Help me understand about the divisions between States in India.

[Acsenray]

@MilTan

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.

I’m not sure what role you’re saying the United States played in this.

@bldysabba

The comparison I usually make is European countries = Indian states.

I’d agree.

[MilTan]

@bldysabba

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.

The US is homogeneous now. But it was not always so: the original colonies were split along religious lines (the Calvinist Massachusetts Bay Colony, Rhode Island as some separatists from Massachusetts, etc.) and cultural lines (Germanic settlement in the Midwest; Scots-Irish settlement in Appalachia). There also was not all that much geographic mobility; most people lived in the same place they were born. There were even pretty distinct linguistic groups (there were many German-language towns in the Midwest on up to the turn of the 20th century).

Now, certainly even then the US was more homogeneous than India, and there is no doubt that the relative dominance of one language played a big part in that.

But there are definitely different folkways and very strong geographically-determined cultural divisions in the US even now. Albion’s Seed recounts how different parts of the US were settled by people of different cultural strains from Britain, and how that affected the local cultures even to this day. This is a recent article that talks about different political traditions in different parts of the country. Its just that there has never been a move to reorganize the states around those cultural differences (which would, for example, split the Appalachian parts of a lot of Eastern seaboard states off into their own region). BrainGlutton’s occasional musings excepted.

India is also only ~20 years into its modernization (IMO), and you can already see the smearing out of cultural differences in the upper and middle classes. Come back in 150 years, and I wonder whether India will look a lot more like the US today from a cultural homogeneity standpoint.

[QUOTE=Acsenray]
I’m not sure what role you’re saying the United States played in this.

[/quote]

Mistyped – I definitely meant “India” there.

[Kimstu]

@bldysabba

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

International “cute farm boy” stereotype, for those who like 'em big and stupid, also applies to rural Punjabi men. (It’s a canard of course, Punjabis in general aren’t dumb, but that’s the stereotype about them elsewhere in India.)