North India
From Open Encyclopedia
North India is a geographic and linguistic-cultural region of India. In traditional Indian geography, India is divided into three major cultural zones: North, South and East. The Vindhya mountains, in particular the line marked by the Narmada River and the Mahanadi River marks the southern boundary of north India. The line made by the Son river and the Kosi river marks its eastern border. The dominant feature geographic feature of northern India is the Indo-Gangetic Plain.
However, the socio-cultural boundaries of north India have actually surpassed these traditional boundaries. As a linguistic-cultural and political region, North India consists of twelve Indian states: Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhatisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. The National Capital Territory of Delhi is also a part of northern India.
North India remains primarily rural, but its vast population has ensured that it has always supported very large cities: apart from the great metropolis of Delhi, the cities of Lucknow, Patna, Kanpur, Allahabad, Meerut, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Amritsar, Bhopal and Indore would rank with the most populous cities of Europe.
People
Anthropologists often associate regional affinities with racial differences. South Indian or "Dravidian" states usually have people with darker skin. People in the states of Eastern Kashmir, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, and other Northeastern Indians states tend to look more "Mongoloid" than "Caucasoid". North India shows a stronger Aryan influence. Indeed, the languages of northern India are preponderantly Indo-Aryan, and it is in this region that Sanskrit and the various Prakrits are thought to have first found a home in India. Also, although skin colour in all parts of India varies by caste rather than region, it is generally speaking the case that inhabitants of the north Indian states have lighter skin than those of their caste counterparts in southern or eastern India. These phenotypic variations are indubitably due to the ingress, across many millenia and in every era, of Central Asian invaders (including "Indo-Greeks", "Indo-Parthians", Sakas, Kushanas, Hunas or Huns, and Turks) into the Indo-Gangetic plain.
North India shows a fuller range of Caste (varna, literally:"colour")variation than does South India – there are proportionately more kshatriya and vaishya castes than is generally the case in most areas of South India.
In terms of religion, North India is generally speaking a stronghold of Vaishnava sects of Hinduism; Shaktism and Shaivism have a strong minority following in North India. Having been ruled for nearly eight centuries by muslim invaders from central asia, north India is the main centre of Islam in India.
North India is, on the whole, poorer and less literate than South India. There is also a generally higher level of inequality between males and females on all social indices. The four BIMARU states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh, collectively have the highest population growth rates in India, as well as lower than average literacy rates and economic growth rates than India as a whole.
Traditional economy
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The economy of this region is predominantly agrarian; culturally, socially and historically the country has always been defined by its village societies. It is therefore proper to devote space to a detailing of the north Indian socio-agrarian structure.
North India largely retains a feudal agricultural setup, with a preponderence of tenant farmers as against Southern India or Eastern India, where extensive land reforms and land redistribution policies over the second half of the 20th century put in place an equally bad system of small, fragmented land holdings being farmed by their owners, who are actually almost as impoverished as the tenant farmers of north India. Some of these differences stem from the later Mughal emperors' practice of relying on zamindars, or 'hereditary tax farmers', who collected taxes from rural communities in return for a percentage of the proceeds, and were granted certain administrative powers. The Zamindari system was never as prevalent in the south, as Mughal rule did not extend to much of the South.
The British administrators of the Bengal Presidency (Eastern India) inherited and expanded upon the Zamindari system, while the Madras Presidency which governed much of south India, relied on panchayats, or village councils, for rural administration and tax collection. Although the zamindari system was formally abolished after India's independence, a rural economy dominated by landlords is still prevalent across much of northern India. Tensions between landlords and their tenant farmers are widespread in northern India, notably in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh; these tensions have given rise to landlord-tenant strife in several northern states, and has fueled Naxalite movements.
