LogFAQs > #878112088

One other thing to keep in mind about India - it's BIG.

While the fact that it's a single country tends to lead people to think about it in historical terms similar to other nations, it's probably a lot more accurate to think of it more as a patchwork of preexisting nation states welded together into a single larger whole.

It's part of why they actually speak multiple different "Indian" languages (which is part of why they kept English as the official language even after throwing the British out - it was the only way some of those different groups could talk to each other at all).

So when you're looking back into history, there are multiple different kingdoms and empires that would occasionally exist simultaneously, occasionally fighting, and occasionally absorbing each other or breaking apart into smaller pieces. Which also means that, when you're looking into modern Indian culture, there's a lot of little (and not so little) differences rooted in precisely which part of the country you're talking about. Whether you're looking at people from Mumbai, or Hyderabad, or Bengal, you're going to be looking at different types of people (and even more so if you're comparing urban and rural areas).

The best metaphor to think of it as might be to think about how the EU is sort of a patchwork of culturally diverse groups - just imagine each different region of India like one of the nations in the EU (rather than, say, states in the US).


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