Culture
Indian culture carries the imprint of several thousand years of migration, trade, and conquest, absorbed rather than replaced, which is part of why looking for a single origin is the wrong exercise. Nearly everything on this page arrived from somewhere, and nearly everything on this page is unmistakably Indian. Both are true, and the second doesn’t cancel the first.
Languages. The 2011 census recorded 19,569 raw mother-tongue returns, rationalized to 1,369 mother tongues and grouped into 121 languages; 22 of these are listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. Four families are represented. Indo-Aryan languages (Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Urdu, Odia, Assamese) account for about 78% of speakers. Dravidian languages (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam) account for about 20%, and Tamil in particular has a continuous literary record going back over two millennia. Austroasiatic (Munda) and Tibeto-Burman languages account for most of the remainder, concentrated in central and northeastern India.
Hindi in Devanagari is the official language of the Union; English is an additional official language; states designate their own official language. There is no national language, and attempts to make Hindi the national language have twice sparked serious unrest in Tamil Nadu. The linguistic map redrew the political one in 1956, when states were reorganized largely along language lines. That is one of the more consequential things the republic has done, and one of the least discussed.
Art and architecture. Indian art blends indigenous and imported forms into something distinct: the Mauryan lion capital, now the national emblem; the Buddhist sculpture of Gandhara under the Kushans, where Hellenistic drapery met Indian iconography; the Ajanta caves, painted between the second century BCE and about 480 CE under Satavahana and Vakataka patronage; Ellora, excavated between the sixth and tenth centuries, including the Kailasa temple, cut downward out of a single rock face rather than built up from the ground; and the Chola bronzes, of which the Nataraja, Shiva dancing in a ring of fire, is the most recognizable object Indian art has produced.
Music. Two classical systems, Hindustani in the north and Carnatic in the south, share a common theoretical root in raga and tala but diverge sharply in repertoire, ornament, and performance practice. Alongside them: devotional and ritual traditions, seasonal songs tied to Holi and Diwali and the harvests, narrative ballads, and film music, which has been the actual popular music of India for ninety years and deserves to be described that way rather than as an afterthought.
Dance. Bharatanatyam (Tamil Nadu), Kuchipudi (Andhra Pradesh), Odissi (Odisha), Kathakali and Mohiniyattam (Kerala), Kathak (the north), Manipuri (Manipur), Sattriya (Assam), all tracing to a shared theoretical root in the Natyashastra, a Sanskrit treatise on drama, music, and dance composed sometime between 200 BCE and 200 CE. Most of these forms, as performed today, were substantially reconstructed in the twentieth century, often by nationalist reformers working from temple and courtesan traditions they were simultaneously trying to distance themselves from. That’s worth saying rather than eliding.
Cinema. India makes more films than any other country, in more languages, for more people. That’s the headline, and it undersells the thing. There is no single Indian film industry: there is a Hindi industry in Mumbai, a Telugu one in Hyderabad, a Tamil one in Chennai, and substantial Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, and Marathi industries besides, with different economics, different star systems, and different politics. Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy (1955–59) is the work that made Indian cinema legible to the rest of the world; the Malayalam industry has spent the last decade producing the most interesting mainstream films in the country; and the mid-century Hindi popular film, from Guru Dutt through Raj Kapoor to the Bachchan years, is the single most effective vehicle Hindustani ever had for reaching people who don’t speak it. If you want to understand modern Indian mass culture, this is where it lives, more than in any of the classical forms above.
Food. There is no Indian cuisine. There are dozens, organized more usefully by grain and fat than by state: wheat and dairy across the north, rice and coconut down the coasts, rice and mustard oil in the east, millets across the semi-arid interior. Chilies arrived from the Americas in the sixteenth century, along with potatoes and tomatoes, which means the food most people think of as timelessly Indian is younger than the Mughal Empire. Vegetarian traditions are real, old, and regionally specific, and the assumption that India is broadly vegetarian is wrong: survey estimates put the figure somewhere between a fifth and a third of the population, concentrated in particular regions and communities.
Festivals. Diwali, Holi, Eid, Christmas, Durga Puja, Onam, Pongal, Baisakhi, Navroz, Bihu, Losar. The public calendar is a negotiated settlement, and the fact that the negotiation mostly holds is one of the place’s more underrated features.
Science and medicine. The decimal place-value system, and zero as a number with defined arithmetic (Brahmagupta, 628 CE, though the symbol appears earlier in the Bakhshali manuscript). Aryabhata computed a value of π accurate to four decimal places and proposed that the earth rotates. The Kerala school under Madhava worked out infinite series for sine, cosine, and arctangent in the fourteenth century, two centuries before Newton and Leibniz. This result is still not in most histories of mathematics. Ayurveda remains widely practiced. And the Indus cities had covered drains and public water tanks before anyone else did.
Astronomy, for what it’s worth. Indian positional astronomy and the jyotisha tradition that grew alongside it constitute a genuine intellectual inheritance, and separating the observational work from the predictive claims is harder and more interesting than either devotees or debunkers admit. I’ve built a set of tools for working with the traditional system at ArsAstro, which is the long version of this paragraph.
Further reading: A.L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India (1954), dated in places but still the best single volume. Kim Plofker, Mathematics in India (2009). Nasreen Munni Kabir on Hindi cinema. Chitrita Banerji, Eating India (2007).