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People
Demography
Although India occupies only 2.4 percent of the world's land area, it supports over 15 percent of the world's population. With India being home to 1.2 billion people, only China has a larger population. Forty percent of Indians are younger than 15 years old. About 65 percent of the people live in more than 550,000 villages, and the remainder in more than 600 towns and cities.
Cultural Diversity
Culturally, India is one of the world's most heterogeneous countries with an extensive and diverse mixture of ethnic, linguistic and religious groups. Throughout India's history, the area of the Indian sub-continent was subject to successive incursions of settlers and invaders including Aryans, Arabs, Parthians, Greeks and other Europeans from the west and northwest; Central Asians from the north and north west; Mongolians, Tibetans, Burmese and other East Asians from the north east reaches and the Himalayans; as well as Malay, Asian and Austro-Asian groups from the east and south east; not to mention African and Oceanic people from the south and south west. This mélange of people has contributed to a variety of ethnic, linguistic, religious and cultural typologies on the Indian sub-continent today.
The migration patterns of the diverse people into India appear to have contributed to the country's complexity while the existing ethno-linguistic variety of India's rich and complicated heritage reflects the major cultural movements mentioned above. In this scheme, the Indo-European group of languages and ethnicities references the peoples of northwest India and the Gangetic plains, and this group is reflective of migrations of people from Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. Indeed, the languages of this part of India share the linguistic geneaology with modern-day French, English, Greek and Persian. The other major category, the Dravidian ethno-linguistic group, appears to include the people of central and southern India, and is reflective of some of the older languages and ethnic groups of India, such as the Tamil of Madras Tamil-Nadu, the Telegu of Andhra Pradesh, Kannada in Karnataka and Malayalam in Kerala.
In addition, there are tribal groups, such as the Oraon, the Munda and the Santhal, in the eastern highlands and central India whose language suggest Austro-Asiatic roots, while the Mizo, the Naga, the Lushai and the Khasi in the north and east, whose languages are reflective of the Tibeto-Burman ethno-linguistic family. This small collection of tribes has managed to retain its ethnic and linguistic identity largely because it is located in a fairly remote part of India, and the culture has been protected by national policies. Efforts by missionaries working to standardize and preserve the languages of these tribes have also been instrumental in this regard.
There are also a number of groups descended from ancient settlers in India. These groups include the Jews, the first group of which reportedly migrated from West Asia and settled in Cranganore on the Malabar Coast of Kerala in the first century, and the second group of which left the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century as Islam flourished. Another such group, the Parsis, settled in India in the 8th century, after escaping Muslim persecution in Persia.
The Europeans also contributed their ethnic and cultural influences to India. The Portuguese were among the first Europeans to arrive in India, although they did not exert dominion over the sub-continent in the manner of the British. Goa, on the west coast of India, is the center of historic Portuguese settlement in India. Portuguese Indians, generally referred to as Goans, about half of whom live in the state of Goa, are descended from Indians in the former Portuguese colony. Many of them assimilated Portuguese culture, and still others are the descendants of Indo-Portuguese marriages, which were not only acceptable, but, indeed, encouraged. In addition, the Austrians, the Danes, the Dutch, and the French held small territories for shorter periods.
European Indians -- descended from British men (in the colonial service and the military) and Hindu or Muslim women - make up the largest group of Indians with some degree of non-indigenous roots. Because Anglo-Indian unions were frowned upon, this group of people has generally married among themselves, thus developing an ethnic and cultural sub-caste of its own. Its characteristics include adherence to Christianity, and a more Westernized diet, dress, and speech.
Another noteworthy ethnic group, known collectively as Siddhis, are the descendants of Africans brought to India as slaves. Although most Indians with African origins are descendants of the large influx of slaves brought to western India in the 17th century, the first Africans reportedly arrived on the Konkani Coast in the first century during the time of the Arab slave trade. Today, most Siddhis tend to be Muslims and live predominantly in Gujarat, Daman and Diu, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and other states and union territories, where they are designated as Scheduled Tribe members.
Linguistic Diversity
In terms of language, the official language of India is Hindi although English also has official status. For use in certain official capacities, the constitution recognizes 18 Scheduled Languages: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. Of the four major language families, there are officially 112 "mother tongues," each with 10,000 or more speakers; 33 languages spoken by one million or more persons. The total number of languages and dialects varies depending on source and how counted; between 179 and 188 languages and between 49 and 544 dialects have been tabulated.
About 80 percent of Indians speak a language derived from the Indo-Aryan language family. Of the Indo-Aryan group of languages, Persian and the languages of Afghanistan are close relatives, belonging, like the Indo-Aryan languages, to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. Brought into India from the northwest during the second millennium before the common era or B.C.E., the Indo-Aryan tongues spread throughout the north, gradually displacing the earlier languages of the area. Over a period of centuries, Indo-Aryan languages came to predominate in the northern and central portions of South Asia.
By about 500 B.C.E, the Sanskrit language, used in religious rites, had also developed along independent lines and gave rise to an elaborate science of grammar and phonetics, as well as an alphabetical system seen by some scholars as superior to the Roman system. Today, Sankrit is still used in academic centers and even on television in India.
Apart from the Indo-Aryan languages, around 18 percent of the Indian populace speak Dravidian languages. Most Dravidian speakers reside in South India, where Indo-Aryan influence was less extensive than in the north. Only a few isolated groups of Dravidian speakers, such as the Gonds in Madhya Pradesh and Orissa, and the Kurukhs in Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, remain in the north as representatives of the Dravidian speakers who presumably once dominated much more of South Asia. (The only other significant population of Dravidian speakers are the Brahuis in Pakistan.) The oldest documented Dravidian language is Tamil, with a substantial body of literature, particularly the Cankam poetry, going back to the first century in the common era or C.E. Kannada and Telugu developed extensive bodies of literature after the sixth century, while Malayalam split from Tamil as a literary language by the 12th century.
In spite of the profound influence of the Sanskrit language and Sanskritic culture on the Dravidian languages, a strong consciousness of the distinctness of Dravidian languages from Sanskrit remained. All four major Dravidian languages had consciously differentiated styles varying in the amount of Sanskrit they contained. In the 20th century, as part of an anti-Brahman movement in Tamil Nadu, a strong movement arose to "purify" Tamil of its Sanskrit elements, with mixed success. The other three Dravidian languages were not much affected by this trend.
There are smaller groups, mostly tribal peoples, who speak Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic languages. Sino-Tibetan speakers live along the Himalayan fringe from Jammu and Kashmir to eastern Assam. The Austroasiatic languages, composed of the Munda tongues and others thought to be related to them, are spoken by groups of tribal peoples from West Bengal through Bihar and Orissa and into Madhya Pradesh.
Despite this vast and extensive linguistic diversity in India, many scholars treat South Asia as a single linguistic area because the various language families share a number of features not found together outside South Asia.
Religion
Although 80 percent of the people are Hindu, India also is the home to more than 120 million Muslims, making it home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the world. The population also includes Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Zorastrians, and Parsis. Indeed, one of India's greatest legacies is the fact that it is the birthplace of four major religions - Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism.
Social Life
The caste system reflects Indian historical occupation and religiously defined hierarchies. Traditionally, there are four castes identified, plus a category of outcastes, earlier called "untouchables" but now referred to as "Dalits," or "the oppressed." In reality, however, there are thousands of sub-castes, and many Indians identify with these sub-castes. Despite economic modernization and laws countering discrimination against the lower end of the class structure, the caste system remains an important factor and de facto reality in Indian society. Today, religion, caste and language are major determinants of social and political organizations in India today.
Human Development
The population of India has a life expectancy at birth of 69.25 years (66.87 years for males, and 71.9 years for females) and an infant mortality rate of 32.31 deaths/1,000 live births.
In terms of health and welfare, 3.1 percent of GDP in this country is spent on education expenditures; 2.4 percent of GDP is spent on health expenditures. Generally, access to water in this country is good in urban areas and far more problematic in certain rural areas. Access to sanitation is more of a challenge, especially in rural areas.
In terms of literacy, the average literacy rate is 61 percent. This expressed rate, however, does not reflect the vast gender divide in regard to literacy in which only 47.8 percent of the female population over the age of 15 can read and write, as compared with 73.4 percent of the male population. Despite the average literacy rate, and in particular, the low literacy rate among females, there are segments of the Indian population which are highly educated, and there are certain cities, such as Bangalore and more recently, Kanpur, renowned as technological centers. This is a vivid example of the way in which India is often regarded as a country of contrasts.
One notable indicator used to measure a country's quality of life is the Human Development Index (HDI), which is compiled annually since 1990 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The HDI is a composite of several indicators, which measure a country's achievements in three main arenas of human development: longevity, knowledge and education, as well as economic standard of living. In a recent ranking of 169 countries, the HDI placed India in the medium human development category, at 119th place.
Note: Although the concept of human development is complicated and cannot be properly captured by values and indices, the HDI, which is calculated and updated annually, offers a wide-ranging assessment of human development in certain countries, not based solely upon traditional economic and financial indicators.
Written by Dr. Denise Youngblood Coleman, Editor in Chief, www.countrywatch.com . See Bibliography for list of research sources.
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