North INDIA

North India is culturally rich and diverse and is supported by very large cities: apart from the great metropolis of Delhi, the cities of Lucknow, Patna, Kanpur, Allahabad, Varanasi, Meerut, Dehradun, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Ludhiana, Amritsar, Jalandhar, Patiala, Srinagar, Jammu, Bhopal and Indore would rank with the most populous cities of Europe. Northern India is a geographic and linguistic-cultural region of India which approximately corresponds to the northern region of the Indian subcontinent. In traditional Indian geography, The Vindhya mountains, in particular the line marked by the Narmada River and the Mahanadi River marks the southern boundary of north India. The dominant geographic features of northern India are the Indo-Gangetic Plain and the Himalayas.

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, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan (Bihar and Jharkhand are also considered as parts of East India). The National Capital Territory of Delhi is also a part of northern India. It shares some of its cultural, historical and linguistic heritage with neighbouring country Pakistan, which was a part of the region before the Partition.

The languages spoken in northern India, namely, Hindi (around 300 million), Punjabi (37 million), Bhojpuri (23 million) and others are classified by linguists as being Indo-Aryan languages.