Carnatic

Dominion of the Carnatic
Flag Coat of arms
Capital and largest city	Madras
Official languages	English
Demonym	Carnatic South Indian Dravidian
Government	Federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy Federal parliamentary executive monarchy (1940–1973)

The Dominion of the Carnatic is a federation of states and provinces encompassing the southern half of the Indian subcontinent. To the north the Dominion shares land boundaries with Jambu and to the south Ceylon. To the west and east, the country is surrounded by the Sindhi Sea and the Bay of Bengal respectively. The Spanish city of Pondicheri and the Portuguese enclaves of Goa and Calicut dot the Carnatic's coasts. It is one of three southern Asian nations, along with the Sultanate and Kamarupa, to be a member of the Organization of Democratic Nations.

With its origins in the 17th-century Presidency of Fort St. George, the modern Dominion was created in 1940 as a re-consolidation of British India after the Great War, in which most of the subcontinent seceded from Crown rule. As a federal entity, it consists of seven provinces, five semi-sovereign kingdoms, and 21 autonomous principalities and estates under the auspices of a federal government led by an elected Prime Minister as head of government and the head of the Commonwealth of Nations, currently Euphemia, as head of state.

Name

The word Carnatic is an Anglicization of the Old Kannada word ಕರ್ನಾಟ (karnāṭa), meaning either 'elevated land', referring to the Deccan Plateau, or 'black land', referring to the peninsula's fertile soils. The term was originally applied to the Western Ghats and Malabar Coast.

Gradually, Carnatic came to be applied to all of southern India. This stemmed from ಕರ್ನಾಟರಾಜ್ಯ (karnāṭa rājya), an alternative name of the 17th-century Vijayanagara Empire, and was further propagated by the term 'Nawab of the Carnatic', which was used for the Coroamandel Coast-based monarchs of Arcot.

Government and Politics

The Carnatic is described as a federation or union of states melded together under a central parliamentary, democratic, and constitutional monarchy. Its monarchical constituents, five kingdoms and 21 principalities & estates, have varying degrees of autonomy, while seven provinces are directly and totally subject to the central government. In 1973, the administration of Prime Minister Cyril Ochira established the Articles of Federation, the first and only constitutional document of the country limiting the powers of the British monarch and solidifying democratic conventions.