Integration
At independence some five hundred and sixty-five princely states held internal sovereignty under British paramountcy, and paramountcy simply lapsed rather than being transferred. Vallabhbhai Patel and V. P. Menon, working through the States Department, secured the accession of almost all of them before 15 August 1947 through an instrument covering defence, external affairs and communications, with privy purses and titles retained.
Three did not accede on time. Junagadh's Muslim ruler acceded to Pakistan against a Hindu-majority population and was removed after a plebiscite; Hyderabad was annexed by military action in 1948; and Jammu and Kashmir acceded to India in October 1947 after a Pakistani-backed invasion, producing a dispute that has continued since.
The princely order was dismantled by degrees: the states were merged into provinces and then reorganised on linguistic lines in 1956, and the privy purses and titles were abolished by constitutional amendment in 1971.
The Constitution
The Constituent Assembly worked from December 1946 to November 1949, and the Constitution came into force on 26 January 1950 — a date chosen because the Congress had declared purna swaraj, complete independence, on it in 1930.
The document is the longest national constitution in the world. It established universal adult suffrage from the outset, in a country then largely illiterate and desperately poor — a decision without precedent at that scale — abolished untouchability, provided for reservation in legislatures, education and public employment, and made fundamental rights justiciable. B. R. Ambedkar, who chaired the drafting committee, had spent his life arguing that political democracy without social democracy would not hold, and said so in his closing speech to the assembly.
The remaining foreign enclaves were taken in: the French settlements in 1954, Goa, Daman and Diu in 1961. Sikkim, a protected monarchy under the Namgyal chogyals, became a state of the Union in 1975 after a referendum — the last kingdom in the subcontinent to be dissolved, and the closing entry in any census of Indian dynasties.
Further reading
- Bayly, Susan. Caste, Society and Politics in India. Cambridge University Press, 1999
- Khan, Yasmin. The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. Yale University Press, 2007
- Keay, John. India: A History. HarperCollins, 2000
- Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. Oxford University Press, 2009
- Brown, Judith M. Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy. Oxford University Press, 1994
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.