India
All regions
Every state and union territory we have published. Each page covers the same twelve topics.
Andaman Islands
Island Realms
A penal colony that became a society — and, beside it, four peoples whose ancestors were here tens of thousands of years before the first ship.
Anga & Seemanchal
Middle & Lower Gangetic Plain
Where Hindi stops and Bengal begins — a silk town, a snake-goddess epic, and a border belt that belongs to everyone around it.
Antarved Doab
Upper Indus–Gangetic Plain
Two rivers, no other boundary — which is how this became the country's canal belt, its sugar belt and the source of its standard language.
Awadh
Upper Indus–Gangetic Plain
A court that lost its state in 1856 and kept everything else — the kitchen, the dance, the embroidery and the manners.
Bagelkhand
Central Highlands & Forest Belt
A sandstone plateau that keeps sending things out — a white tiger, a gharana, coal, cement and power — and gets very little back.
Barak Valley
Eastern Himalaya & Brahmaputra Belt
A Bengali plain that drains the wrong way — downstream into Sylhet, over a wall of hills from the state it belongs to.
Bastar
Central Highlands & Forest Belt
A seventy-five-day Dussehra with no Rama in it, a lost-wax casting tradition where every mould is destroyed, and a weekly market that is the region's real parliament.
Bayaluseeme
Deccan Inland Plateau
The plain that tried both temple grammars side by side, then produced most of the century's Kannada writing and half its Hindustani singers.
Bengal Delta
Middle & Lower Gangetic Plain
A river that moved east and left its ports, its towns and its temples sitting on water that no longer runs.
Bhojpur & Purvanchal
Middle & Lower Gangetic Plain
A region with an overseas half — its songs are sung in Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad and Suriname by people whose ancestors left in the 1870s.
Brahmaputra Valley
Eastern Himalaya & Brahmaputra Belt
A river that floods on purpose — and an island in it the size of a district.
Braj
Upper Indus–Gangetic Plain
A religious story given a real map — every hill, pond and grove on it is named for an episode, and people still walk the route.
Bundelkhand
Central Highlands & Forest Belt
A region that solved its water problem in the eleventh century, forgot how, and now exports its young men instead.
Canara Coast
Western Coastal Strip
Four estuaries, an areca garden that pays for everything above the ghat, and three communities on the same hillside who arrived by entirely different routes.
Chenab Valley & Chamba
Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
Two rivers, one wall between them, and a shepherd economy that treats the passes as roads rather than as boundaries.
Chhattisgarh Plains
Central Highlands & Forest Belt
The rice bowl of central India, where the previous day's rice is a drink and a farmer's soil vocabulary is older and more precise than any survey.
Chola Nadu
Eastern Coastal Plains
A delta that turned rice into surplus, surplus into temples, and temples into a set of trades that outlived the dynasty by a thousand years.
Chota Nagpur Plateau
Central Highlands & Forest Belt
Three language families in one village, a script invented in 1925 that stuck, and sacred groves that are the original forest left standing as evidence.
Desh
Deccan Inland Plateau
A plateau that walks — two hundred and fifty kilometres to Pandharpur every monsoon, on jowar bread, behind a pair of palanquins.
Dhundhar & Shekhawati
Arid Northwest
A city laid out on a grid in 1727, and a belt of painted merchant houses paid for from Calcutta by families who never came back.
Dooars & Terai
Eastern Himalaya & Brahmaputra Belt
A gravel shelf that drinks its own rivers, planted with tea by a labour force brought a thousand kilometres, and still crossed at night by elephants.
Garhwal
Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
Four shrines that close for six months, a language that stops at a watershed, and a food economy built on millet because wheat will not grow at that angle.
Garo Hills
Northeast Hill Massif
Matrilineal A·chik country, cleared and burned on a rotation, cooking with ash-water instead of acid and keeping its harvest calendar in a hundred drums.
Goa & Gomantak
Western Coastal Strip
Four and a half centuries of Portuguese rule over a Konkani base, and a line drawn in the eighteenth century that still tells you which temple, which kitchen and which script you are standing in.
Hadoti
Arid Northwest
One perennial river turned this corner of the desert state into farmland, and almost everything else — the weaving, the painting, the wheat — follows from that.
Haryana Bangar & Bagar
Upper Indus–Gangetic Plain
A plain that measures wealth in buffalo, settles arguments in an akhara, and eats more ghee per head than almost anywhere else in the country.
Imphal Valley
Northeast Hill Massif
A valley floor that ferments its fish, writes in a script named after the body, and grows a rice the colour of ink.
Jammu Duggar
Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
A hill shelf that speaks its own language, built a state from the plain upward, and paints in a red that exists nowhere else in India.
Kalyana Karnataka
Deccan Inland Plateau
Bidri black, jowar white — a Persianate Deccan laid over the Kannada country that invented free verse.
Kangra & Dhauladhar
Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
The wettest slope in the western Himalaya, a painting school named after a valley, and a tea the plains forgot.
Kashmir Valley
Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
A closed basin that had to invent a winter — dried vegetables, a firepot worn under the coat, and a banquet built on pounded meat.
Khandesh
Deccan Inland Plateau
A hot river valley with its own language, India's banana district, and a bread eaten with roasted brinjal and a chutney fierce enough to be a dish.
Khasi & Jaintia Hills
Northeast Hill Massif
The wettest inhabited ground on earth, farmed and governed by clans that count descent through their mothers and protect their forests with taboo rather than law.
Kinnaur & Spiti
Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
One district where the monsoon stops, the pine gives out and the language changes family — and households keep the temple and the gompa in the same courtyard.
Kochi & Central Kerala
Western Coastal Strip
A coast, a laterite midland and a wall of mountains, in a strip 580 km long and rarely 100 km wide.
Kongu Nadu
Deccan Inland Plateau
A thirty-two-kilometre hole in a mountain range, and everything a dry country built out of the wind that comes through it.
Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands
Central Highlands & Forest Belt
Millet above, rice below, and two language families farming adjacent valleys.
Kosta Andhra
Eastern Coastal Plains
The richest rice country in the Telugu world, and the sourest, hottest kitchen in it.
Kullu & Mandi
Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
Where the gods hold property, travel by palanquin and start their festival on the day everyone else finishes theirs.
Kumaon
Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
A hundred stone temples in a deodar grove, a god who takes petitions on legal paper, and a pulse economy that runs on black soybean because nothing easier will grow at that angle.
Kutch
Arid Northwest
An island for four months of the year, and the densest surviving concentration of hand embroidery, block printing and pastoral craft anywhere in India.
Ladakh & Zanskar
Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
A cold desert that eats its grain roasted, drinks its fat in tea, and keeps its records in monasteries because nothing else here lasts.
Lakshadweep
Island Realms
India's only coral territory — ten inhabited islands, one imported grain, one fish, and a language border drawn across a hundred and thirty kilometres of open sea.
Magadh
Middle & Lower Gangetic Plain
A state's name comes from its monasteries, an empire came from its capital, and the water still comes from a system dug by hand.
Mahakoshal & Gondwana
Central Highlands & Forest Belt
A single cultural region that no state contains — which is the point, and the reason it is usually described as four state peripheries instead of one centre.
Malabar
Western Coastal Strip
The pepper coast that faced Arabia rather than India — and the far north, where the god arrives in person between December and April.
Malnad
Deccan Inland Plateau
Eight thousand millimetres of rain, a language nobody else speaks, and a souring agent made by boiling a fruit for three days.
Malwa Plateau
Central Highlands & Forest Belt
The tableland that fixed the zero meridian of Indian astronomy, grew the opium that paid for the China trade, and eats a fried snack for breakfast.
Marathwada
Deccan Inland Plateau
Two hundred years of being governed in Urdu, laid over a Marathi countryside that was already carving its temples out of the cliff.
Marava & Ramnad
Eastern Coastal Plains
A dry coast with no river, which exported bankers to Burma and brought back teak, and which keeps its heat in pepper rather than chilli.
Marwar & the Thar
Arid Northwest
The Aravallis cut the state in two — desert on one side, farmland on the other — and almost every difference follows that line.
Mewar
Arid Northwest
The one part of Rajasthan built around water it kept, and the one court that made refusal its whole political identity.
Mithilanchal
Middle & Lower Gangetic Plain
A pond culture with its own script, its own painting tradition, and a Brahmin kitchen built on fish.
Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills
Northeast Hill Massif
One clan system, one loom grammar and one kitchen, cut by four borders — and legible on all sides of every one of them.
Monpa & Tawang Belt
Eastern Himalaya & Brahmaputra Belt
Buckwheat, yak butter and a monastery library — a Tibetan Buddhist world on the Indian side of the eastern Himalaya.
Naga Hills
Northeast Hill Massif
Not one people with many dialects — many peoples on one ridge, who had to invent a creole to talk to each other.
Nanjil Nadu
Eastern Coastal Plains
The tail of the peninsula, where the Tamil kitchen switches to coconut oil, the Ghats run out, and a Kerala department maintains the palace.
Nicobar Islands
Island Realms
Austroasiatic speech, pandanus and pig, round houses on stilts — an archipelago that belongs, culturally, to Southeast Asia.
Nimar
Central Highlands & Forest Belt
A hot trough between two ranges, where a river is walked around on foot for three years and the sari border is copied off a fort wall.
North Konkan
Western Coastal Strip
A coast that is mostly estuary, worked by people who arrived by sea at six different dates and never fully merged.
Old Mysore
Deccan Inland Plateau
A court that spent its revenue on hydro-electricity and sandalwood soap, over a countryside that ate a millet ball it never chewed.
Pandya Nadu
Eastern Coastal Plains
A dry interior basin that runs on tanks, jasmine and a temple wedding, and stays open all night.
Patkai & Tirap Belt
Eastern Himalaya & Brahmaputra Belt
A pass at 1,136 metres that let a kingdom in, a road out and a language family straight through without stopping.
Punjab Doabs
Upper Indus–Gangetic Plain
Four interfluves, one language in two scripts, and a farming system that fed the country and spent its groundwater doing it.
Rarh
Middle & Lower Gangetic Plain
Brick where there is no stone, poppy seed where there was opium, and the dialect group that quietly became standard Bengali.
Rayalaseema
Deccan Inland Plateau
Ragi in the hand, chilli in the pot, and a temple economy on the one hill in the region that catches rain.
Rohilkhand & Katehar
Upper Indus–Gangetic Plain
An Afghan settlement that took root in a Katehari plain, and a forest edge that never accepted either.
Saurashtra
Arid Northwest
A peninsula with no perennial river, the last wild lions in Asia, and a caste of poets whose word was treated as a legal instrument.
Siang & Adi Belt
Eastern Himalaya & Brahmaputra Belt
One river with three names, a village council that still meets around a hearth, and a kitchen that cooks almost entirely without oil.
Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills
Eastern Himalaya & Brahmaputra Belt
Three peoples on one ridge, a fermentation cuisine built for a place with no salt pans, and two crops that rewrote the population — tea and large cardamom.
South Gujarat Littoral
Western Coastal Strip
A coast that has been receiving arrivals for a thousand years and turning them into local trades — a sacred fire, a diamond industry, and a forest slope that keeps its own calendar.
South Konkan
Western Coastal Strip
Laterite, kokum and Alphonso, with an all-night masked theatre and a language that has to keep explaining it is not simply Marathi.
South Odisha & Ganjam
Eastern Coastal Plains
A coast where Odia turns into Telugu by degrees, and where six lakh turtles use one river mouth in one week.
Sundarbans
Middle & Lower Gangetic Plain
A forest with a deity that both Hindus and Muslims petition before entering, and a tiger that is treated as a landlord rather than a hazard.
Telangana
Deccan Inland Plateau
A plateau that solved its rainfall problem with earthworks in the thirteenth century, and kept two languages in the same mouth ever since.
Tondaimandalam
Eastern Coastal Plains
A coast with no harbour, rivers with no water and a dynasty that solved architecture by carving hills into buildings.
Travancore & Kuttanad
Western Coastal Strip
A rice country farmed two metres below the sea, and a kingdom that signed itself over to its own temple and then governed as the deity's servant.
Tripura Hills & Plains
Northeast Hill Massif
A hill kitchen with no oil in it and a delta kitchen with mustard in everything, in one territory a day wide — and a fermented fish that both of them use.
Tulu Nadu
Western Coastal Strip
A language with its own script, its own inheritance law and its own possessed gods — and no state that carries its name.
Utkal
Eastern Coastal Plains
A temple that runs a kitchen, a wardrobe and a chariot yard, on a coast that remembers sailing east.
Uttarandhra
Eastern Coastal Plains
The coast where the mountain arrives at the beach — and Telugu picks up an Odia accent on the way north.
Vidarbha
Deccan Inland Plateau
Cotton on black soil, mandarins on red, and a mass conversion in 1956 that made this the centre of Buddhist India.