Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu occupies the southern tip of the Indian peninsula, with the Bay of Bengal to the east, the Arabian Sea to the west and the Western Ghats along its western border. The capital is Chennai. The Cauvery and its delta form the state’s main agricultural region.

The state has one of the most industrialised economies in India. Chennai and its hinterland form the country’s largest automobile manufacturing cluster, earning the city the description “the Detroit of India”; the state also has large electronics, textile, leather and cement sectors, and Tiruppur is a major knitwear export centre. Tamil Nadu is a leading producer of wind and solar power. Rice, sugarcane, bananas, cotton and coconuts dominate agriculture.

State politics has been shaped since the 1960s by the Dravidian movement, and power has alternated between two Dravidian parties for most of that period. The Cauvery water dispute with Karnataka has been litigated for over a century and has repeatedly produced unrest. Tamil is one of the world’s oldest continuously written languages, and was the first in India to be given classical-language status by the central government, in 2004; the list has since grown to eleven. The state treats the language as a matter of public policy, and its politics has periodically turned on the place of Hindi.