Book review: Sanjiv Chopra, We, the People of the States of Bharat: The Making and Remaking of India’s Internal Boundaries
| Published date | 01 March 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00195561231204603 |
| Author | V. Srinivas |
| Date | 01 March 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
Sanjiv Chopra, We, the People of the States of Bharat: The Making and
Remaking of India’s Internal Boundaries. HarperCollins, 2022, 397 pp.,
`799.00.
Dr Sanjiv Chopra, a distinguished civil servant, former Director, Lal Bahadur
Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie, a role model for the
Civil Services with over 35 years of experience in the government, has written a
remarkable history of India’s unification, mining vast historical records to provide
an animated and gripping account of modern India’s cartography. The Nation’s
ability to negotiate its political and administrative boundaries with its citizens
is depicted in the fact that nine provinces of the Dominion of India as well as 562
Princely States that existed in August 1947 are not reflected on the map in 2023.
Most of the restructuring in the internal boundaries is marked by aspirations,
assertions and adjustments of linguistic and ethnic groups seeking their place in
the States and the Federal polity.
Dr Sanjiv Chopra’s book has been endorsed by fourteen eminent personalities,
most of them being authors, with each one of them acknowledging the scholarly
work, brilliant exposition and painstaking analysis. The book covers the period
1947 to 2019. Professor Makrand R. Pranjape says ‘maps reect and inuence
how a Nation regards itself and the book is original, unique, even unprecedented
in reimagining of post-independence India through its changing maps, looking
especially at State formation and changing contours of Indian federalism’. The
focus of the book is on boundaries of States and nomenclatures, each of which is
impacted by politics and personalities. The lessons from this study are that lan-
guage is a force that brings people together, there is a considerable difference in
the way pan-India parties and regional parties looked at issues. Political parties
changed their perspectives with time and every story has multiple perspectives.
The book has eighteen chapters, each one dealing with a changing map and
administrative boundaries. The rst Hindi map of Independent India included
Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh
and Jharkhand were created to meet the aspirations of sub-regions, prior to which
Haryana (1966) and Himachal Pradesh (1971) were carved out as Hindi-speaking
States out from Punjab. The appearance of China and the disappearance of Tibet in
1956 and the reappearance of Tibet in 1959 are discussed. 1952 witnessed linguistic
agitations in several parts of the country, which resulted in the announcement of the
States’ Reorganisation Commission (SRC). The year 1956 marked the foundational
Indian Journal of Public
Administration
70(1) 216–225, 2024
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DOI: 10.1177/00195561231204603
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