wistfully on his return from China in 1954, ‘China has no such problem... any decision taken by the central government is the nation’s decision
and accepted all over the country.’^42 The process of redrawing state
boundaries was by definition incomplete and in some cases not entirely
logical, leaving future claims waiting to be made. In 1960, the old
Bombay Presidency was divided (this had not been envisaged by the 1956
Act) into Gujarat and Maharashtra, after much acrimony, and not without
pain as proponents of Maharashtra and Gujarat rioted over the fate of
Bombay city – it stayed with Maharashtra. But Nehru would not com-
promise on overall ‘national’ unity, and consistently opposed the creation
of new states on ethnic or religious lines, for Sikhs, Jats or Rajasthanis.
At any event, linguistic states and other particularistic sub-divisions
had political and electoral implications not dissimilar from colonial
enumeration policies: vested interests were being created in particular
linguistic, and potentially ethnocentric, identities that could be exploited
for narrowly sectarian purposes. In an electoral system already marked by
‘bloc voting’ of particular communities or language groups for particular
parties, this was a negative trend; the Nehruvian dream of a democratic
India of rational individuals making informed decisions was deferred into
the distant future – yet to be arrived at.
The question of a ‘national language’ on its own was a problematic
one. The claims of linguistic surveyors that India was a country of a
few hundred languages had been ridiculed by Nehru in his Discovery
of Indiaas academic quibbling: he claimed that ‘Hindustani’ was intel-
ligible across much of North India, and that the ‘few hundred’ idea was
the invention of a colonial imagination intent on describing India as a
fragmented society. Nehru regarded ‘Hindustani’ as a potential national
language for India: ‘it must not be too Sanskritised or too Persianised
which would divorce it from large masses of people.’ Although Hindi
and Urdu had ‘developed separate literary forms’, he believed that ‘no
great language can grow up if it is based on literary coteries’.^43 Earlier,
Nehru had argued that Hindi and Urdu were not mutually conflictual and
should come closer together to ‘develop into one language, with two
scripts, for India’, to form ‘our great national language’, while at the same
time the ‘present literary forms’ of Hindi and Urdu ‘represent a certain
individual genius and background’ and should therefore ‘be allowed to
develop without interference from the other’. ‘This seems,’ he acknowl-
edged, ‘to be [a] mutually contradictory process but I do not think it will
208 CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55