when was bhopal state merged in the indian union
Bhopal State The state was founded in 1707 CE by Dost Mohammad Khan, an Pashtun soldier in the Mughal army, who became a mercenary after the Emperor Aurangzeb's death and annexed several territories to his fiefdom. It came under the suzerainty of the Nizam of Hyderabad in 1723 shortly after its foundation. In 1737, Marathas defeated the Mughals and the Nawab of Bhopal in the Battle of Bhopal, and started collecting tribute from the state. After the defeat of the Marathas in the Third Anglo-Maratha War, Bhopal became a British princely state in 1818. Bhopal State was the second largest state in pre-independence India, with a Muslim leadership, first being Hyderabad State. The state was merged into the Union of India in 1949 as Bhopal.
States Reorganisation Act, 1956 The demand for states to be organised on a linguistic basis was developed even before India achieved independence from British rule. A first-of-its-kind linguistic movement started in 1895, in what is now Odisha. The movement gained momentum in later years with the demand for a separate Orissa Province to be formed by bifurcating the existing Bihar and Orissa Province.[5][6] Due to the efforts of Madhusudan Das, the Father of Oriya nationalism, the movement eventually achieved its objective in 1936, when Orissa Province became the first Indian state (pre-independence) to be organised on the basis of common languages.