Culture of India
The culture of India had history, all the while absorbing customs, traditions, and ideas from both invaders and immigrants. Many cultural practices, languages, customs, and monuments are examples of this co-mingling over centuries. India was the birth place of religious systems such as Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism, each of which have had a strong influence not only over India but also over the rest of the world. Following the Islamic conquests and the subsequent foreign domination from the tenth century onwards, the culture of India was heavily influenced by Persian, Arabic and Turkish cultures. In turn, the various religions and the multi-hued traditions of India have influenced South East Asia and other parts of the world.
Religion
Indian culture can be classified into many varied form which are existent in their totality throughout India. The culture of India has been influenced by various religions and customs of the world, which has resulted in the mingling of religious values, folk idioms, and art forms. While the religious influence is quite evident in the "classical" Indian culture mostly found in smaller towns and villages, the urban India is now widely influenced by globalization.
Language
As well as regional diversity, languages have created diverse traditions of culture in India. There are a large number of languages in India, 216 of each of which are spoken by a group of 10,000 people or more, although there are others that are spoken in India by fewer than 10,000 people. If these languages are included, there are 415 living languages in India.[1] The two major families of languages are those of the Indo-Aryan languages and those of the Dravidian languages, the former being largely confined to North India and the latter to South India. The Constitution of India has stipulated the usage of Hindi and English to be the two official languages of communication for union government. There is another language family in India which is spoken by about 3% of the people. These languages falls in the language family of Tibeto-Burman languages, which is a subgroup of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Besides this, many other languages in India can be divided into 10 other families of languages.
Cultural Policy
The cultural policy of the Government of India has three major objectives. One is to preserve the cultural heritage of India; two to inculcate Indian art consciousness amongst countrymen; and three to promote high standards in creative and performing arts fields.
History
The earliest literary traditions were mostly oral and passed down through descendants by citizens. Later, though, they were transcribed. Most of these spring from Hindu tradition and are represented by sacred works such as the Vedas, the epics of the Mahabharata and Ramayana. Tamil Sangam literature represents some of India's oldest secular traditions. Many Buddhist and Jain works are in Prakrit languages like Pali. The classical works of playwright Kalidasa even today exert an important influence on Indian litterateurs. The Tamil Ramayana (translated from the original Valmiki Ramayana) by Kamban is considered to be a classical masterpiece.Kamban and Kalidasa have been rightly given the title of "Kavi Chakravarthi" (King among Poets).
Upon the arrival of Mughal dynasty, Islamic culture also influenced the medieval Indian literature. This was due to the spreading influence of Persian and the rise of famous poets such as Amir Khusro. Colonial rule prepared the stage for modern literature exemplified by the works of Rabindranath Tagore, Subhramanya Bharati,Kuvempu, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Munshi Premchand, Devaki Nandan Khatri, among many others. Indian writers in modern times, like R. K. Narayan, Poornachandra Tejaswi, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer,Mahasweta Devi, Amrita Pritam, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, Khushwant Singh, Salman Rushdie, and Moncy Pothen, have been the cynosures of wide acclaim, both in Indian languages and English .
