States and territories of India

The subcontinent of India was ruled by the Mughals hundreds of years before the British came to India. British India included all of modern-day India (except for Sikkim), Pakistan, and Bangladesh, but not Bhutan, Ceylon and Nepal. It was made up of two types of territorial divisions, provinces and princely states.

[edit] After 1956

The former French and Portuguese colonies in India were incorporated into the Indian Republic as the union territories of Puducherry, Dadra, Nagar Haveli, Goa, Daman, and Diu in 1962.

Several new states and union territories have been created out of existing states since 1956. Bombay State was split into the linguistic states of Gujarat and Maharashtra on May 1, 1960 by the Bombay Reorganisation Act. The Punjab Reorganisation Act of 1966 divided the Punjab along linguistic and religious lines, creating a new Hindu and Hindi-speaking state of Haryana, transferring the northern districts of Punjab to Himachal Pradesh, and designating Chandigarh, the shared capital of Punjab and Haryana, a union territory. Nagaland was made a state in 1962, Meghalaya and Himachal Pradesh in 1971, and Tripura and Manipur in 1972. Arunachal Pradesh was made a union territory in 1972. The Kingdom of Sikkim was annexed to India as a state in 1975. Mizoram was made a state in 1986, and Goa and Arunachal Pradesh in 1987, while Goa's northern exclaves of Daman and Diu became a separate union territory. In 2000 three new states were created; Jharkhand was created out of the southern districts of Bihar, Chhattisgarh was created out of eastern Madhya Pradesh, and Uttaranchal was created out of northwestern Uttar Pradesh. The Union Territories of Delhi and Puducherry have since been given the right to elect their own legislatures, and hence are on their way to full statehood.