Help me understand about the divisions between States in India.

Factual Questions
1

As a software developer in the US, I encounter a lot of people from India and have picked up tidbits of knowledge about that country.

Can you recommend (or provide!) a good introduction on the differences and relationships between the States in context to someone who has had exposure to the US and Canada?

I understand that many states have their “own” language and distinct cultures. How easy is it in theory, and how easy is it in practice, to migrate or travel between these states? Is it as easy as crossing the bridge between Ontario and Quebec, or are the States more like independent countries and everyone stays on their own side, and if you cross the border, you can hardly communicate with anyone? If someone from Punjab wanted to move to Tamil Nadu to study, work, or marry, what barriers would they face (e.g. social ramifications, or denial of residency)? Is it common to see people move or grow up outside the state of their family, language, or ancestry (in the sense that you can find English speakers living in Quebec, a majority French speaking province of Canada).

2

Practically speaking, India is a federal state only in a nominal sense. But even if it were more federal, just like in the United States, the states have no authority to restrict free movement.

To the extent that there are barriers to people from one community obtaining housing or employment based in ethnic or religious identity, these are not legal barriers. They are matters of social custom and are maintained and enforced in the same way that focal customs are enforced.

As a practical matter, the more educated and affluent you are, the more likely you are to run in circles in which such barriers are if diminishing importance.

Also, as a practical matter, the social diversity of India is vastly more complex than its state borders would indicate and thus as a matter of necessity people from different communities pretty much have to live elbow to elbow.

Particularly, the major conurbations are veritable salads of diversity. While there might be barriers on a social level, there are always interactions between members of different groups.

A city like Calcutta for example – it’s a Bengali city, but it has communities of Biharis, Nepalis, Tamilians, Marwaris, Gujaratis, Anglo-Indians, Chinese, Armenians, etc., many of which have been there for centuries.

There are sometimes language issues on a day to day basis, but people work it out. It’s not uncommon for people to be able to get along on one level or another in four or five different languages.

And they pretty much have to. If you want to do business in Bengal, you have to deal with Marwaris. If you want to get a new outfit, you have to deal with Muslims.

Another example – Bombay is the capital of Maharashtra, but the vast majority of business in Bombay is conducted in languages other than Marathi – Hindi, Gujarati, English being dominant.

Durga Puja and Kali Puja are religious festivals celebrated pretty much only by Bengali Hindus, but in non-Bengali cities like Delhi and Bombays you can always find it being celebrated by the local Bengalu community at the appropriate time of year.

3

If you are among the affluent classes you will have friends and relatives in every major city of the country.

It’s a common joke that while offices in Calcutta are largely staffed by Bengalis, it’s the one or two “Madrasis” (south Indians) in the office who do all the work while the Bengalis gossip about soccer, literature, movies, politics, and scandals.

4

If you need the services of a loan shark, you have to go to the Afghans. If you want to buy jewelry you have to go to the Panjabis.

Marriage is the one area where Indians for the large part are most conservative. But among the westernized society, this has broken down quickly. There were several inter-caste and inter-ethnic marriages among my parents’ generation, and while many of them faced some degree of ostracism from at least one side of the family, their relationships held and 40-50 years later, they are all part of the extended family. Among my cousins in my generation I would say that roughly half cross community boundaries of one kind or another. Even among “arranged” marriages, a lot of amalgamation is taking place along socio-economic lines rather than traditional community lines. For example, cross-ethnic pairings. The upper castes of Bengali Hindu society (Brahman-Boidya-Kayastha / priest-healer-scribe) often intermarry these days and they share the same white-collar professions – physicians, academics, engineers, journalists, artists, lawyers, finance, marketing, management, mass media, advertising, etc.

5

Did I actually answer all your questions?

6

Also, even traditional caste-conforming arranged marriages can pair people who are very distant geographically. As you noted, especially among the higher socioeconomic groups there’s a lot of geographic mobility both within India and outside it. In many castes (jatis) you can find a caste-suitable potential spouse in practically any Indian state.

For the OP: If you like Bollywood movies and/or women’s hockey, you might enjoy picking up some tidbits about Indian regional stereotypes (along the lines of Acsenray’s call-center staff jokes) while watching the 2007 movie Chak De India. Sixteen young women from different states thrown together on the national hockey team, and what happens then.

7

The people in the socio-economic class you’re likely to interact with (urban, and relatively well educated/ affluent) face practically no barriers in migrating and travelling between states. The informal barriers that exist are faced are at lower income levels, where migrant labour populations, particularly from poorer parts of North India, face hostility from the local populations. This is little different from the ‘These furriners are taking our jobs’ kind of nonsense that you hear all over the world.
The language that truly bridges the Indian ‘elite’ is English. Others end up making themselves understood in either the local language or Hindi or some mash up in between.
It is fairly common to see people move around following two things - jobs, and education. Both of these tend to be better/more available in Southern India and the big cities.
I hope that answers your questions. There’s a ridiculous amount of complexity beyond this of course, so if you have any other doubts, ask away, I’ll be happy to answer.

8

Could you clarify what you mean by federal here? Just so I can understand you better

9

Even I appreciate this knowledge. Having never lived in India as an adult, I don’t know a lot of this stuff, either.

I would recommend this movie as well - it was pretty interesting. The hockey thing was meh, but the cross-cultural girls were very interesting.

10

In form, India is not a unitary state; it is a union of sovereign states, just like the United States, Mexico, Canada, Germany, Australia, etc. An Indian state is not merely an administrative jurisdiction that can be altered at will by the national government, in the manner of English counties. Each state has its own democratically elected parliamentary legislature (“legislative assembly”) and a state’s borders cannot be changed without its consent. However, practically speaking the national government (“the Centre” in Indian parlance) has a great deal of authority to impose its will on the states. The central government is much more powerful – in a federalism sense – than the U.S. government is, with respect to the division of powers between national government and state governments.

11

I’ll be happy to share, if there’s specific stuff you want to know. I’ve lived everywhere (at least that’s what it feels like sometimes) in India, but of course to experience it entirely is well nigh impossible. The one statement I have come to agree with is that you can say practically anything you like about India, and it will be true.

12

The opposite also will be true.:wink:

13

Constitutionally speaking, the powers of the central government are quite well defined into state and central ‘lists’ of what area is governed at which level. What you say was perfectly accurate of course, IIRC the Indira Gandhi era was responsible for the consolidation of power. The last 15-20 years though have seen state governments matter much more both in the sense of involvement in decision making at the central level, and especially in delivery of governance at the state level. I’ve been fairly closely involved in some consulting projects with both central and various state governments, and while overarching policy in most areas typically gets articulated at the center(with considerable input from the states), the implementation depends almost entirely on the state level. The Indian government is weaning itself away from its addiction to the ‘top-down’ model of governance in many areas.

14

“When you consider any generalisation about India, always remember that for any generalisation that is accurate, the exact opposite is equally true.”

Yes, I’ve quoted this quip many times myself. I don’t know where it originates, but I first heard it in a speech by Shashi Tharoor. I’ve seen it attributed to someone named Joan Robinson.

15

Thank you. I chiefly am curious about Punjab and Haryana. My family is from Panipat, which of course is in Haryana, but we are ethnically connected to Punjab, as well.

I don’t really know much about either, or even what the class differences are. I’ve visited, and my uncle has a textile shop on the main road there (GT Road) but I’d love to hear anything interesting you know about any of these places.

16

Aye, and I’ve read it in some of your posts as well :slight_smile: What I was saying is just slightly different though. Its that you can make almost any generalisation about India (within reason of course) and it will be true.

17

“The frustrating thing about India”, I was told by one of my teachers, the great Cambridge economist Joan Robinson, “is that whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.”

Amartya Sen, from the Economist.

18

Heh. Ok. Here goes.

They’re both fairly well to do states, among the richest in the country. However, they’re also very patriarchal societies. The sex ratios are massively skewed. In Haryana in particular it’s so bad that they’ve taken to importing brides of late.

Punjab isn’t supposed to be much better, but treatment of women wise it’s somewhat less repressive I think. I’ve had (female) cousins in small towns get into ‘love’ marriages with someone from a different religion for instance.

The food in Punjab is to die for, and very probably to die from, if you’re not used to the amount of ghee they use :slight_smile:

Guys from Haryana are supposedly hot, but only as long as they keep their mouths shut :slight_smile:

Jats are also famous for being incredibly hot-headed.They will NOT back down from a fight, the consequences be damned.

Haryanvi is easily the harshest, crassest language in India. This of course has something to do with how it’s spoken in a highly patriarchal, aggressive milieu. If you like your language liberally sprinkled with the choicest of swear words, Haryanvi is for you. For some strange reason though, one of my friends who’s an excellent mimic of Haryanvi can keep girls giggling all day long just by talking in Haryanvi. ‘Kay kar ri se’ is apparently India’s response to ‘How you doin’

Chandigarh(the capital of both states) is widely regarded as being the best planned city in India. Chandigarhis, on the other hand, are widely regarded (by big city snobs like myself) as being a tad rustic. On the other hand, how seriously do you want to take the opinion of big city snobs?

If you ever travel to either state in winter, go for a drive out in the agricultural areas. There’s nothing quite like the sight of grey fog hanging over bright yellow fields of mustard.

All I’ve got for now. If there was anything specific that you were looking for, let me know!

19

Well, I couldn’t tell you much about the differences culturally, but Haryana and Punjab are an interesting discussion from the perspective of what the state lines in India can mean.

Immediately after independence, the part of British India’s Punjab Province that remained in India was called East Punjab. Through a long series of maneuverings, mostly designed to get a state with a Sikh majority in the US, the territory that was once East Punjab eventually split into three states: what are now Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana, with the state retaining the Punjab name now Sikh majority.

This all happened in 1966. But it wasn’t the first step to consolidating states around religious or (especially) linguistic lines. The states in India aren’t often coextensive with major linguistic groups accidentally; they were designed that way. In 1956, the States Reorganization Act redrew all the lines left over from the British period.

During the British Raj, a lot of the “states” in India were actually nominally independent kingdoms (e.g., Hyderabad) which cut across ethnic and linguistic lines). But post-Independence, there was a lot of agitation to realign political boundaries according to linguistic ones (much as, arguably, Partition realigned national boundaries around religious ones). The ultimate result was, among other things, that Hyderabad, a huge, landlocked “state” in South India was ultimately split up along with portions of the Madras Presidency (a British administrative unit) into four pieces: Kerala (majority Malayalam-speaking), Tamil Nadu (majority Tamil-speaking), Andhra Pradesh (majority Telugu-speaking) and Karnataka (majority Kannada-speaking). Similar divisions were made in other states, and the state lines were completely redrawn.

A later development was that that Bombay State, after much rioting (Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children has a fictionalized account of some of that rioting), split along linguistic lines, too, into Maharashtra and Gujarat (the placement of Bombay on the Marathi side of that line is still a sort subject for some).

State lines are still being redrawn in India, for that matter (or rather, the potential for redrawn lines is still high). Just a few years back there were riots surrounding whether the Telengana region of Andhra Pradesh should be split off.

All this is by way of saying that state lines in India are much more malleable than they are in the US. The only states whose (actual, not supposed) borders have been significantly changed (for reasons other than surveying problems) since their formation are Maryland (ceding land for DC), Virginia (ceding and then reclaiming land for DC, and losing its western counties to West Virginia).

At the same time, this mutability of political boundaries means that there are often much starker differences (primarily in terms of the majority linguistic group) between states in India than there would be in the US.

20

Pretty accurate post, but a minor nitpick with the quoted part - is it even possible to have the kind of differences that India has in the US? I would have thought that the US is an almost homogeneous society (relatively speaking of course). The comparison I usually make is European countries = Indian states.