[kumarvvr]

This is blatantly false. A western trope resounding forever.

Culturally India was a unified entity for millenia. As in, perhaps not having a unified government, but having the same cultural and literary background throughout the region.

Ancient texts like Ramayana and Mahabharata talk about various places and practices across the length and breadth of India, which are remarkably similar and have a unified core.

The greatest temples of Hinduism are not concentrated in one place, but spread over the entirety of the continent. And those are ancient temples. From Saraswati Temple in Kashmir to the Bhagavathi temple in Kanya Kumari.

The idea that India was not a cultural entity was a British invention

[origin_path]

But surely by that definition Europe was also a unified entity in the medieval period.

[OJFord]

I was going to say the same thing, but then I realised the initial claim was also about 'cultural unity'. So fair enough, and yes a lot of Europe (or all of it in a few sections) has been culturally unified since time immemorial.

It is a bit more complex though, certainly even today there's some very distinct 'culture' in different regions across India. But also shared themes and roots (e.g. Sanskrit & texts written in it, from which modern 'distinct' languages/beliefs/teachings have been derived) that kumarvr's far better placed to comment on than I am.

[eru]

> [...] has been culturally unified since time immemorial.

Could you be a bit more concrete?

[hnfong]

Not the GP but I'll be more concrete in the other direction.

The Roman Empire is located in Europe, is more recent than "time immemorial", and I'll claim that they didn't regard the various barbarians in Europe outside its sphere of influence as culturally unified with them.

[eru]

It depends a bit on what we mean by 'time immemorial'. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_immemorial for some possibilities.

In a legal context, 'time immemorial' is often much, much more recent than the Roman Empire, even the Eastern part.

[bnralt]

To go even further: I imagine if the Arab world was politically unified with Europe today, there'd be a lot of people saying that it was always a unified Mediterranean cultural entity, sharing Monotheistic Abrahamic religions, Greek intellectual foundations, and having a long-term shared history in the Roman world. It's not a point of view commonly encountered today, though, probably because Europe and the Arab world aren't politically unified.

That is to say, if you decide that a region should be seen as unified (perhaps because of modern political boundaries), one can cherry-pick common elements to try to reach that conclusion. It's not entirely incorrect, but it's a biased way of presenting the evidence in order to justify a preconceived belief.

[prox]

Yeah, this is also what I gathered from speaking to people from India, and my own research. Brahmanism/ belief in the vedas was pretty widespread and sanskrit is with a few local exceptions the “Latin” of India. As far as I know there was relatively little iconoclasm as most follow up empires usually respected what came before. The exception might by in the deep south? Not sure. Ofcourse this changed somewhat with islamism and British rule. Those two things reformed a lot in the identities of people during time up till now.