Understanding Indian Society’s Cultural Rise and Regression

Photo by Yogendra Singh

To understand the evolution of Indian culture is to observe a civilisation in motion — not static, but fluid; not uniform, but polyphonic. The subcontinent’s culture has always been a living ecosystem — an ever-shifting interplay of geography, belief, art, and survival.

As Clifford Geertz once noted, culture is not a set of objects but a web of meaning through which humans interpret their world.

India, perhaps more than any other region, exemplifies this idea: a civilisation that continually reinterprets itself through faith, language, and collective memory.

At ParibhaAsha, we view culture as this web — intricate, evolving, and alive. Across millennia, what began as a dialogue between humankind and nature matured into one of the world’s richest tapestries of thought. Yet, in recent decades, that dialogue has been interrupted. What was once an organic, plural field of experience has been restructured into a singular narrative — one that aligns cultural identity with political power and spiritual pride. This shift from lived culture to ideological culture marks both Indian Society’s rise and its regression.

The Subcontinent’s Cultural Genesis: Diversity as Evolution

The earliest layers of Indian civilisation — from the urban sophistication of the Indus Valley to the pastoral rhythms of the early Vedic world — reveal a profound relationship between human imagination and ecological order. Every ritual, from the lighting of lamps to the drawing of kolams, was an act of harmonising with nature’s cycles. Polish anthropologist and ethnologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, described culture as a tool for survival — a set of shared practices that helped humans adapt to their environment.

In this light, early India was not merely spiritual; it was profoundly pragmatic. The Harappans engineered sanitation and trade networks; the Vedic people cultivated oral philosophy; the tribal and Dravidian communities nurtured medicinal, musical, and artistic knowledge that outlived empires.

Culture was thus not owned by any single group or text — it was cumulative, evolving through contact, migration, and the eternal dialogue between belief and necessity.

The Classical Confluence: Pluralism as the Core of Civilisation

Photo by Yash Mishra

By the time of the Mauryas, Guptas, and Cholas, India’s cultural imagination had achieved global resonance. The Buddhist stupas of Sanchi and the rock-cut temples of Mahabalipuram existed alongside Jain monasteries, Shaivite shrines, and Islamic khanqahs. Language, architecture, and music travelled freely across boundaries.

This was the age when, as N.K. Bose observed, Indian civilisation perfected the art of absorption — the ability to incorporate new influences without erasing older ones. The Bhakti and Sufi movements became the moral soul of this pluralism. Saints like Kabir, Lalla, Basava, and Chaitanya preached equality through poetry, dissolving distinctions between caste and creed. Vernacular languages flourished — Odia, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, and others emerged as vessels of spiritual emotion and civic imagination.

Culture, during this era, was a conversation — a collective search for beauty, balance, and belonging. The sacred and the social were indistinguishable; both emerged from lived experience.

Colonial Codification: The Birth of Cultural Boundaries

The colonial encounter disrupted this equilibrium. Through ethnographic surveys, censuses, and legal codifications, the British administration redefined culture as a category of governance. As Bernard Cohn, an American anthropologist, and Nicholas Dirks, an American academic, demonstrated, the colonial state “objectified” Indian society — converting fluid social identities into rigid classifications of caste, religion, and tribe.

Photo by Anindita Chatterjee

This process not only fractured indigenous pluralism but also privileged textual and Brahmanical traditions as the authentic markers of “Indian culture.” The folk, the vernacular, and the regional were demoted to secondary status. Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism helps us understand this transformation: the coloniser defined India by what it was not — rational, modern, or unified — thus justifying domination.

The deeper loss, however, was psychological. The Indian imagination began to internalise these hierarchies, shaping how modern India would later understand itself. Culture, once lived, now requires validation.

Post-Independence India: Unity Through Cultural Integration

After independence, India faced the monumental challenge of creating cohesion from inherited diversity. The rhetoric of “unity in diversity” became central to national reconstruction. Institutions like the Sahitya Akademi and Sangeet Natak Akademi were founded to preserve regional arts and languages, weaving them into a shared national narrative.

This integration, however, reflected what Benedict Anderson termed an imagined community — a nation that existed not by uniformity but by a shared sense of belonging. Regional languages were recognised, and folk traditions were showcased, but within a framework that increasingly emphasised national coherence over regional authenticity.

While these efforts celebrated pluralism on paper, they also created an unspoken hierarchy between the classical and the folk, the national and the local. The dancer had to align her movements with a classical grammar; the tribal artisan became a symbol of rural nostalgia rather than an innovator of living tradition. Culture, in the name of unity, was curated — sometimes at the cost of its spontaneity.

Regional Roots and National Narratives: A Delicate Paradox

The contribution of regional cultures to India’s national consciousness is both undeniable and underacknowledged. Each linguistic zone — from Odisha’s temple traditions to Bengal’s literary renaissance, from Kerala’s matrilineal rituals to the Himalayan oral epics — gave India its intellectual and aesthetic diversity.

These regional traditions built the emotional architecture of the nation. They shaped how people celebrated time, nature, and faith. Yet, as India’s national institutions began defining culture in singular terms — through standardised curricula, tourism boards, and televised performances — the regional voices began to fade from the centre.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, a Belgian-French anthropologist and ethnologist, warned that when cultures are forced into artificial uniformity, they lose their creative tension.

In India’s case, national interest, while rooted in noble intent, began to flatten differences. Regional dialects were replaced by standardised versions; local deities were absorbed into pan-Indian pantheons; festivals were reframed to fit a common cultural calendar.

The paradox deepened: regional diversity had built national unity, but national ambition now endangered regional survival. What was meant to integrate ended up assimilating. The idea of India expanded, even as the texture of Indianness thinned.

The Contemporary Condition: Spirituality as Spectacle

Photo by Bishesh Pandey

In the contemporary landscape, the conflation of religion, culture, and politics has produced what Victor Turner might call a ritualised society — one that performs faith as identity rather than experience. The rise of “civilisational branding” has turned spirituality into a commodity and the sacred into a symbol of power.

Yoga, Ayurveda, temple restoration, and heritage revival are now embedded in nationalist rhetoric. The folk and the philosophical have been replaced by the commercial and the performative. What once emerged from dharma — the principle of balance — now often serves doxa — the enforcement of belief.

The danger lies not in revival itself but in selective revivalism: the retelling of history that glorifies one narrative while silencing many. The sacred is thus reimagined not as wisdom, but as weaponry — a mirror reflecting pride, not humility.

Reclaiming the Cultural Ethos: The ParibhaAsha Viewpoint

Culture cannot survive as propaganda; it must breathe as participation. As Nirmal Kumar Bose emphasised, the survival of Indian civilisation depends on the renewal of its local lifeworlds — the daily ethics, languages, and creative economies that sustain its people.

At ParibhaAsha, we believe the task ahead is to reactivate culture as an infrastructure of shared meaning. This means seeing heritage not as frozen artistry, but as living knowledge: the fisherman’s chant, the weaver’s pattern, the storyteller’s rhythm — all as repositories of civilisational intelligence.

The challenge is to return culture to the community — to make preservation a collective practice, not a bureaucratic project. India’s cultural rise must be rooted in dialogue, not dominance; its revival must empower regions, not subsume them. True unity, as history shows, emerges not from sameness but from the freedom to differ.

Culture as a Living Infrastructure

India’s cultural journey — from plural coexistence to politicised identity — reveals both resilience and fragility. As Geertz argued, meaning is never stable; it must be continually interpreted. The same is true for civilisation.

Regional traditions have long been the moral spine of India’s unity. Their decline signals not just a loss of heritage, but a weakening of empathy — the ability to see difference as kinship. National pride, when untethered from understanding, becomes amnesia dressed as memory.

The way forward lies in returning to the ethos that made India luminous — its ability to absorb, question, and coexist. Culture must once again be seen not as an emblem of power but as an ecology of belonging — a living dialogue between the material and the moral, the local and the universal.

For when culture ceases to be conversation and becomes commandment, it forgets its most sacred purpose — to help us remember who we are, together.