This thesis examines economic policymaking and regional state-making in independent India between the late 1940s and the mid-1970s as mutually constitutive processes in the evolution of India’s federal system. Focusing on the south Indian state of Madras, it shows how Tamil political actors turned conflicts over food provisioning, clothing controls, and federal financial relations into struggles for policy autonomy while recalibrating the state’s place within a centralising union. Drawing on archival research in regional, national, and international repositories, the study reconstructs how economic policymaking became a defining terrain on which governments in Madras translated electoral mandates into governing capacity and political legitimacy. It demonstrates that Madras was not merely implementing central policies but actively shaping the practice of economic federalism through cooperation, resistance, and bargaining with New Delhi. Viewed from Madras, Indian federalism appears not simply as a constitutional framework through which the centre managed diversity and conflict, but as a political order continually constituted through regional claims for dignity and autonomy within the Indian union.
