, 1959)

Assam (1951, 1962, 1971) Sikkim (1975)

Bihar (1950, 1956, 2000) Tamil Nadu (1950, 1953, 2000)

Chhattisgarh (2000) Telangana (2014)

Goa (1987) Tripura (1950)

Gujarat (1960) Uttar Pradesh (1950, 1968, 1979, 2000)

Haryana (1966, 1979) Uttarakhand (2000)

Himachal Pradesh (1966) West Bengal (1950, 1954, 1956)

Jammu & Kashmir (1950)

Jharkhand (2000) Union Territories

Karnataka (1950, 1956, 1968) Andaman & Nicobar (1950, 1956)

Kerala (1956) Chandigarh (1966)

Madhya Pradesh (1950, 1950, 2000) Dadra & Nagar Haveli (1961)

Maharashtra (1950, 1960) Daman & Diu (1987)

Manipur (1971) Lakshadweep (1956)

Meghalaya (1971) National Capital Territory of Delhi (1950, 1956)

Mizoram (1971) Puducherry (1962)

Nagaland (1962)

12 M. P. Singh and R. C. Dhussa

co-official language with Hindi as long as the non-Hindi-speaking states desire. Infact, Article 343(3) of the Constitution had already left the door open for such aneventuality with a parliamentary enactment to that effect. This option was exercisedby the Official Language Act of 1963, as amended in 1967. An informal three-language formula, attributed to Nehru was also said to be agreed by the Union andstate governments whereby all central and state schools would arrange to offerinstruction in at least three languages: Hindi, English, and a third Indian or foreignlanguage other than English.

Besides the official languages of the Union, the Constitution also uses the term“regional languages.” Article 345 provides that “the Legislature of a Sate may bylaw adopt any one or more of the languages to be used for all or any of the officialpurposes of that State.” Article 346 stipulates English or Hindi as the link language

Table 3 Relative size of various linguistic communitiesa by state in India, 2001 (CensusIndia.gov)

No. Language States where predominant No. Personsb % Populationc

1 Assamese Assam 13,168,484 1.3

2 Bengali West Bengal 83,369,769 8.1

3 Bodo Part of Assam 1,350,478 0.1

4 Dogri Part of J & K 2,282,859 0.2

5 Gujarati Gujarat 46,091,617 4.5

6 Hindi Hindi heartlandd 422,048,642 41.0

7 Kashmiri J & K 5,527,698 0.5

8 Kannada Karnataka 37,924,011 3.7

9 Konkani Part of Maharashtra 2,489,015 0.2

10 Malayalam Kerala 33,066,392 3.2

11 Manipuri Manipur 1,466,705 0.1

12 Marathi Maharashtra 71,936,894 7.0

13 Maithili Part of Bihar 12,179,122 1.2

14 Nepali Part of West Bengal 2,871,749 0.3

15 Oriya Odisha 33,017,446 3.2

16 Punjabi Punjab 29,102,477 2.8

17 Santhali Part of Jharkhand 6,469,600 0.6

18 Sindhi Mumbai city 2,535,485 0.3

19 Sanskrit A classical language 14,135 Negligible

20 Telugu Andhra & Telangana 74,002,856 7.2

21 Tamil Tamil Nadu 60,793,814 5.9

22 Urdu Bihar, UP, Telangana 51,536,111 5.0aCensus 2011 data on this parameter not yet releasedbNumber of persons who reported this language as their mother tongue. Excludes figures forPaomata, Mao-Maram, and Purul subdivisions of Senapati district of Manipur for 2001 CensuscThe percentage of speakers of each language for 2001 was based on the total population of Indianexcluding the population of Mao-Maram, Paomata, and Purul subdivisions of Senapati district ofManipur due to cancellation of census resultsdHindi heartland includes the states of Bihar, UP, MP, Rajasthan, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh,Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Delhi

Reorganization of States and the Politics of Official Languages in India 13

for communication between the Union and state governments and between one stateand another.

Coinciding with States Reorganization Act, 1956, the Seventh Amendment to theConstitution (1956) inserted Articles 305A and 350 B, the former obligating thestates and local authorities to facilitate primary education in mother tongue forchildren of linguistic minorities, and the latter making provision for appointmentof a special officer for linguistic minorities at the Union level by the President ofIndia for oversight in these matters.

Article 348 makes a blanket provision that allows the use of English in theSupreme Court and High Courts and in publication of Acts, Bills, etc. until theParliament by law provides otherwise.

Finally, the Constitution in Article 351 gives a general directive to the Uniongovernment for the development and promotion of the Hindi languages “so that itmay serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture ofIndia.” The Union government should also seek “to secure its [Hindi language’s]enrichment by assimilating without interfering with its genius, the forms, style andexpressions used in Hindustani and in the other languages of India specified in theEighth Schedule, and by drawing, wherever necessary or desirable, for its vocabu-lary, primarily on Sanskrit and secondarily on other languages.” Two comments areapposite on this constitutional directive. First, although the Constitution stops shortof designating Hindi as the national language of India, it clearly posits it as thelanguage of India’s “composite culture” which is tantamount to India’s federativenational culture. Second, Hindustani, the common spoken language that developedin Delhi and Hyderabad and around these medieval Muslim elite-dominated capitalcities in the North and the Deccan, is being considered as a mere vernacular languagebeyond which Hindi is stipulated to be developed as the lingua franca of the republicof India.

However, government patronage of Hindi has remained an affair fraught withform without substance. Hindi continues to be a low-level transactional vehicle inpolitics and administration and second-rate medium of instruction in school andhigher education outside the elite institutions. Language has thus become a basis ofundesirable class divisions in the society. Nevertheless, nonformalistic Hindi hascontinued to expand as the medium of mass politics, market, media, and filmindustry almost in a nationwide spread. There is, besides, a rich literary Hinditradition in fiction and poetry. Yet Hindi does not measure up to the standards of alanguage of knowledge in natural sciences and social sciences.

Concluding Observations

The geographic template of the landmass between the Himalayas and the IndianOcean has had a variegated history and politics spanning over three thousands and ahalf of millennia. Only for about less than one-third of this long time span was Indiaruled by a centralized subcontinental state. Hence, ethnic and linguistic diversities in

14 M. P. Singh and R. C. Dhussa

the country abound to the present. Yet the larger state systems managed to operatethrough various mixes of languages of the elites in different periods: Sanskrit/Prakrit/Pali in ancient times, Persian/Urdu/Hindustani in medieval times andEnglish/Hindustani/Hindi in the modern times.

Contemporary India has managed to deal with unparalleled linguistic diversitieswithin a single national state mainly through two strategies. The first has been thedevice of linguistic and tribal reorganization of the states of the Indian Union.History of provinces in India has been a checkered one. If we take three historicalsnapshots of the internal boundaries of Mauryan Magadh (c. 322–185 BC), MughalHindustan (c. 1526–1858 AD), and British India (1757–1947), we find widelyvariable number of provinces: four units in Ashoka’s India: eastern with capital inToshali, western with capital in Ujjain, northern with capital in Taxila, and southernwith capital in Suvarnagiri/Brahmagiri, besides of course the Centre in Pataliputra(Thapar 1997, pp. 100–101); 15 “subas or Governments” in Akbar’s India: Bengal,Orissa, Bihar, Allahabad, Oudh, Agra, Malwa, Khandesh, Berar, Gujarat, Ajmer,Delhi, Lahore, Multan, and Kabul (Allami 1981: viii, 129–404); 11 in British Indiaunder the direct rule by the Crown-in-Parliament, besides the princely Indian statesunder the paramountcy of the British Crown: Assam, Bengal, Bihar, Bombay,Central Provinces, Madras, North West Frontier Province, Orissa, Punjab, Sind,and United Provinces (Pylee 1967, pp. 99–100). Independent India began withnine Part I states (the former British Indian Provinces) eight Part II states (smalland medium erstwhile princely states that acceded with the Indian Union), and ninePart III states (the larger or merged bigger erstwhile princely states that voluntarily orinvoluntarily acceded with the Indian Union) (see Singh 2007). This complicatedmap was simplified by the States Reorganization Act, 1956, into 14 states,abolishing the three categories of 26 preexisting states, creating unilingual states insome cases, though not in all. Following a series of reorganization of states onlinguistic, tribal, and consideration of regional backwardness over the next sixdecades until 2014 when the latest new state was created, we now have 29 statesand 7 union territories (Table 2 above).

Secondly, treading gingerly over the linguistically diverse landscape of India, theConstitution of India has made elaborate provisions for official languages for theUnion and state governments and link languages among them as also guaranteeingrights of national and regional linguistic minorities. These arrangements haveworked reasonably well so far for federal-national unity of India, though theIndian languages continue to remain relatively backward vis-à-vis English, whichserves as a more pervasive framework for all-India elite communication and alanguage of higher education and administration and justice but causes and deepensclass divides and regional disparities. Hindi and other regional languages improviseas languages of mass communication, mass education, vernacular mass media,market, and popular mass culture. Paul Brass (2009, pp. 188–195) presents aninsightful look at three complex levels of bilingualism or unilingualism plus eliteand mass language choices and life chances in contemporary India: (i) higher-levelEnglish-Hindi elite bilinguals with best life chances; (ii) intermediate-level elite

Reorganization of States and the Politics of Official Languages in India 15

unilinguals in Hindi or a regional language only with limited zonal life chances; and(iii) lower-level masses poorly educated or even illiterates speaking in mothertongues. This is certainly not the “heaven of freedom” into which RabindranathTagore (1920) wished his country to be awakened!

Publisher’s note: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims inpublished maps and institutional affiliations.

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