Family and Society · Sub-pillar 7.6

Culture, heritage and languages

Languages, arts, crafts, festivals, heritage and sport as living parts of everyday Indian life.

What is culture, heritage and languages?

Culture, heritage and languages is sub-pillar 7.6 of the 47 BH framework for a developed Bharat by 2047, the last of six sub-pillars under the Family and Society pillar. It asks whether India's languages, arts, crafts, festivals, heritage and sport remain living parts of everyday life rather than museum pieces, and whether a developed Bharat will still be recognisably Bharat.

Why it matters for 2047

Development without culture is a hotel: comfortable and anonymous. What makes a country worth developing is what it is, and India is its languages, its music and dance, its crafts, its festivals, its monuments and its games. The question for 2047 is whether these remain things ordinary people do and speak and make, or become things they watch others do.

Languages are the clearest test. India speaks more than a hundred languages and thousands of mother tongues, and the pressure of schooling, media and migration pushes towards a few. Every language that stops being spoken at home takes a literature, a way of thinking and a community's memory with it.

Heritage and sport are the visible measures. Monuments conserved and visited, crafts that still earn a living, and medals at the games the world watches tell the world and India itself that the country's culture is alive. 47 BH tracks them not for pride but as evidence.

Where India stands

  • 121

    languages and 1,369 rationalised mother tongues were recorded in Census 2011, from 19,569 raw returns; 22 are scheduled languages spoken by 96.71% of the population. Hindi was the mother tongue of 43.63%, Bengali of 8.03% and Marathi of 6.86%.[1]

  • 44

    Indian properties are on UNESCO's World Heritage List after the Maratha Military Landscapes were inscribed in July 2025: 36 cultural, 7 natural and 1 mixed, placing India sixth in the world by count.[2][3]

  • 107

    medals, 28 of them gold, was India's record haul at the 2023 Asian Games in Hangzhou, the first time the country passed a hundred; at the Paris Olympics of 2024 India won six medals.[4]

  • 93%

    of Indians aged six and above spent time on culture, leisure, mass media or sport on a given day in 2024, 171 minutes on average, and 90.3% on socialising, community or religious activity, which includes festivals, according to the Time Use Survey.[5]

India's culture is practised, not preserved. Nine in ten people take part in community and religious life every day, festivals fill the calendar in every region, 22 scheduled languages each carry a living literature and press, and the world has recognised 44 Indian sites as heritage of all humanity. [1][2][5] Indian sport has moved from a single medal a games to a hundred at the Asian level. [4]

The pressures are real. Hundreds of the smaller languages have few speakers and are passing out of use as children are schooled in larger ones; crafts compete with factory goods for the same customers; and leisure time is increasingly media time, which can crowd out the making and performing that keep a culture alive. [1][5] Olympic medals remain few for a country of India's size. [4]

A note on the numbers: the language figures are from Census 2011, since the 2021 Census was delayed, and the Census counts only mother tongues with more than 10,000 speakers as languages, so the true number of living tongues is higher and the number endangered is not officially measured; World Heritage counts recognise outstanding value but not condition or visitor numbers; medals are a narrow measure of sport; the Time Use Survey groups culture, leisure and media together and does not separate making from consuming. 47 BH will add measures of craft livelihoods, language transmission and heritage conservation when credible national data exist.

On the 47 BH report card

Every 15 August, 47 BH reports how far India has come on each sub-pillar. For this sub-pillar, the headline indicators are:

  • Speakers of each scheduled language and of smaller mother tongues (Census).
  • World Heritage and nationally protected sites, their condition and visitors (UNESCO; Archaeological Survey of India).
  • Medals at the Olympic and Asian Games, and sports participation (Indian Olympic Association; Time Use Survey).
  • Participation in arts, crafts and cultural activity, and craft livelihoods (Time Use Survey; Ministry of Textiles).

Two lenses on culture, heritage and languages

City and village

47 BH asks whether a child in a city speaks her grandparents' language, knows her region's dances and crafts and plays the games her village played, or whether culture has become something she watches on a phone. The village is where most of India's living culture is still made; the city is where it is most often lost or reinvented.

Learn, avoid, protect

Learn
What can India learn from countries that revived languages through schooling and media, that made heritage pay for its own upkeep through visitors without being cheapened, and that built sporting excellence from mass participation rather than a few academies?
Avoid
Which mistakes should it avoid, such as treating culture as tourism, letting a few languages crowd out the rest in school and screen, or measuring heritage by the number of listings rather than by whether people still use and love the places?
Protect
What of its own should it protect, such as the festival as the organising rhythm of community life, the craft traditions that employ millions and carry centuries of skill, the classical and folk arts still learned from a teacher's hands, and the habit of speaking more than one language at home?

What this sub-pillar does not cover

Each topic has one home in the framework. These related topics sit elsewhere:

Questions about culture, heritage and languages

How many languages does India have?

Census 2011 recorded 121 languages and 1,369 rationalised mother tongues from 19,569 raw returns; 22 scheduled languages are the mother tongue of 96.71% of Indians. Hindi is spoken as a mother tongue by 43.63%, Bengali by 8.03% and Marathi by 6.86%. [1]

How many World Heritage Sites does India have?

44 as of July 2025, after the Maratha Military Landscapes, twelve forts in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, were inscribed: 36 cultural, 7 natural and 1 mixed, the sixth-largest number in the world. [2][3]

How does India do in international sport?

India won a record 107 medals, including 28 gold, at the 2023 Asian Games in Hangzhou, and six medals at the 2024 Paris Olympics. [4]

How much time do Indians spend on culture and leisure?

93% of people aged six and above spent time on culture, leisure, mass media or sport on a given day in 2024, 171 minutes on average, up from 9.9% to 11% of the day since 2019, according to the Time Use Survey. [5]

Why is culture a development question?

Because it is what development is for. A country that reaches high income having lost its languages, crafts and festivals would have become somewhere else. 47 BH measures culture so that Bharat in 2047 is both developed and itself.

Sources

  1. Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, Census of India 2011, "Language: India, States and Union Territories" (Table C-16), Paper 1 of 2018, 25 June 2018. https://new.census.gov.in/nada/index.php/catalog/42458/download/46089/C-16_25062018.pdf
  2. Ministry of Culture, "Maratha Military Landscapes of India inscribed in UNESCO's World Heritage List" (India's 44th property), as reported by News On AIR, 12 July 2025. https://www.newsonair.gov.in/maratha-military-landscapes-of-india-inscribed-in-unescos-world-heritage-list
  3. UNESCO World Heritage List, India's 44 properties by category, as compiled by Padhai, 2025. List: whc.unesco.org/en/statesparties/in. https://padhai.ai/blogs-padhai/unesco-world-heritage-sites-in-india-upsc-notes
  4. Indian medal tally at the Hangzhou 2023 Asian Games (107 medals, 28 gold), as reported by Deccan Herald, 8 October 2023; Paris 2024 Olympic tally of six medals from the Indian Olympic Association. https://www.deccanherald.com/sports/india-ends-asian-games-campaign-with-107-medals-2716950
  5. Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, "Time Use Survey 2024", press release, 25 February 2025. https://mospi.gov.in/sites/default/files/press_release/PR_TUS_25022025.pdf

47 BH cites every figure so that it can be checked. If you find an error, it will be corrected openly and the date below will change.

All sub-pillars of Family and Society

Back to the Family and Society pillar  ·  47 BH home