Asra Hamid Rashid is a Hasrat Mohani Fellow for constitutional history at The Equals Project. She researches on the intersection of constitutional history and language.
In the halls of the Constituent Assembly, language was a hotly debated issue, shaping several discussions all the way down to how States were named. In the first of this multi-part constitutional history series, we explore a brief history of provinces in newly independent India, their competing visions of nationhood, and what our legal imagination of language in today’s majoritarian India must borrow from this history.