The Evolution of Maharashtra State

During its years under British imperial rule (1858-1947), India was organized into provinces that best suited British needs. Two of the British Raj's key objectives in drawing political boundaries were to maximize the efficiency of colonial administration, and to undermine territorial tendencies towards homogeneity, unity, and nationalism. These objectives assured that the linguistic characteristics of each province were at best of secondary concern, and at worst leveraged by the British to weaken India's sense of identity, by encouraging heterogeneous states.

However, India remained an incredibly multi-cultural, multi-linguistic, multi-faith, and multi-ethnic country. How is a government to effectively govern a body of such disparate peoples? One popular solution, raised as early as 1920 by the All-India Congress Committee, was the formation of "linguistic states," or states divided according to which language was predominantly spoken within them.

The movement towards linguistic states spans the decades before, during, and after Indian independence in 1947. Through the complex reorganization of a newly liberated country, many issues that are significant and familiar to democracies--state's rights, peaceful resistance, the effective governance of a federation of geographic bodies both nationally and locally--become exemplified and amplified in India, the world's largest democracy by population, and particularly in Mumbai, the largest and most diverse city in India.