This is the script for my video posted on October 23, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
North India and South India share a country, but they speak unrelated languages and grew up on very different land. Today the south holds a disproportionate share of India’s wealth while the north holds a growing share of its people, and India’s first census in sixteen years could shift the balance of power between them. So how did these two Indias form, and what does the tension between them mean for India’s place in the world?
On a topographical map, the Vindhya and Satpura ranges run roughly parallel from east to west, with the Narmada River valley between them, dividing north from south. North of that line lies the Indo-Gangetic Plain, one of the largest and most fertile farm belts on Earth, where monsoon rains and Himalayan snowmelt keep the rivers flowing year-round.
But the passes of the northwest left the plain exposed to migrants and conquerors, from the Indo-Greeks and Kushans to the Mughals, so the north’s great powers were land empires facing Central Asia.
South of the line lies the Deccan Plateau, a rocky, drier tableland framed by coastal mountains called the Western and Eastern Ghats. Its rivers depend on the monsoon, so the interior grew hardy millet while people crowded into the river deltas and coasts, growing rice and facing the Indian Ocean. Southern kingdoms like the Cheras, Cholas, and Pandyas traded with the Roman Empire, Arabia, and Southeast Asia.
Northern empires rarely held the deep south for long. Even Ashoka, the Mauryan emperor who ruled most of the subcontinent in the 3rd century BCE, described the southern kingdoms as neighbors beyond his borders.
That separation preserved a deep linguistic divide. The north mostly speaks Indo-European languages like Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu, while the south speaks Dravidian languages like Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada, a separate family despite heavy borrowing from Sanskrit, written in scripts that share an ancestor with Hindi’s. One Dravidian language, Brahui, survives in Pakistan, which some linguists read as a sign that the family once reached much farther north, though others think its speakers arrived there later.
The two regions shared Hinduism, and the devotional Bhakti movement that transformed it across India began in the Tamil south. Islam mostly reached the north with armies from Central Asia and Afghanistan, but it reached the Kerala coast centuries earlier with Arab merchants, and Kerala is also home to India’s oldest Christian community, which traces its roots to the first century CE.
Genetically, though, northerners and southerners aren’t separate races. Most South Asians descend from three ancient groups: hunter-gatherers that geneticists call Ancient Ancestral South Indians, Indus Valley people with ancestry related to ancient Iranian hunter-gatherers, and Steppe herders who arrived roughly 3500 to 4000 years ago. Northerners tend to carry more Steppe ancestry and southerners more hunter-gatherer ancestry, but it’s a gradient rather than a line, and both descend heavily from the Indus Valley.
The first power to bring the whole peninsula and the northern plain under one lasting authority was the British, and they arrived by sea. The East India Company, founded in 1600 to trade in goods like spices, cotton, and silk, built fortified posts on India’s coasts and learned to fight there, battling the French for the southeast in the mid-18th century.
By 1803 its private army of around 200k men, mostly Indian soldiers, was roughly twice the size of the British Army, and the company used it to conquer the subcontinent from the coasts inward.
After a major rebellion in 1857, which was concentrated in the north while the south stayed largely quiet, the British Crown took over, ruling most of India directly and the rest through princely states. Britain governed north and south as one empire, but in some ways it deepened the divide.
In 1856 a missionary named Robert Caldwell popularized the label Dravidian for the southern language family, and southern intellectuals who resented a small Brahmin elite’s grip on colonial jobs and schools turned it into a political identity.
That fed the Dravidian movement of E.V. Ramasamy, better known as Periyar, which attacked the caste system and resisted Hindi. When the Madras provincial government made Hindi compulsory in many schools in 1938, protests raged until the order was withdrawn in 1940.
In the late 1930s the movement began demanding a separate nation called Dravida Nadu, and Periyar’s former protégé C.N. Annadurai carried that demand past independence with a new political party called the DMK. It never caught on outside Tamil areas, and it faded after India redrew its states along linguistic lines in the 1950s. Then, after India’s 1962 war with China, a 1963 constitutional amendment effectively barred campaigning for secession, and the DMK dropped the demand for good.
But the language fight wasn’t over. The constitution had set 1965 as the year Hindi would replace English as the national government’s sole official language, and when the date arrived, Madras State, now Tamil Nadu, broke out into weeks of riots. About 70 people died by official count, including protesters who set themselves on fire. The national government backed down, and a 1967 law kept English in official use indefinitely. That same year the DMK won power in Tamil Nadu, and Dravidian parties governed the state for the next 59 years, until a newcomer party won in 2026.
Those divides still shape Indian politics. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, which has led India’s government since 2014, draws its core support from the Hindi-speaking heartland, and that heartland holds most of the votes. The Hindi-speaking states, including Delhi, have about 225 of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of parliament, while the five southern states, home to about a fifth of Indians, have 129. Many southern voters see the BJP as a Hindi-belt party, and critics accuse it of pushing Hindi over regional languages, which it denies.
The south is much richer than the north though, producing more than 30% of India’s economic output with about 20% of its people. Per-person income in Telangana is more than five times that of Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh has an economy about the size of Tamil Nadu’s despite having roughly three times as many people. Because India’s tax system moves money from richer states to poorer ones, as most federations do, southern states generally contribute far more in national taxes than they receive back.
But the south has far lower birth rates. A woman in Tamil Nadu now has 1.3 children on average, compared with 2.9 in Bihar, and every major state still at or above replacement fertility is in the Hindi heartland, so the north will supply most of India’s future workers and voters.
That’s the problem for the south. In 1976, India froze each state’s share of parliamentary seats at the 1971 census so that states wouldn’t be punished for slowing their population growth. The freeze was extended in 2001, but it lapses once results are published from the first census taken after 2026, and India begins counting its population in February 2027. If today’s 543 seats were reallocated strictly by projected population, some analysts estimate that Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Rajasthan would gain 26 seats while Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Andhra Pradesh would lose 21.
Northern politicians have a strong counterargument that every vote should count equally, and right now a member of parliament from a fast-growing northern state represents far more people than one from the south.
This matters far beyond India, because much of its economic and maritime future lives in the south. Sri Lanka, across the Palk Strait from Tamil Nadu, is roughly a quarter Tamil-speaking, and Tamil Nadu’s politics have shaped India’s policy there for decades. India backed Tamil militants in the early 1980s and then sent in peacekeepers from 1987 to 1990 in a costly intervention, and in 1991 a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber killed former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in Tamil Nadu in an attack widely seen as revenge.
Today, Sri Lanka’s navy keeps arresting Tamil Nadu fishermen in the waters around Katchatheevu, a tiny island India recognized as Sri Lankan in 1974. China, meanwhile, has built a foothold in Sri Lanka through projects like the port of Hambantota, which a Chinese state-owned company took over on a 99-year lease in 2017. That leaves the Indian government balancing Tamil Nadu’s demands against its need to keep Sri Lanka close.
The south also anchors India’s military and space power. The Indian Navy’s Eastern and Southern Naval Commands are headquartered in Visakhapatnam and Kochi, India’s space agency is based in Bengaluru, and its rockets launch from Sriharikota.
And the south is one of India’s main links into US-aligned technology supply chains as companies diversify away from China. Tamil Nadu alone accounted for about 42% of India’s electronics exports in the fiscal year ending March 2026, much of it from factories assembling iPhones, although Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh are winning chip and phone plants of their own. Also, Kerala alone receives about a fifth of the money Indians abroad send home, much of it from the Gulf.
So that’s India’s bind. Geography split the subcontinent into a north that looks overland and a south that looks out to sea, and that divide still defines the country. The north has the people and the votes, while the south has much of the wealth, the factories, the ports, and the connections to the outside world that India needs to become a great power.
Nobody serious is talking about the south breaking away anymore, but once India finishes counting its people, it will have to choose between giving the north the power its population demands and protecting the bargain that has kept the south invested in the union for half a century.
Keep reading
- Why does Myanmar (Burma) have two names?
- Why is Sri Lanka so important?
- Why is Guangxi’s fate different from places like Tibet and Xinjiang?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.