The Challenges of Cultural Diversity

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Sociology Class XII (Indian Society), Chapter 6.

One country, 1,632 languages: how does it not fall apart?

Open a train ticket app and you can switch the language of the screen. Walk through one railway station and you hear half a dozen mother tongues before you reach the platform. Most people would call this India's greatest strength. Sociology asks a harder question: when so many communities share one country, one set of laws and one pool of scarce resources (river water, jobs, government funds), what keeps them from pulling apart? This chapter is the answer, and it also explains why many other countries have found the same problem much harder.

Diversity is not the same as inequality

The word diversity points to differences, not to inequalities. When we say India is culturally diverse, we mean that many kinds of social groups live here, marked out by cultural markers such as language, religion, sect, race or caste. Inequality is a different idea: it means some groups have more wealth, power or respect than others.

The two often travel together, and that is where the trouble starts. Cultural identities are powerful. They can arouse strong feelings and bring large numbers of people together. When a difference of culture also carries a difference in wealth or opportunity, a step to help one community can look like a loss to another. The tension grows when scarce resources have to be shared.

Why community identity matters so much

Every person needs a stable answer to "Who am I?" We get that answer mainly through socialisation, a continuing dialogue with significant others (parents, family, kin and community). The community gives us our mother tongue and the cultural values through which we understand the world, and it anchors our self-identity.

Community identity rests on birth and belonging, not on achievement. It is what you are, not what you have become. Nobody chooses their family, community or country, and such identities are called ascriptive: fixed by birth, with no choice involved. This is very unlike membership of a profession or a sports team, where you must pass an exam or show a level of skill.

Why people feel so strongly about it. The belonging is accidental, unconditional and almost inescapable, and that mix makes the attachment deeply emotional. Overlapping circles of ties (family, kinship, caste, ethnicity, language, region, religion) give our world meaning. So any perceived threat to the community brings a strong, sometimes violent, reaction.

A second feature: it is universal. Everyone has a motherland, a mother tongue, a family, a faith, and we are all equally loyal to our own. This is why community conflicts are so hard to settle. Each side sees the other as the hated enemy, praises its own virtues and exaggerates the other's faults. Two nations at war each believe that truth is on their side, and each builds a mirror image of the other without noticing.

Pause and predict: a student says, "I am proud of my school's cricket team, but I did not play a single match for it." Is this feeling closer to ascriptive or achieved identity?

Check your answer: it is a feeling of belonging, but the student's own membership (being a pupil of the school) is not conditional on skill. The sociological point is the contrast: ascriptive belonging needs no achievement, yet it still produces strong emotion. The team's own players, selected on skill, hold an achieved membership.

Communities, nations and states

A nation is a community of communities. Its members share a wish to be part of the same political collectivity, and this wish usually expresses itself as a demand for a state. A state is an abstract entity made up of political and legal institutions that claim control over a territory and the people living on it. Max Weber defined it as a body that successfully claims a monopoly of legitimate force in a territory.

A nation is easy to describe but hard to define. For every proposed test (common language, religion, ethnicity, history) there are exceptions: many nations have no single common language or religion, and many languages and religions are shared across nations without forming one nation. The one test that works best is the state: a nation is a community that has a state of its own, which is why the two are joined as nation-state.

The link between nation and state is a modern one. The Soviet Union formally recognised more than one hundred internal nationalities. Some nations spread across many states: the Jamaican population living outside Jamaica is larger than the population inside it. Dual citizenship laws let one person be a citizen of two states at once.

Why states need nations. In the modern era, democracy and nationalism are the main sources of political legitimacy. "The nation" is the accepted justification for a state, and "the people" are the final source of the nation's authority. So states need nations as much as, or more than, nations need states.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: a nation is hard to define, and the best test is that it has a state. In reality: the political scientist Benedict Anderson (1983) called nations "imagined communities": members will never meet most fellow members, yet each carries an image of belonging together. That fits the chapter's point that language, religion or ethnicity alone cannot define a nation. Why it matters: it helps you explain why shared identity has to be built and renewed, not simply inherited.

How states treat diversity: three models

Because any community identity could in principle become the base of a new nation, existing states often see community identities as rivals. Many have tried to reduce or remove them. The chapter names two strategies and an alternative.

Typical tools of assimilation or integration include centralising power in forums where the dominant group is a majority, a single legal system, one compulsory official language, state media and schools that promote one culture, state symbols drawn from one group's history, and taking over land or forests of minority groups as "national resources".

Why suppression backfires. It is costly: it alienates the communities whose culture is labelled "non-national", and the act of suppression can make their community identity stronger. So allowing cultural diversity is good policy both practically and on principle.

India as a state-nation

India is one of the most diverse countries in the world. The textbook gives figures from the 2011 Census: a population of about 1.21 billion, roughly 1,632 languages and dialects, and 22 languages recognised in the 8th Schedule of the Constitution, which secures their legal status.

Small percentages hide large absolute numbers because the total population is so big. Note also that the textbook warns that even the largest group is not uniform: it is divided by region, language and caste, as are all the major religions to different extents.

India fits neither the assimilationist nor the integrationist model. The independent state ruled out assimilation from the start. National integration is a constant theme, yet the Constitution does not push religion, language and similar identities out of public life; these communities are explicitly recognised. Constitutional protection for minority religions is strong by international standards. The textbook adds that India's problems have been mostly in implementation and practice, not in laws or principles, and calls it a good example of a state-nation, though not free from the problems common to nation-states.

Regionalism: where it comes from

Regionalism in India is rooted in the diversity of languages, cultures, tribes and religions. It grows stronger when these identity markers are geographically concentrated in a region and when people feel regionally deprived. Indian federalism is the main way these sentiments are accommodated.

After Independence the state at first kept the colonial arrangement of large, multi-ethnic, multilingual provinces called presidencies (Madras, Bombay and Calcutta were the three major ones). Strong popular agitations soon forced a redrawing of these units into ethno-linguistic States.

What happened next. The early fear was that linguistic States would cause further subdivision of India. Something close to the opposite happened: linguistic States helped strengthen Indian unity. It proved perfectly consistent to be a Kannadiga and Indian, Bengali and Indian, Tamil and Indian, and so on. These States do sometimes quarrel with one another, but the textbook argues that disputes could have been far worse. It points to two neighbouring cases where language disputes became part of long political conflicts: the 1956 decision in Sri Lanka to make one language the only official language, and the separation of East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh in 1971.

Language did not decide every case. Language, together with regional and tribal identity, and not religion, gave the strongest basis for ethno-national identity in India. But not every language community has its own State. For the three States formed in 2000, a mix of tribal ethnicity, language, regional deprivation and ecology gave the basis. Today there are 28 States and 8 Union Territories.

Two views. For the exam: linguistic reorganisation strengthened national unity. Another reading: scholars point out that linguistic States also brought inter-State disputes and that language alone has not satisfied every regional demand, as the 2000 States show. Both readings agree that accommodating regional identity within a federal structure has been central to India's stability.

How federal accommodation works. Respecting regional feeling takes more than drawing borders. States need a framework that makes them viable as relatively autonomous units.

Pause and predict: a State is formed mainly because of tribal identity, regional deprivation and ecology, not language. Which of the textbook's examples fits?

Check your answer: Chhattisgarh, Uttaranchal (now Uttarakhand) and Jharkhand, formed in 2000. They show that statehood in India does not follow one criterion: language was the strongest, but not the only, basis.

Minorities and the need for protection

Religion-related issues are broadly of two kinds. The first set is secularism and communalism, about the state's relationship to religion and to groups that use religion as their main political identity. The second is minority and majority, about how the state treats communities that are unequal in numbers or power (social, economic and political).

The Indian nationalist vision. The dominant trend in Indian nationalism was inclusive (it recognised diversity and plurality) and democratic (it sought to end discrimination and build a just society). "The people" was not defined by religion, ethnicity, race or caste. Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore both spoke against the harm of exclusive nationalism. Tagore warned that teaching a people to feel superior and to hold other peoples in contempt would harm that people too.

What counts as a minority in sociology. The term is more than a numerical distinction. It usually involves a sense of relative disadvantage, and the members also feel a strong group solidarity, a feeling of togetherness. This solidarity is linked to disadvantage because facing prejudice and discrimination tends to strengthen loyalty inside the group. So left-handed people or those born on 29 February are minorities in a statistical sense, but not in the sociological sense, because they do not form a collectivity.

The textbook gives the Parsis and Sikhs as examples of religious minorities that may be relatively well off economically but are still culturally disadvantaged by small numbers. That is why religious and cultural minorities need special protection.

Constitutional safeguards. The framers believed a strong, united nation could be built only if all sections of people had freedom to practise their religion and develop their culture and language. B.R. Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Constitution, made this point in the Constituent Assembly, arguing that safeguards for minorities matter to the stability of the state.

Minorities exist everywhere. In most nation-states there is a dominant cultural, ethnic, racial or religious group. No nation-state consists only of one homogeneous group. Even countries that came close have developed plural populations through modern capitalism, colonialism and large-scale migration.

Communalism: a political ideology, not a faith

In everyday Indian use, communalism means aggressive chauvinism based on religious identity. Chauvinism is the attitude that one's own group is the only worthy one and others are inferior, illegitimate and opposed. So communalism is an aggressive political ideology linked to religion.

It is about politics, not religion. A communalist may or may not be devout, and devout people may or may not be communalists. What defines it is the attitude to people with other identities. Communalists claim that religious identity overrides everything else, whether you are rich or poor, whatever your job, caste or political belief, so every member of a religious group is treated as the same. This turns large and diverse groups into one singular, homogeneous block.

Why it matters in India. It has been a recurring source of tension and violence. Communal riots go back to the colonial period, and the divide-and-rule policy of the colonial rulers played a part, but the textbook is careful: colonialism did not invent conflicts between communities, and it cannot be blamed for post-Independence violence. India also has a long tradition of religious pluralism and syncretism (mixing of traditions), visible in the devotional songs and poetry of the Bhakti and Sufi movements. The poems of Kabir, which bring together devotion from different traditions, are a lasting symbol. History offers both good and bad examples, and what we learn from it is up to us.

Secularism: two meanings

In the western context, secularism means the separation of church and state, linked to secularisation, the gradual retreat of religion from public life as it became a voluntary personal practice, alongside the rise of modernity, science and rationality.

The Indian meanings include this western sense and add more. In everyday language secular is the opposite of communal: a secular person or state does not favour any one religion over others. It need not mean hostility to religion. In terms of the state-religion relationship it implies equal respect for all religions, not separation or distance. For example, the Indian state declares public holidays for the festivals of all religions.

Two views. For the exam: India's secularism combines equal respect for all religions with protection of minorities, and the two commitments create a tension. Another reading: one side argues that special protection for minorities is favouritism or "appeasement" used to gain support. The other side argues that without such protection, secularism could become an excuse for imposing the majority's values and norms on minorities. The textbook presents both positions and expects you to explain each fairly.

The state and civil society

The state is central to managing diversity, but it can become insulated from the people. If it does, it risks turning authoritarian: the people have no voice and those in power are not accountable. Authoritarian states often limit civil liberties such as freedom of speech, of the press, of political activity, and the right to due process. State institutions can also fail through corruption, inefficiency or lack of resources. This is why non-state actors matter: they can watch the state, protest against injustice or supplement its work.

Civil society is the arena beyond the private domain of the family and outside both the state and the market. It is the non-state, non-market part of the public domain where individuals get together voluntarily to form institutions and organisations. It is the sphere of active citizenship.

Civil society takes up many causes: tribal land rights, urban governance, violence against women, rehabilitation of people displaced by dams, fishers' struggles against mechanised fishing, housing rights, primary education reform and more. Civil liberties organisations watch the state and press it to obey the law. The media, especially its visual and electronic segments, has also become more active.

The Right to Information campaign. It began as an agitation in rural Rajasthan demanding information about government funds spent on village development, and grew into a nationwide campaign. Despite resistance from the bureaucracy, the government passed the Right to Information Act, 2005.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: the RTI campaign shows civil society making the state accountable. In reality: the Supreme Court had held in 1993 that the right to information is part of the freedom of speech and expression under Article 19(1)(a), so the 2005 law gave that idea a detailed statutory form. Why it matters: it shows how a campaign, a court ruling and a law can reinforce each other (see the Constitution chapter).

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: Patterns of Social Inequality and Exclusion shows how caste, tribe and gender inequalities can overlap with the cultural differences discussed here.
• Next: Suggestions for Project Work turns the research methods you met earlier into small projects.
• Related: The Constitution and Social Change takes the RTI and fundamental rights thread further, and Social Movements covers civil society in action.