Culture and Heritage

The culture of India had history, all the while absorbing customs, traditions, and ideas from both invaders and immigrants. Many cultural practices, languages, customs, and monuments are examples of this co-mingling over centuries.

In modern India there is cultural and religious diversity, and the many regions of India have distinct identities. Almost every state has even carved out its own cultural niche. In spite of this unique cultural diversity, the whole country is bound as a civilization due to its common history, thereby preserving the national identity.

India was the birth place of religious systems such as Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism, each of which have had a strong influence not only over India but also over the rest of the world. Following the Islamic invasions and the subsequent foreign domination from the tenth century onwards, the culture of India was heavily influenced by Persian, Arabic and Turkic cultures. In turn, the various religions and the multi-hued traditions of India have influenced South East Asia and other parts of the world.

Languages

As well as regional diversity, languages have created diverse traditions of culture in India. There are a large number of languages in India, 216 of each of which are spoken by a group of 10,000 people or more, although there are others that are spoken in India by fewer than 10,000 people. If these languages are included, there are 415 living languages in India. The two major families of languages are those of the Indo-Aryan languages and those of the Dravidian languages, the former being largely confined to North India and the latter to South India. The Constitution of India has stipulated the usage of Hindi and English to be the two official languages of communication for union government. There is another language family in India which is spoken by about 3% of the people. These languages falls in the language family of Tibeto-Burman languages, which is a subgroup of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Besides this, many other languages in India can be divided into 10 other families of languages.

A further twenty-two languages are scheduled for official use, mainly by state governments.