What would Braj Pradesh look like?

On the states that were never drawn, and the language of Lord Krishna’s own country

1. Why was the linguistic principle applied everywhere except the Hindi belt?
2. What would a Braj Pradesh look like, and which is its capital, Agra or Mathura?
3. Can the languages be scheduled without unseating Hindi?
4. What did Ambedkar see in 1955?

Good for the South but not the North?

The States Reorganisation Commission redrew the South along language lines and left the North alone. Andhra for Telugu, Kerala for Malayalam, Karnataka for Kannada, and one enormous Uttar Pradesh for a “Hindi” that contains multitudes. Ambedkar read the report and wrote a pamphlet, Thoughts on Linguistic States, published in December 1955. His verdict: the Commission had produced “a consolidation of the North and balkanisation of the South“, and intentionally or not, the fact was there.

His remedy was specific. Divide UP into three states of roughly two crore each, capitals at Meerut, Cawnpore and Allahabad. Divide Bihar in two, capitals at Patna and Ranchi. “The idea of having bigger linguistic states is not a democratic idea at all,” he wrote, and he added the detail that pre-empts the obvious objection: each of the resulting states would still have Hindi as its language. Division did not threaten Hindi. Forty-five years later, southern Bihar became Jharkhand with its capital at Ranchi, exactly as drawn.

In November 2011 Mayawati’s assembly passed a resolution splitting UP into four, Purvanchal, Bundelkhand, Awadh Pradesh and Paschim Pradesh, and sent it to Delhi. The UPA let it die. Uttar Pradesh today holds over 240 million people, which would rank it around the fifth largest country on earth, under one Vidhan Sabha.

The Hindi umbrella

The census explains what the map will not.

In 1961, ten mother tongues were grouped under Hindi, Braj Bhasha and Awadhi among them. In 1971 the grouping widened to forty-eight, absorbing the languages previously counted as Bihari, Bhojpuri, Magahi and Maithili included, along with the Rajasthani and Pahari clusters. Hindi’s share of India rose from 30.4 per cent to 37 per cent in a single decade. Nobody learned Hindi in those ten years.

By 2011 the umbrella recorded 528 million speakers, 43.6 per cent of India, of whom roughly 320 million reported Hindi proper as their mother tongue. Inside the rest: Bhojpuri at 50.6 million, Rajasthani at 25.8 million, Chhattisgarhi at 16.2 million, Magahi at 12.7 million. Two languages have escaped, Nepali on scheduling in 1992 and Maithili in 2003, and each promptly left the Hindi count. The Bhojpuri demand has been pending since before 2009, on which the Union’s position is that no time frame can be set.

This is the quantity the undivided map protects. Schedule the four pending claimants alone, Bhojpuri, Rajasthani, Chhattisgarhi and Magahi, and roughly 105 million are reassigned on the Maithili precedent, taking the umbrella from 528 million to something near 423, from 43.6 per cent of India to about 35. The base is Hindi proper itself, just over a quarter of the country. The giant states of the North and the extra-wide Hindi column of the census are the mirrors.

Braj

Braj is the western crescent, Mathura, Agra, Aligarh, Hathras, with Bharatpur across the Rajasthan line belonging to it culturally if not administratively. It is Krishna’s country, the land of the pilgrimage circuit, and its language was not a dialect that failed to rise. It was the language that had already risen. Surdas composed the Sursagar in it. The Ashtachhap poets of the Pushtimarg wrote in it. For roughly four centuries Braj Bhasha was the premier literary vehicle of what we now call Hindi, until Khari Boli displaced it in the late nineteenth century and the court poetry of one era became the “dialect” of the next.

The 2011 census records 1.56 million people declaring Braj Bhasha as their mother tongue, 0.36 per cent of Uttar Pradesh (in Krishna’s own country, the enumerator hears “Hindi”).

A Braj Pradesh would face a problem no other proposed state has: its administrative and devotional capitals cannot be the same city. Agra has the size, the infrastructure and the economy. Mathura has everything else. Ambedkar’s western capital was Meerut, but his western state ran far larger than Braj proper. The secretariat in Agra but otherwise expect the state to be governed, in every sense that matters, from Mathura?

The communal balancing

A claim circulates that the big states were built to manufacture Hindu majorities.

Braj fails the premise outright. Mathura and Agra districts run under ten per cent Muslim; a Braj Pradesh would be among the most religiously homogeneous states in India, and it has still never been drawn.

Rohilkhand, Moradabad, Rampur, Bijnor, carries districts above forty per cent, and a Paschim or Harit Pradesh built there would have India’s largest Muslim share outside Kashmir.

So the communal reading does explain one resisted state. It cannot explain the resistance to all of them, Bundelkhand and Purvanchal and Braj included, where the arithmetic of faith changes nothing but of course dilutes the Hindu % in the rest of the State.

The case against Linguistic Reorganisation

The serious objection is not administrative. It is that the belt is a dialect continuum, that Braj shades into Kannauji and Kannauji into Awadhi with no line a surveyor could defend, that every division manufactures new minorities at new peripheries, and that unseating Hindi from its plurality hands a loaded weapon to every anti-Hindi politics in the South at the precise moment the language question is combustible again.

Ambedkar answered most of this in the pamphlet. His three states were all to be Hindi states; the official language loses nothing when its territory is administered in thirds. The continuum objection proves too much, since Telugu shades into Kannada at the border and nobody proposes remerging them. And Telangana settled the remaining question in 2014: one language now has two states, the linguistic principle survived, and Ambedkar’s formula, one state one language rather than one language one state, acquired its proof.

What has actually been divided tells its own story. UP and Bihar have both been cut, in 2000, but on hill and tribal lines, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand, never on language. The one principle that organised the entire map of the South has intermittently been permitted to touch the North.

The freeze on Lok Sabha apportionment lapses after the next census, the North’s huge numbers become the South’s open grievance, and every settlement on the table will involve redrawing of some kind. When that argument arrives, the pamphlet from December 1955 may well be the most current document in the room (Meerut, Cawnpore and Allahabad are still waiting)?