5.5 — India, State by State

India has 28 states and 8 union territories, and the map they sit on was redrawn once, on purpose, on the basis of language.

How the map was made

Why do Indian state borders follow languages?

Because a man starved himself to death over it and the government changed its mind.

At independence the provinces were inherited from British administrative units, which followed conquest and convenience rather than population. Congress had promised linguistic reorganisation before independence and then hesitated, fearing that redrawing states along language lines would encourage separatism so soon after Partition.

Potti Sriramulu, a Gandhian activist, began a fast in October 1952 demanding a Telugu-speaking state. He died 58 days later. The riots that followed forced the government's hand within days, and Andhra State was created in 1953.

The States Reorganisation Act of 1956 then remade the whole map on linguistic lines. It is one of the most consequential administrative decisions in Indian history, and the argument about whether it was right is still live: it gave education and administration a language people actually spoke, and it also entrenched linguistic identity as a political category.

The map has kept changing since. Gujarat and Maharashtra split from Bombay State in 1960. Punjab and Haryana split in 1966. The north-eastern states were carved out through the 1960s and 70s. Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand were created in 2000, and Telangana split from Andhra Pradesh in 2014. Jammu and Kashmir was reorganised into two union territories in 2019.

What is the difference between a state and a union territory?

A state has its own elected government with powers guaranteed by the Constitution, and the centre cannot ordinarily override it in state subjects. A union territory is administered by the centre through an appointed administrator, though some — Delhi, Puducherry and Jammu and Kashmir — have their own legislatures with limited powers.

The categories exist for different reasons: small size (Lakshadweep, Daman and Diu), strategic sensitivity (Andaman and Nicobar), historical inheritance (Puducherry, formerly French), or a specific political decision (Chandigarh, shared as capital by two states; Delhi, the national capital).

The north

What defines the Himalayan states?

Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh are union territories since 2019. Ladakh is a high cold desert above 3,000 metres, Buddhist-majority in Leh district and Muslim-majority in Kargil, with a landscape closer to Tibet than to anywhere else in India. The Kashmir Valley is one of the most fertile and most militarised places on the subcontinent.

Himachal Pradesh is almost entirely mountain, produces a large share of India's apples, and has consistently high literacy and health indicators for reasons that are studied — small population, high public spending per head, and land reform that left most farmers owning their land.

Uttarakhand, split from Uttar Pradesh in 2000, holds the sources of the Ganga and Yamuna and the four dham pilgrimage sites. It is also where the Chipko movement began in the 1970s, when village women physically embraced trees to stop commercial felling — one of the first environmental movements to succeed against a state forestry department.

What are the big northern plains states?

Uttar Pradesh is the most populous state in India and, if it were a country, would be the fifth or sixth most populous in the world at around 240 million. It contains Varanasi, Ayodhya, Mathura, Agra and Lucknow, has sent more prime ministers to Delhi than any other state, and ranks poorly on most human development measures.

Bihar was the political and intellectual centre of ancient India — Magadha, the Mauryan and Gupta empires, Nalanda university, and the places where the Buddha attained enlightenment and Mahavira taught. It is now among the poorest states by income and among the youngest by median age.

Punjab and Haryana are the grain belt, transformed by the Green Revolution described in 3.3, and now facing the groundwater consequences of it. They share Chandigarh as a capital, a city designed from nothing by Le Corbusier in the 1950s and one of the few planned cities in India.

Rajasthan is the largest state by area, most of it the Thar desert, and holds the greatest concentration of forts and palaces in the country. Its water systems — stepwells, johads, and the bawdis — are studied as a model of arid-land engineering.

The west

What is Maharashtra and Gujarat known for beyond the obvious?

Maharashtra contains Mumbai, which produces a very large share of India's tax revenue and is the base of both its financial sector and its Hindi film industry. Inland it is a different state entirely: the Deccan plateau, cotton and sugarcane, and the Vidarbha and Marathwada regions where agrarian distress has been most severe.

It also holds the Ajanta and Ellora caves — rock-cut Buddhist, Hindu and Jain temples and monasteries, some of them carved downward from a single piece of rock, which are among the most extraordinary structures in the world and are covered in 8.3.

Gujarat has the longest coastline of any Indian state, a long history of maritime trade reaching to Africa and Arabia, and the archaeological site of Lothal, a Harappan port with what appears to be a dockyard. It is also where the Asiatic lion survives, in the Gir forest — the only wild population in the world outside Africa, recovered from perhaps twenty animals in the early twentieth century to several hundred now.

Goa was Portuguese for 450 years, until 1961 — far longer than any part of India was British — which is why its architecture, food, surnames and law are distinct. It still uses a civil code derived from Portuguese law, making it the only Indian state with a uniform civil code.

The south

What distinguishes the four southern states?

Tamil Nadu has the oldest continuously used literary language in India — Sangam Tamil literature dates to the early centuries CE — and the Dravidian political movement that has dominated its politics since the 1960s. Its temple architecture, with towering gopuram gateways, is a distinct tradition from the north's. It is heavily industrialised, particularly in automobiles.

Kerala consistently records the highest literacy and life expectancy in India and among the lowest infant mortality, on a modest per-capita income — a combination studied internationally as the "Kerala model", generally attributed to early investment in education and health, land reform, and high female literacy. It has a large diaspora in the Gulf, and remittances are a significant part of its economy. It also has the oldest Christian and Jewish communities in India, both predating their arrival in most of Europe.

Karnataka holds Bengaluru, the centre of the Indian software industry, and also Hampi, the ruined capital of the Vijayanagara empire, which in the sixteenth century was among the largest cities in the world.

Andhra Pradesh and Telangana split in 2014 after a long agitation, dividing a Telugu-speaking state on regional rather than linguistic lines. Hyderabad, in Telangana, served as joint capital for a transition period and is a major technology and pharmaceutical centre; Andhra Pradesh has been building a new capital at Amaravati.

The east and north-east

What is in the eastern states?

West Bengal was the centre of the colonial administration until the capital moved to Delhi in 1911, and of the Bengal Renaissance — the nineteenth-century movement in literature, science, religion and social reform that produced Ram Mohan Roy, Tagore, Vivekananda, J. C. Bose and Satyendra Nath Bose. It shares the Sundarbans, the largest mangrove forest in the world, with Bangladesh, and it is the only place where tigers routinely swim between islands and hunt in tidal water.

Odisha has the Konark Sun Temple, built as a colossal stone chariot, and the Jagannath temple at Puri whose annual chariot festival gave English the word juggernaut. It is also on the cyclone coast, and its disaster management authority is now cited internationally: the 1999 super cyclone killed around ten thousand people, and comparable storms since have killed dozens, because of an evacuation system built deliberately in response.

Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh hold a very large share of India's coal, iron ore and bauxite, and also a large tribal population, and the tension between extraction and displacement defines much of their politics.

Why is the north-east distinct?

Eight states — Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura — connected to the rest of India by the Siliguri Corridor, a strip about 22 kilometres wide at its narrowest, often called the Chicken's Neck.

The region has over 200 distinct ethnic groups and languages, mostly Tibeto-Burman and Austroasiatic rather than Indo-Aryan or Dravidian. Several states are majority Christian — Nagaland, Mizoram and Meghalaya — following nineteenth-century missionary activity. Sikkim was an independent kingdom until 1975.

Assam produces a large share of the world's tea and holds Kaziranga, which has the great majority of the world's one-horned rhinos. Meghalaya has the living root bridges of the Khasi hills, grown over decades by training rubber fig roots across streams — structures that get stronger with age rather than decaying.

The region's relationship with the rest of India has been strained by distance, by insurgencies over several decades, and by the time zone question in 2.7: sunrise in Arunachal Pradesh can be before five in the morning while offices open on Delhi's clock.

Things worth knowing about the whole country

How many languages does India actually have?

The Constitution recognises 22 scheduled languages. The 2011 census recorded 121 languages with more than 10,000 speakers, and 1,369 rated as mother tongues, grouped into those 121.

India has no national language. Hindi and English are the official languages of the union government, and each state sets its own. The Constitution originally envisaged English being phased out by 1965; anti-Hindi agitations in Tamil Nadu, in which several people died, led to English being retained indefinitely.

Four major families are represented: Indo-Aryan in the north and west, Dravidian in the south, Tibeto-Burman in the north-east and Himalaya, and Austroasiatic in central and eastern tribal areas. Tamil, Sanskrit, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Assamese, Bengali, Marathi and Pali have been designated classical languages, which carries funding for their study.

What is the Tropic of Cancer doing across India?

It runs through eight states — Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Tripura and Mizoram — cutting the country almost in half.

Its significance is real rather than decorative. North of it, the sun is never directly overhead; south of it, it passes overhead twice a year. That line broadly separates the subtropical north, which gets a genuine cold winter, from the tropical south, which does not. It is why Delhi has fog and frost in January and Chennai does not.

Which are the largest and smallest states?

Rajasthan is largest by area, Goa smallest among states, and Lakshadweep smallest of all at 32 square kilometres.

Uttar Pradesh is the most populous and Sikkim the least, with under 700,000 people. Delhi is the most densely populated, at over 11,000 people per square kilometre, and Arunachal Pradesh the least, at 17.

Sikkim also has a distinction worth knowing: it became the first fully organic state in the world in 2016, phasing out chemical fertilisers and pesticides across all its farmland over about thirteen years.

What comes next

The last page of this Part is about the map itself — why every flat world map is wrong, which distortion each one chooses, and how a satellite tells you where you are to within a few metres.