We are not Indian — we are almost Europe in one country
We think of India as a single place, but this is a convenient fiction. To truly understand it, we must read it the way we read Europe — as a continent of distinct cultures, languages, and histories forced to wear a single flag.
The idea of ‘Indian’ is a fiction. A useful one, granted. It helps in diplomacy, in cricket, and in selling things to foreigners. But it is a fiction nonetheless, and one that is becoming less and less useful for understanding the place. When we talk about India, we are not talking about a country in the European sense. We are talking about a landmass that holds a continent’s worth of cultures, histories, and languages, all wearing a single flag. A better comparison is not France or Italy, but Europe itself.
You would not ask, ‘What is the European language?’ You would not ask, ‘What is European food?’ You would be rightly told that the question is absurd. A Portuguese fisherman and a Polish academic have nothing in common linguistically, and a Sicilian grandmother’s cooking has no relationship to what is served in a Copenhagen restaurant. Yet we ask these same absurd questions of India.
The Indian constitution recognises 22 official languages. The 2011 census, however, recorded more than 19,500 distinct mother tongues. An educated person moving between states is often trilingual not as a hobby, but as a basic requirement for navigating life. A designer from Tamil Nadu speaking to a client in Punjab will use English, not because either of them is affecting a colonial hangover, but because their native languages are as mutually unintelligible as Spanish and Finnish.
To speak of ‘Hindi’ as the language of India is a political statement, not a factual one. Fewer than half the population identify it as their first language. Imposing it as a national default is an act of cultural dominance, presenting the identity of the northern ‘Hindi belt’ as the identity of the entire nation. It is an internal colonialism of culture that flattens a dozen different worlds into one.
This same flattening happens with food. ‘Curry’ is a British shorthand, a desperate attempt to categorise a cuisine so diverse it defies easy labels. The food of my neighbours in Kerala, rich with coconut and black pepper, is a world away from the mustard-oil sharpness of a Bengali kitchen or the robust, wheat-heavy meals of the Punjab. To call it all ‘Indian food’ is a failure of imagination.
We do this because the singular ‘India’ is easier. It is a simple story for a complicated place. The West needs this story to make sense of us, and a certain kind of nationalist politician needs it to centralise power. The media in Delhi broadcasts a vision of the nation that looks suspiciously like its own backyard, mistaking the part for the whole.
This is not a celebration of diversity. That particular cliché is tired and unhelpful. It is a simple statement of fact. India is not a nation-state with a single, coherent culture. It is a state that happens to contain dozens of nations arguing under one roof.
To understand India, you must first un-learn the idea of ‘India’.
TL;DR
We think of India as a single place, but this is a convenient fiction. To truly understand it, we must read it the way we read Europe — as a continent of distinct cultures, languages, and histories forced to wear a single flag.