The state of Madras is a state of India that existed in 1947-1968.
Following the division of British India in 1947, the British presidency of the Madras Presidency was renamed the Madras State of the Indian Union .
The intra-Indian borders were formed historically through expansion, and absolutely did not correspond either to the borders of the settlement of peoples or to the borders of the distribution of languages. In the state of Madras, both Tamils ​​and Telugu were found to be living. Despite the fact that the creators of independent India decided not to rush to create mono-ethnic states, a powerful movement began in Madras to create a separate Telugu-speaking state. The situation was complicated by the fact that the separatists demanded inclusion in the new state as the capital of the city of Madras , which had a mixed population and was located approximately on the border of the distribution of two languages.
The Indian government resisted pressure from below for a long time, but in 1952, the famous Indian revolutionary Potty Sreeramulu (a companion of Gandhi ) died as a result of a hunger strike announced by him in support of the creation of a Telugu-speaking state. As a result, the Indian government agreed in this case to speed up the process of creating a mono-ethnic state, but Nehru flatly refused to include the city of Madras. As a result, in 1953, the Telugu-speaking state of Andhra with the capital in Karnulu was allocated from the state of Madras.
In the elections in 1952, the INC was unable to obtain the majority of seats in the Legislative Assembly and formed a government with the Socialist Party.
In 1956, the Government of India passed the State Reorganization Act . In accordance with this act, the western part of the state of Madras (Malabar coast) was separated into a separate state of Kerala , and the islands subordinate to the state - in the union territory of the Laccadive, Minicoan and Amindiv islands . The state of Travankor-Cochin was liquidated, while its southern part was annexed to the state of Madras (and the rest to the state of Kerala).
Due to the fact that now the state of Madras began to cover mainly the territory of Tamil resettlement, the state government began to develop the Tamil language. The ruling party, the Indian National Congress, pursued a policy of establishing the Hindi language as the only official language of India, and in 1965, contradictions between the policies of the center and the realities of the regions led to student unrest in Madras on a linguistic basis.
In 1967, the Indian National Congress party lost elections in nine states, but Madras was the only one where the opposition was able to form a one-party parliamentary majority. The party of Dravid Munneth Kazhagam formed a new state government, and in 1969 the state of Madras was officially renamed the “Tamil Land” - “ Tamil Nadu ”.