Indian culture: a plurality the state keeps as a register

How many languages India counts

The 2011 Linguistic Survey of India recorded more than 780 languages in use across the country and 66 scripts to write them in, with 90 of those languages in the single north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh. Four families account for almost all of them. Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages carry the great majority of speakers, and Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman languages are spoken across the centre, the east and the north-east, alongside small numbers of speakers of Tai-Kadai, Andamanese and several isolates.

The constitution names 22. Those are the scheduled languages, listed in the Eighth Schedule, and the state is obliged to develop them. The schedule is not a register of who speaks what. Sanskrit is on it and has no first-language speakers in India; Urdu is on it and belongs to no single region. Both are there for their place in the written record. Adding a language means amending the constitution, which is why the schedule has a datable history.

The question of an official language took the Constituent Assembly three years and was settled in September 1949 between two camps: one wanted Hindi in the Devanagari script as the sole national language, and delegates from the south wanted English written into the constitution. The compromise made Hindi the official language of the federal government, gave English the status of associate official language for fifteen years while Hindi's formal vocabulary was built up, and fixed the international form of Hindu-Arabic numerals as official. It became articles 343 to 351, in force on 26 January 1950. When the fifteen years expired in 1965, against bitter opposition in the south to Hindi standing alone, the temporary arrangement was made permanent, and English remains an associate official language with no closing date.

The map was redrawn to match. Under the States Reorganisation Act of 1956 the internal borders were reorganised on a linguistic basis, and the union now consists of 28 states and 8 union territories, beneath which sit more than a quarter of a million local government bodies. Eleven languages carry a further designation, that of classical language: Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Odia, joined on 3 October 2024 by Marathi, Pali, Prakrit, Assamese and Bengali. Tamil's case rests on inscriptions found on pottery dated to 500 BC and a literature running for more than two thousand years. Odia's rests partly on its appearance in Ashoka's Rock Edict X, dated to the second century BC.

Which dances the state calls classical

Whether a dance form is classical in India has an administrative answer. The Sangeet Natak Akademi, the government's academy for the performing arts, decides, and it has chosen eight. More forms could meet the criteria, and the published lists disagree at the edges: Chhau, danced in Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha, and Yakshagana of Karnataka are counted by some accounts as classical and treated by others as dance-drama sitting outside the eight.

Each form is attached to a state, which is the organising principle of the language schedule applied to the body. The criteria themselves come from a text. The Natya Shastra, with the Abhinaya Darpana, is dated to between 200 BCE and the early centuries of the first millennium CE, and it remains the reference against which classical performance is measured. Kutiyattam of Kerala, the surviving form of Sanskrit theatre, follows it strictly and is recognised by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.

Bharatanatyam began as the temple dance of the Tamil devadasis, and its twentieth-century history is a case of a practice being separated from its practitioners. The dancing of the devadasis, identified in the reformist argument of the period with "prostitutes and courtesans", was formally banned in 1947. In the same years the dance was rehabilitated as a "pure" art form, with Rukmini Devi Arundale the prominent figure in that project, while Thanjavur Balasaraswati, from a devadasi family, went on to national and international standing. The ban and the revival ran through the same decade.

The crafts are indexed the same way. The tourism ministry's own catalogue attaches each to its state: kathputli puppets to Rajasthan, silver filigree to Karimnagar in Telangana, zardozi embroidery to Varanasi, aipan drawing to Uttarakhand, muga silk to Assam, the Santipore sari to West Bengal, khatwa applique to Bihar and stone carving to Durgi in Andhra Pradesh.

How Indian music split into two systems

The oldest preserved Indian melodies are those of the Samaveda, dated to about 1000 BC and still sung in certain Vedic Shrauta sacrifices. They set out a seven-note structure named in descending order, from Krusht down to Atiswar, corresponding to the notes of a flute, which was then the only instrument of fixed pitch. The principles classical music still works from, the raga as melodic frame and the tala as rhythmic cycle, were refined in the Natya Shastra around 200 BC and the Dattilam around 300 AD. The same text sets out five separate taxonomies for classifying instruments, one of which sorts them by four sources of vibration: strings, membranes, cymbals and air.

The tradition split in the thirteenth century into two systems still taught apart. Hindustani music, of the north, leans on improvisation and on instruments including the sitar and tabla. Carnatic music, of the south, is built around written composition, particularly the kriti. Both use raga and tala, and both descend from Vedic practice, but a musician trained in one does not simply transfer to the other.

Archaeologists working in the Odisha highlands have reported a carefully shaped polished basalt lithophone of twenty keys, about three thousand years old, which places a tuned instrument in eastern India long before either system existed.

What is actually bought is film music. Filmi, written for Indian cinema and sung by playback singers, accounts for more than 70% of music sales in the country.

Where cinema divides by language

Indian cinema is divided on the basis of language, in the same way as the schedule and the state borders. Hindi cinema is one industry among many, and Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, Odia, Bhojpuri, Assamese and Punjabi cinema each have their own studios, performers and audiences. Each is named for its language. Directors whose work has travelled outside its own industry include Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Guru Dutt, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Girish Kasaravalli, Mani Ratnam and S. S. Rajamouli.

Television ran the other way for its first three decades. Doordarshan began in New Delhi in 1959 with tests for educational broadcasts, regular programming started in the mid-1970s, and colour arrived with the Asian Games of 1982, after which set ownership climbed quickly. A single channel serving a growing audience reached saturation, so a second was added carrying part national and part regional programming. Serialised versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata came out of those monopoly years and were watched across languages. The market was opened to cable television in 1991, and by 2016 the country had 892 channels.

What a typical Indian meal is built on

The structure of a meal holds across the country even where the ingredients do not. A cereal is cooked plainly and complemented with savoury dishes. The cereal is steamed rice, or chapati, a thin unleavened bread, or idli, a steamed cake eaten at breakfast, or dosa, a griddled pancake. The savoury dishes are lentils, pulses, vegetables, meat, poultry or fish, spiced most often with ginger and garlic and then with coriander, cumin, turmeric, cinnamon and cardamom. Between 20 and 39% of the population is vegetarian, and there are several distinct vegetarian cuisines, each attached to the history of the community that eats it. Meat is eaten widely and the proportion of meat in the diet is low.

The heaviest import of technique arrived from the north-west with the Mughal Empire: onions, garlic, almonds and spices added to a Persian yoghurt marinade, and rice part-cooked and layered with sauteed meat in a sealed pot, which is biryani. Cooking had been treated as a subject with rules long before that. The Manasollasa, a Sanskrit work of the twelfth century, sets out how food should change with the season, how flavours should be blended, and how a meal should be served.

What is sold as Indian food abroad is largely Punjabi. Tandoori chicken, cooked in the bread oven of the rural Punjab and the Delhi region, dates as a restaurant dish to the 1950s and spread through the enterprise of Punjabis displaced by the partition of 1947.

Beef is where the plate meets the statute book. Article 48 of the constitution, one of the Directive Principles, asks the state to work towards prohibiting the slaughter of cattle, and what that has produced is a patchwork. Gujarat's Animal Preservation Act of October 2011 prohibits killing cows and the buying, selling and transport of beef. Madhya Pradesh passed the Gau-Vansh Vadh Pratishedh (Sanshodhan) Act in January 2012, making cow slaughter a serious offence. Maharashtra and other states legislated bans by 2015. Assam and Andhra Pradesh permit the slaughter of cattle that carry a fit-for-slaughter certificate. In West Bengal and Kerala, eating beef is no offence at all, and in Kerala beef accounts for close to half of all the meat eaten, across communities. Beef is a taboo food in mainstream Hindu and Jain practice and it is also the cheapest animal protein on sale, at about half the retail price of mutton or chicken.

How the calendar is divided between union and states

The union declares three national holidays: Independence Day, Republic Day and Gandhi Jayanti. Everything else on the calendar is regional, and the states declare their own public holidays according to who lives in them.

The Hindu festivals kept most widely include Diwali, Holi, Navratri, Durga Puja, Ganesh Chaturthi, Janmashtami, Maha Shivratri, Chhath, Rath Yatra and Dussehra. Diwali is observed by Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains alike. Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, Mawlid, Muharram and Shab-e-Barat are public holidays, and some states declare further regional holidays for Arba'een, Jumu'ah-tul-Wida and Shab-e-Qadar. Christmas and Good Friday are public holidays nationally.

There is no single new year. Ugadi, Gudhi Padwa, Puthandu, Vishu, Bihu, Vaisakhi, Pohela Boishakh and Vishuva Sankranti fall at different moments in different places. The harvest festivals divide along the same lines: Pongal, Onam, Makar Sankranti, Sohrai, Pusna, Raja Sankranti, Chapchar Kut in Mizoram and the Hornbill festival in Nagaland. The Apatani of the Ziro valley in Arunachal Pradesh keep the Dree festival. Nowruz is the principal festival of the Parsi community. Fairs work as festivals too, and the Pushkar fair in Rajasthan is a cattle and livestock market that functions as one.

What the census records about belief

The religion figures in circulation come from the census of 2011, which is the last one the government has conducted. It recorded 79.8% of the population as Hindu, 14.2% Muslim, 2.3% Christian, 1.7% Sikh, 0.7% Buddhist and 0.4% Jain, and it also recorded tribal religions including Sarnaism, Sanamahism and Niamtre. In absolute terms the 2011 count gave more than 172 million Muslims and more than 27.8 million Christians, of whom about 17 million were Roman Catholic. Hindus were the predominant population in every state and union territory except Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Mizoram and Lakshadweep. The preamble declares India a secular state and the constitution makes liberty of belief, faith and worship a fundamental right.

Those figures are now fifteen years old. The Registrar General has notified Census 2027, with the house-listing phase running from 1 April 2026 to 30 September 2026 and the population count following it. Censuses have been taken in India since 1872.

Caste is also written into the constitution as a category the state administers. Hindus fall broadly into four varnas: Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra, each divided into jatis, many of them tied to occupations, and marriage within the subcaste makes the label hereditary. Outside that system are those formerly called untouchables, now the Scheduled Castes in the constitution's own vocabulary, or Dalit as a self-description meaning broken or downtrodden. The Constituent Assembly abolished untouchability in 1947 and the Republic did so more formally in 1950. B. R. Ambedkar, who chaired the drafting committee and was born into a Dalit family, wrote the States and Minorities document safeguarding Scheduled Caste rights and became independent India's first minister of law. Later statute includes the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act of 1989. Caste-based inequality, discrimination, segregation and violence persist.

Which buildings the state has listed

The built record is a list kept by somebody else. Of the 45 Indian properties on the UNESCO World Heritage List as of 2026, 37 are inscribed as cultural, 7 as natural and one as mixed.

The earliest surviving architecture belongs to the Indus Valley civilisation of 2600 to 1900 BC, whose towns were laid out to a plan in which religion and kingship appear to have played little part. Under the Mauryan and Gupta empires and their successors came the Buddhist complexes: the caves at Ajanta and Ellora, and the stupa at Sanchi. Southern dynasties built in stone and cast in bronze, and the Chola temples at Thanjavur, the Hoysala temples at Belur, Halebidu and Somanathapura, the Sun Temple at Konark and the Srirangam complex date from that work. The Rajput kingdoms built Khajuraho, Chittor Fort and the Chaturbhuj Temple.

Islamic rule from the west produced the Indo-Islamic style, of which the Qutb complex raised by the sultans of Delhi is among the earliest examples, followed by Fatehpur Sikri, the Red Fort, Gol Gumbaz, the Charminar and the Taj Mahal. British rule added the Indo-Saracenic manner and imported European Gothic, which is what the Victoria Memorial and Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus are. The architectural work of Le Corbusier at Chandigarh is inscribed on the same list, as are the Victorian Gothic and Art Deco ensembles of Mumbai and, since 2023, Santiniketan.

Several Indian architectural elements travelled: the stupa or temple mound, the shikhara or spire, the pagoda and the torana or temple gate are used across East and South East Asia, and Angkor Wat and Borobudur are built in styles close to Indian religious buildings.

Why India has no national game

Field hockey was long described as the national game of India, and the description was never official. Asked under the Right to Information Act, the Government of India answered that no sport has been declared the national game. A state that schedules its languages, certifies its dances and gazettes its holidays has left that particular box empty.

The hockey record is real enough: the men's team won the World Cup in 1975 and has taken eight gold medals, one silver and two bronze at the Olympic Games, though the following the sport once had has fallen away. Cricket has it now. The men's team won the Cricket World Cup in 1983 and 2011, the T20 World Cup in 2007 and 2024, and the Champions Trophy in 2002, 2013 and 2025. The domestic calendar runs on the Ranji, Duleep, Deodhar and Irani trophies and the Challenger Series, and the board also runs the Indian Premier League, a Twenty20 competition.

Games that began here are still played here. Chess is thought to have developed from chaturanga in north-western India under the Gupta empire in the sixth century, and Viswanathan Anand held the undisputed world title from 2007 to 2013. Kabaddi, kho kho, gilli-danda and the wrestling of pehlwani remain widely played. Polo comes from Manipur, where it was known as sagol kangjei, and the first polo club was founded at Silchar in Assam in 1833. The martial arts are regional in the same way as the dances: kalarippayattu of Kerala is mentioned in Sangam literature composed between 400 BCE and 600 CE, and silambam, developed around 200 AD in the south, is fought with a bamboo staff and a footwork system of its own.