India's Living Traditions

📖 Languages & Literature

India has 22 scheduled languages in its Constitution and hundreds more spoken across the country. Here is “Bharat” (India) in some of them:

The 22 scheduled languages

Did you know?

• Eleven languages have been declared classical languages of India, including Tamil, Sanskrit, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Odia.
• Rabindranath Tagore became the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1913, for Gitanjali.
• Our national anthem, Jana Gana Mana, was written by Tagore in Bengali.
• The Tirukkural, written in Tamil by Thiruvalluvar, has 1,330 short couplets about living a good life.
• The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are two great epics retold in almost every Indian language.

🌱 Living Heritage & Sustainability

Traditions stay alive when we use them, value them and pass them on.

• Preserving traditional crafts and skills.
• Using local and eco-friendly materials — clay, cotton, bamboo, natural dyes.
• Supporting artisans and local communities by buying handmade products.
• Passing our heritage to future generations through stories, songs and festivals.
• Many crafts, like Madhubani painting, Kashmir Pashmina and Muga silk, have a GI tag (Geographical Indication), which protects their name and their makers.