How provincial and princely politics around language and sovereignty shaped Indian Constitution’s making: A multi-part series
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.
Asra Hamid Rashid
Published on: 18 June 2025, 06:24 am
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.
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.
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.
