I've been looking into the partitions recently, and I was curious as to whether or not the Indian Subcontinent would be easier to control if India was divided on cultural lines, rather than as a single political entity (i.e. Telugu, Punjab, Nepal, Rajputna, Orissa) - each with their own colonial governors who would be effectively in competition with each other for prestige (perhaps by linking their compensation to the prosperity of their province over time).

Would this lead to a richer, less famine-stuck Indian subcontinent?
Prevent a single state forming if there is decolonialism ITTL?
Strengthen local cultures?
Create a larger local economy to extract tax revenues?
 
Sanity checks:

1. Reorganizing India by linguistic lines would make sense for a unified India, but not for a piecemeal colonial system. For example, the princely state of Hyderabad would have to be partitioned into several language areas. Any system in which India was multiple colonies would've divided India by which colonial base it came from - Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, maybe Malabar Coast, probably Sindh/Punjab.

2. Dividing a contiguous area into several colonies happened in OTL in Africa: Kenya and Uganda (and later Tanzania), the various components of French West and Central Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia and Malawi. Purely as a sanity check, India has been more successful since independence than Africa, and the African intellectuals are quite often pan-African and in favor of greater political unity; the African Union is the ultimate goal, but even smaller things like the East African Federation are active. Of course, African states are often divorced from cultural boundaries... but even in nation-states, you see pan-Africanism; the pan-African blogger I read, Siyanda Mohutsiwa, is Motswana.
 
Top