Why didn’t an Indian culture emerge as the dominant culture like Han did in China due to Sinicization
I’m aware of how China became an almost homogenous nation of 1.2 bn people through Sinicization, but why didn’t India who in many ways shares similar geography produce an equivalent to Han?
I get why in Europe and the Middle East one super culture didnt form to dominate the west, mainly due to The Mediterranean sea, Sahara desert, and Syrian desert. But the Indian subcontinent, like China, isn’t broken up by a massive sea or desert like the west is. As well it had one of the few river valley civilizations and is one of the most fertile places in the world
[–]RuinEleint 1650 points 19 hours ago
Hi. I am an Indian, and am currently studying Indian history. You address a rather complex issue.
The main thing about Indian history is that there is a very significant amount of linguistic, cultural and geographical diversity.
Now, the periods between empires saw long-intense periods of regional autonomy, local conflict and the further emphasis on local identities. India is very good at adopting new norms, while maintaining old ones. Thus, in Bengal, in the 16th to 18th century, while Persian was the acknowledged language of court and administration, the ordinary people used Bengali, and that too was fragmented into many local dialects that literally changed from district to district.
There was never a ruler who actually tried to impose one culture, one language and one code of laws. No empire had the stability and the power. The regional diversity was too much.
This is not very different to the situation in India during its early years.
I would argue the main reason that China stayed unified was the lack of foreign influences, as you also pointed out. Foreign powers created lasting imprints that exacerbated geographic differences, especially with religion, and made regional rivalries flare up and make any empire which unified the continent difficult to maintain. Overall, India's proximity to other centers of civilizations destabilized the country enough that it could never fully unify.
The history of both modern nations are fairly short compared to the cultural history of the regions respectively. They're wasn't anything like "all Indians belong together" or "all Chinese belong together" before their recent nation-forming. If either region reached modern era in a more divisive period, there could very well be multiple modern nations in their place today. For India it is the Mughal and then British who "forced" all the different peoples into a same superstate, whereas if not for the Manchurian conquest and acquisition of Mongolia, Tibet etc., these regions would likely belong to their own independent states instead of China. Had Ottoman empire survived to this day, it would be comparable to India or China but somewhere in between - with strongly culturally related peoples (through history and religion) that are also very distinct from region to region, and we would be asking similar questions about them.
[–]RuinEleint 3 points 10 hours ago
Asoka actually chose peaceful consolidation and tried to use Buddhism to unify India. He sent missionaries to Sri Lanka, Tibet, China, and I think Greece.
The issue was never simply invaders through the North West, but also repeated weakness and fragmentation of the indigenous kingdoms. The Guptas actually successfully fought the Huns and this was after their golden age. Chandragupta Maurya defeated Alexander's general Seleucus when he tried to regain Alexander's conquests in India. But at other times, there was simply no united powerful Indian political entity to resist invasion.
[–]hammersklavier 16 points 11 hours ago*
It occurs to me this might actually be -- ironically -- because the middle Ganges valley is too optimal for the development of a centralized state.
See, the Chinese heartland in antiquity was the North China Plain, which is one of the world's largest alluvial plains. This means it is incredibly fertile but also incredibly flat and prone to flooding. The Yellow River has, in fa