ABSTRACT
The present demand for Telangana statehood can be better understood in view of the earlier processes of reorganisation carried out periodically at various stages since the 1956 when the first phase of reorganisation of states began. The Congress party passed a resolution in 2001 proposing to set up a reorganisation commission to consider redrawing the map of India for addressing the demand for smaller states. In a sense, the States Reorganisation Commission drew outlines of the political geography of independent India. A number of language-based cultural movements emerged in India since the mid-nineteenth century. The colonial state started devising policies of control over a large land mass with many cultural regions inhabiting a highly diverse population in India. The colonial state began to rupture the geolinguistic and cultural coherence of these regions by arbitrarily aligning and realigning their boundaries in order to weaken their supra-regional ties with the national movement.
