Thoughts on Linguistic State 1955

one proposal, many questions

The Ambedkar Reader 2026

Jul 02, 2026

We Have Seen Too Many Self-Help Books

We have seen too many self-help books. Some promise productivity, others teach manifestation or habit formation. But what if I told you that there was once a self-help book that claimed to teach people how to live in independent India?

If we think about it, self-help books are themselves products of particular social and economic conditions. The capitalist-liberal economy constantly pushes individuals to become more productive in order to achieve their dreams. Books such as Atomic Habits, The Secret (where you are told that manifesting a car might one day get you one), and Deep Work emerge from this social world.

Similarly, when India was about to begin self-rule, it produced its own peculiar political and social climate. While working through Tamil periodicals, I came across an advertisement for a self-help book published in a Tamil magazine in 1947. The advertisement warned readers that they had entered a “new, unknown world” and that the book would teach them “how to live in an independent world.”

This “new world”-of the state, the nation, and the federation-generated profound anxieties among different linguistic communities within the Indian Union. It was also around this time that Ambedkar began developing many of the ideas that would later appear in his writings on the linguistic reorganisation of states.

Reading this text today, when the Union government continues to push proposals such as delimitation and “One Nation, One Election,” is particularly striking. Many states perceive these proposals as undermining the promises of state autonomy and the federal character of the Indian Union. Ambedkar’s Thoughts on Linguistic States remains one of his most contested works. There are, of course, many dimensions to this debate, but I want to engage with the text on its own terms before bringing other thinkers into the discussion where necessary.

Cold-Blooded Reasoning

In 1955, Ambedkar published Thoughts on Linguistic States at a time when, as he himself put it, “the creation of Linguistic States is a burning question of the day.” Dissatisfied with the recommendations of the States Reorganisation Commission (SRC), he argued that the issue should be solved through “cold-blooded reasoning.” But this reasoning is deeply nationalist. It is not the detached coldness of a scholar but the calculated reasoning of someone committed to securing a particular national future. Before dismissing Ambedkar’s position as simple nationalism, however, we need to reconstruct the political debates that preceded the emergence of the linguistic question.

The story goes something like this: the British had decided to transfer power, but the question was how to govern such a vast and diverse subcontinent. This is where the plot unfolds; with negotiations, contradictions, and enormous political uncertainty. The British often described India as a “sleeping beauty,” but once the beauty woke up, the aftermath was far more chaotic than they had anticipated.

The Cabinet Mission of 1946 proposed dividing British India into three sections while preserving a united federation with substantial provincial autonomy.

Group A: Hindu-majority provinces—Madras, Bombay, United Provinces, Bihar, Central Provinces, and Orissa.

Group B: Muslim-majority provinces in the northwest—Punjab, Sindh, the North-West Frontier Province, and British Baluchistan.

Group C: Bengal and Assam.

This proposal attempted to balance Hindu and Muslim political interests in the hope of preventing Partition while accommodating competing national claims. Democracy, after all, is often imagined as the rule of the majority. By balancing majority and minority proposition, the proposal hoped to produce a stable democratic federation.

But this immediately raises an obvious question: are all Muslims across India politically one? Are all Hindus one? Can democracy really be stabilised simply by dividing people according to religion? This, I think, is the heart of the problem.

Prof. Madhava Prasad has argued that imagining India as an eternal conflict between Hindus and Muslims is itself a colonial myth. Within this colonial framework, there was little room for other forms of political identification. The language question, in particular, appeared as little more than a nuisance. Of course, Pakistan was eventually created on the basis of religious difference. Yet Prof. T. K. Oommen provocatively argues that had India been reorganised on linguistic lines before Partition, Pakistan may never have come into existence. There is something compelling about this observation. Pakistan itself, despite being founded upon religious unity, has continually struggled with linguistic conflicts.

Tariq Rahman’s work on Pakistan’s language politics illustrates this well. Urdu, spoken by only around nine percent of the population at independence, became the official language of the state, while Punjabi, spoken by more than forty percent of the population, was politically marginalised. Similar tensions emerged in Balochistan over Balochi. The question, then, is perhaps not whether religion or language constitutes a nation, but rather how these different identities operate in the formation of political complexes.

State, federation, and democracy form a peculiar combination. Within this relationship, language, which also carries culture, history, and civilisation, has historically played a constitutive role. Ambedkar, however, departs from this line of thinking. For him, language is not simply the foundation of democratic life; it can also become a threat to national unity.

He writes:

“I was glad that India was separated from Pakistan… When the partition took place I felt that God was willing to lift his curse and let India be one, great and prosperous. But I fear that the curse may fall again. For I find that those who are advocating linguistic States have at heart the ideal of making the regional language their official language.”

It is this “curse” of separatism, particularly when organised around linguistic identity, that Ambedkar seeks to confront. His principal solution is that regional languages should not become the official languages of their respective states. It is a fascinating proposal because it imagines Hindi as a web that could bind together linguistically reorganised states.

Yet this immediately raises another question: can a political language simply be created through constitutional design? Hindi could not acquire the status of a genuinely political language because people’s cultural languages remained Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, and so on. Ambedkar was fully aware of this contradiction. He recognised that Hindi could not simply replace people’s cultural languages. Yet he nevertheless argued, somewhat paradoxically, that “culture is conserved by language. Since Indians wish to unite and develop a common culture, it is the bounden duty of all Indians to own up Hindi as their language.”

Language: Political and Cultural

The States Reorganisation Commission recommended that states should largely correspond to linguistic communities, for example, Punjab for Punjabi speakers. Although Ambedkar broadly accepted linguistic states, he was deeply concerned about the challenges they posed to democracy and national unity.

For Ambedkar, multilingual states could not function effectively as democratic units. Democracy, he argues, “cannot work without friction unless there is fellow feeling among those who constitute the State.” This fellow feeling is a “corporate sentiment of oneness” that makes people regard one another as “kith and kin.” The cement that binds this collective consciousness together is language. A linguistic community develops a shared feeling of belonging that enables it to negotiate internal conflicts and competing interests, both of which are integral to democratic politics.

But can such a feeling of oneness be artificially produced? Can Hindi become the political language of India simply because the Constitution or the state desires it? I think Ambedkar himself recognised the practical impossibility of this project, and it is perhaps here that the nationalist in him becomes visibly frustrated. At one point he argues that anyone who refuses to accept Hindi “as part and parcel of linguistic States has no right to be an Indian.”

While reading this passage, I underlined it and scribbled in the margin: he is very, very angry.

The passage continues:

“If my suggestion is not accepted, India will then cease to be India. It will be a collection of different nationalities engaged in rivalries against one another.”

A committed regionalist might understandably be offended by these remarks. But if one momentarily suspends that reaction and instead situates Ambedkar within the political anxieties of the 1950s, the force of his anger becomes easier to understand. Whether one ultimately agrees with him or not is another matter.

End of Part 1

(writing on this piece requires lot of reading so I decided to put them in two parts)

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