The Tamil Nadu Government has demanded that in addition to English, Tamil should be used to conduct proceedings in the high court. The acceptance of this demand by the Union law minister, as reported in this paper on Sunday April 20, illustrates once again that the Indian state has proved more than sagacious when it comes to accommodating linguistic demands. This lesson in political prudence has, however, not come naturally to the state. It has been learnt literally through trial by fire, for in the 1950s and 1960s the new nation was in danger of being torn apart on the twin issues of linguistic states and that of the national language.

Throughout the freedom struggle, the Congress leadership had been committed to the idea that language should form the basis of constituent states in a post-Independence federal India. In 1927, the Congress adopted a resolution suggesting that ‘that the time had come for the redistribution of provinces on a linguistic basis’. The resolution was significant because the colonial power had constituted administrative units in complete disregard of language ties. For example, the Madras presidency stretched from Cape Comorin and touched the Jagannath Temple in Puri. It extended to the Bay of Bengal in the east, and to the Arabian Sea along the Malabar Coast. The Presidency encircled Mysore State, and impinged on the princely states of Cochin and Travancore on the coast of Coromandel. Not surprisingly in 1931, 60.3 per cent of the population in the Presidency was to speak a language other than Tamil: Telugu, Oriya, Malayalam, and Kannada. In the same year, 57.2 per cent of the population of Bombay Presidency spoke a language other than Marathi, such as Gujarati, Sindhi and Kannada.

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