LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL REGIONS

Eighteen official languages are recognized by The Constitution: Hindi (spoken by just under 40%), Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Sanskrit (the learned language), and the three most recent additions to the list, Nepali, Konkani and Manipur.  English is also recognized as an official language (spoken by about 3% to 5%), and both Hindi and English are approved for official, government communication.

In fact, however, there are many more languages than are actually officially recognized.  There are as many as 4599 distinct communities in India and as many as 325 languages in 12 language families and some 24 different scripts.

The country overall is made up of 640,000 villages, some 5200 towns, 593 administrative districts and 35 major urban centers of over a million: Calcutta, Mumbai (Bombay), Delhi, Chennai (Madras), Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Kanpur, Pune (Poona), Nagpur, Lucknow and Jaipur.  Almost 28 percent of India's population is urban; 72 percent is rural.  The largest population cluster is in the so-called "Hindi Heartland" States of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar which together account for 25 percent of the entire population of the country.

Altogether five basic cultural regions can be identified (map):
(I)  The North-West Region, including the States of Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh;
(II)  The "Hindi Heartland" Region of North Central India, including the States of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Orrisa, Rajasthan, Chhatisgarh, Jharkhand, and Uttaranchal;
(III)  The North-East Region, including the States of West Bengal, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Manipur, Tripura, Mizoram and Sikkim;
(IV)  The Western Region, including the States of Gujarat and Maharashtra; and
(V)  The Southern Region, including the States of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Goa.
Each of these regions have distinctive linguistic, cultural, religious and political traditions.