Sociology · Ch 5 — The Challenges of Cultural Diversity
Regionalism in the Indian Context
Regionalism in the Indian Context
Regionalism in the Indian Context
Regionalism in India is not an accident — it is rooted in the country’s deep diversity of languages, cultures, tribes, and religions. What gives this diversity political force is that these identity markers are often geographically concentrated in particular regions. When a community that shares a language or tribal identity also occupies a distinct territory, the sense of belonging to that region becomes powerful. This feeling is further fuelled by a perception of regional deprivation — the belief that one’s region has been neglected or exploited by the central government or by more prosperous regions.
Indian federalism has been the key institutional mechanism for accommodating these regional sentiments. The story of how this happened begins right after Independence.
From Presidencies to Linguistic States
At Independence, India inherited the British colonial arrangement of large provinces called presidencies — Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta were the three major ones. These were multi-ethnic, multilingual units. But soon after the Constitution was adopted, strong popular agitations forced the government to reorganise these colonial-era units into ethno-linguistic states within the Indian Union.
The turning point was the States Reorganisation Commission (SRC), whose report was implemented on 1 November 1956. The background to the SRC is instructive. As early as the 1920s, the Indian National Congress had reorganised its own provincial units on linguistic lines — one for Marathi speakers, another for Oriya speakers, and so on. Gandhi and other leaders had promised that after freedom, the new nation would be based on linguistic provinces.
But when freedom came in 1947, it came with Partition. The Congress leadership — Nehru, Patel, and Rajaji — hesitated. Their fear was straightforward: if attachment to faith had led to one partition, how many more would attachment to language cause? The rank-and-file Congressmen, however, were strongly in favour of redrawing the map on linguistic lines.
Vigorous movements arose among Marathi and Kannada speakers, who were then scattered across the Bombay and Madras presidencies and princely states like Mysore and Hyderabad. But the most militant protests came from Telugu speakers. In October 1953, Potti Sriramulu, a former Gandhian, died after a 56-day fast unto death. His martyrdom sparked violent protests and led directly to the creation of Andhra Pradesh. It also forced the government to set up the SRC, which in 1956 formally approved the principle of linguistic states.
The fear that linguistic states would weaken Indian unity turned out to be wrong. In fact, the opposite happened. It has proved perfectly consistent to be Kannadiga and Indian, Bengali and Indian, Tamil and Indian, Gujarati and Indian. Linguistic states have strengthened Indian unity.
The Contrast with India’s Neighbours
The textbook draws a sharp contrast with two neighbours to make this point concrete.
- Sri Lanka: In 1956 — the very year the SRC redrew India’s map — the Parliament of Ceylon declared Sinhala the sole official language, ignoring Tamil protests. One left-wing Sinhala MP warned: “One language, two nations… Two languages, one nation.” The civil war that has raged in Sri Lanka since 1983 is partly rooted in the denial of minority linguistic rights.
- Pakistan: Pakistan was divided in 1971 because the Punjabi and Urdu speakers of its western wing refused to respect the sentiments of the Bengali-speaking east.
The formation of linguistic states allowed India to escape an even worse fate. As the textbook puts it, if the aspirations of India’s language communities had been ignored, we might have seen: “One language, fourteen or fifteen nations.”
Language, Region, and Tribal Identity
Language — coupled with regional and tribal identity, and not religion — has therefore been the most powerful basis for ethno-national identity in India. But this does not mean every linguistic community has got its own state. For example, the three new states created in 2000 — Chhattisgarh, Uttaranchal (now Uttarakhand), and Jharkhand — were not primarily based on language. Instead, a combination of factors drove the demand for statehood: tribal identity, language, a sense of regional deprivation, and ecological concerns.
Currently, India has 28 States (federal units) and 8 Union territories (centrally administered).
In this chapter, the word “State” with a capital S refers to the federal units within the Indian nation-state; the lower-case “state” is used for the broader conceptual category.