Saving the soul: The movement to keep India “Indian”

What if India stopped being… Indian?

Sounds impossible, right? But take a closer look at your language, clothing, and even the food on your plate. They are all being gradually influenced by a global narrative.

Now, imagine a battle that you didn’t even know was occurring, neither fought with weapons nor armies, but with words, traditions, and memories, which led to a silent alarm, somewhere, as a government report, buried under census data, that left unnoticed, but a small, passionate movement did, referring to it as “saving the soul of India,” and they firmly believe that if we don’t take action now, there may be nothing distinctly “Indian” left to preserve.

The Crisis of Cultural Identity

In 2017, a survey conducted by the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, helmed by Ganesh Devy, quietly raised an alarm that few newspapers reported on. Of the 19,500 languages and dialects spoken across the country, at least 250 had disappeared in the preceding five decades, and scores more were classified as endangered, which statistically was beyond a linguistic footnote, thus becoming a cultural obituary indicating that something deeper than vocabulary was being lost. For millions of Indians who grew up hearing their grandmothers sing folk songs in tongues that now have no living speakers under thirty, the numbers confirmed what they had long felt in their bones that India's extraordinary civilizational diversity was quietly contracting, pressed thin by the homogenising weight of globalisation and the relentless pull of urban modernity.

The anxiety this breed is not unique to India, but it is uniquely intense here, because the stakes feel uniquely high. India is not merely a nation-state; it is, as the Minister of Tourism of India, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, once observed, a civilizational experiment of staggering ambition, where thousands of years of layered history, philosophy, art, and spirituality have produced a culture unlike any other on earth. To cultural nationalists, intellectuals, and even ordinary citizens who feel the ground shifting underfoot, the question of what it means to remain "Indian" in the twenty-first century has become not just philosophical but urgent, almost existential.

Sanskrit: The Soul of India

Few symbols have come to represent this cultural reclamation more powerfully than Sanskrit, a language that most Indians cannot read but virtually all revere. In 2019, the Indian government announced a significant expansion of the Central Sanskrit University system, and the Union Budget of 2021–22 provided substantial funding to Central Sanskrit University (CSU) as part of efforts to promote Sanskrit under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 framework, with Rs 214.56 crore allocated that year within a five-year grant of Rs 1,074 crore (2017-2022). Supporters of the effort like Sadhguru argue that Sanskrit is not simply a language but an epistemological system a way of organizing knowledge, ethics, science, and beauty that produced texts ranging from Panini's grammar, which is still studied by computational linguists for its prescient structural elegance, to the surgical manuals of Sushruta, who described rhinoplasty procedures in the 600 BC with a precision that astonished modern historians of medicine.

The push for Sanskrit is incomplete without its critics, who point out that the millions of Indians who speak Maithili, Tulu, Konkani, or Gondi may feel that the cultural preservation movement has a hierarchy of its own, privileging a classical language associated with upper-caste traditions over the vernacular tongues of communities who have historically been marginalised. This tension is real, and it matters, because any movement serious about preserving Indian culture must grapple with the fact that "India" has never been a monolith; instead, its cultural richness has always lived precisely in its multiplicity, and a nationalism that collapses that multiplicity into a single, sanitised identity risks destroying the very diversity it claims to protect. Even those who hold these reservations often concede that the revival of interest in Sanskrit among young Indians, thousands of whom are now enrolling in online courses offered by platforms like Vyoma Labs, represents something genuine, such as a hunger to reconnect with roots that the modern education system had long treated as irrelevant.

Globalization V/s Local Traditions

The forces driving cultural erosion are simply the ordinary mechanics of economic integration and media saturation. When a young woman in a culturally rich city like Jodhpur spends around four hours a day on Instagram and Netflix, encountering aspirational images, almost uniformly Western in their aesthetics and values, when the most prestigious career path in her town leads to a call center where she is expected to suppress her accent and adopt an anglicized name for her shift, its cumulative experience profoundly impacts her cultural self-perception and identity, leading to a necessary self-interrogation and the question, "Why am I here if I can’t be accepted as a countrywoman in my own country?". Researchers have documented a steep decline in the transmission of traditional performing arts from parents to children in urban households, with classical dance forms like Sattriya and Mohiniyattam losing their community-level practitioners even as they gain occasional slots on television talent shows where they are repackaged as entertainment spectacles rather than living rituals.

Alongside, the food system tells a similar story, where the biodiversity of Indian agriculture, which once included over 100,000 varieties of rice alone, according to the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, has been dramatically narrowed by the Green Revolution's emphasis on high-yield monocultures, and today the culinary traditions built around those lost grains are disappearing alongside them. A local farmer who once cooked with pokkali rice during the monsoon season, a grain uniquely adapted to backwater salinity and carrying with it centuries of agricultural knowledge encoded in practice, now finds that grain increasingly difficult to source as commercial cultivation dwindles. What appears to be merely a dietary shift is, in reality, the severing of a thread that connected a community to its ecology, its festivals, its identity.

Digital Preservation of Heritage

The same technological revolution that accelerates cultural homogenization has also, paradoxically, become one of the most powerful tools available for cultural preservation, and a growing number of institutions and individuals are exploiting this contradiction with impressive results. The Digital Library of India project, undertaken in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science and Carnegie Mellon University, has digitised over 250 million pages of rare manuscripts, books, and documents in regional languages, making them freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection. The Endangered Archives Programme, funded by the British Library, has supported over 30 projects in South Asian countries like Nepal, Bhutan, and India, recording oral traditions, folk music, and ritual performances in communities where the last living practitioners are often elderly and the window for documentation is closing fast.

Perhaps the most democratizing development has been the rise of vernacular content on platforms like YouTube and Instagram, where creators in languages as varied as Bhojpuri, Dogri, and Santhali have built substantial audiences without needing the approval or resources of legacy media gatekeepers. A folk musician from Rajasthan named Sawai Khan, virtually unknown outside his district a decade ago, now has over three million subscribers on YouTube, and the comments on his videos are filled with messages from the Indian diaspora in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom people who discovered their own heritage through an algorithm rather than through a classroom, and who are now seeking out more. The digital platform, for all its distortions and perils, has in this sense done something that decades of government cultural policy could not make cultural heritage feel cool, accessible, and alive to a generation that had been taught, implicitly, that modern meant Western.

Balancing Past & Progress

The movement to keep India "Indian," however, carries within it a risk that its most sincere proponents must not ignore, and that is the risk of calcification of mistaking the preservation of form for the preservation of spirit. A living culture does not merely repeat itself; it absorbs, transforms, and innovates, and the greatest cultural achievements of the Indian tradition have always been the product of exactly this kind of creative encounter with the foreign and the new. Several legends were born in this peninsula and taught us how to relish our culture and also explore it bit by bit. Take examples like Kabir, who drew from both Hindu and Sufi wells, the Chola bronzes absorbed influences from Gupta classicism and remade them into something singular. Similarly, Rabindranath Tagore synthesised Bengali folk tradition, Sanskrit poetry, and Western musical theory and produced an art form that belonged to all of them and was reducible to none. This means the movement faces a hard but necessary reckoning with the difference between cultural preservation and cultural policing. When enthusiasm for tradition slides into the harassment of couples holding hands on Valentine's Day, or the vandalism of film sets depicting interfaith romance, or the demands to cleanse textbooks of historical complexity, it stops being cultural protection and becomes cultural coercion, and it poisons the very well from which it claims to drink. The most credible voices in this space, scholars, artists, linguists, activists working at the community level, understand this distinction instinctively, which is why their work tends to be generative rather than prohibitive.

The path forward, then, is more complex than retreating into nostalgia or uncritically surrendering to the global monoculture, yet it is something harder and more interesting than either a deliberate, pluralistic, and democratically negotiated stewardship of what India has been so that it can more freely decide what the land of the Ganges would become. The so- called “crisis of cultural identity” while real, need not be met with fear rather it can be met with the same restless absorptive irrepressible creative energy that built the civilization in the first place, carved the Ajanta caves, composed the Mahabharata and taught the world to count with zero and it could be said that energy has not gone anywhere, it only needs to be named nurtured and trusted to find its own contemporary form.

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