My dissertation, Federal Futures, recasts the founding of independent India as a clash of worldviews around democracy and states’ rights, or between a unitary nation-state based on parliamentary democracy and a multinational federal state based on group rights and autonomous states. Thus far, all accounts of late colonial India and Indian founding have privileged anticolonial nationalism, democracy, individual rights, and the parliamentary state as the organizing concepts of Indian political and constitutional thought. On the contrary, I argue that a tradition of non-democratic constitutionalism—drawn primarily from imperial constitutionalism and the rights of the Indian princely states and Muslim minorities—imagined postcolonial India as a collection of nationalities and states with autonomy and sovereignty. I show that the nationalist ideals of popular sovereignty, unity, freedom, and postcolonial sovereignty were developed in an adversarial engagement with this non-democratic constitutionalism that privileged states’ rights over individual rights. By demonstrating the persistence of states’ rights and provincial autonomy in Indian federal imaginaries on the one hand, and the implication of Indian federalism in the global discourses around balkanization and secessionism on the other, the dissertation shows the rise and fall of federal ideas in late colonial India. This complex and tragic history of the making and unmaking of federal futures continues to define the postcolonial state’s relationship with its constituent units. Turning away from nationalism and metropole toward regionalism and princely states opens a vibrant sphere of constitutional translations, exchanges, and circulations in which federal ideas emanating from Germany and the United States played a key role. In doing so, the dissertation recasts Indians as active agents in a world of federalist discourses shaped by the twin crises of nationalism and democracy and uncertain postcolonial futures.