Ge­og­ra­phy of India facts

Madras. The renaming of cities in India started after the end of the British imperial period in 1947 and continues to date. Madras was changed to Chennai in 1994, but the old name is preserved in many institutions, like Madras Stock Exchange, Madras University and Madras High Court.

Varanasi. Hindus believe that bathing in the Ganges remits sins and that dying in Varanasi ensures release of a person's soul from the cycle of its transmigrations. Those who are lucky enough to die in Varanasi, are cremated on the banks of the Ganges, and are granted instant salvation. Thus, many Hindus arrive here for dying.

India is one of the few countries that use single time zone with a 30-minute increment from UTC. The country's east–west distance covers 28 degrees of longitude, resulting in two hours difference in astronomical time. Since authorities decided to have one time zone for the whole country, they had to adjust it precisely.

Ganges. Hindus consider the waters of the Ganges to be both pure and purifying. What the Ganges removes, however, is not necessarily physical dirt, but symbolic dirt; it wipes away the sins of the bather, not just of the present, but of a lifetime.

New Delhi. Modern Standard Hindi is a standardised register of the Hindustani language. It is the native language of people living in Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and parts of Rajasthan.

Urdu. These two varieties of Hindustani language are nearly identical in basic structure and grammar, and at a colloquial level also in vocabulary and phonology. Mutual intelligibility decreases in literary and specialised contexts, which rely on educated vocabulary drawn from different sources; Hindi drawing its specialised vocabulary from Sanskrit, whilst Urdu (used on the Muslim court) does so from Persian and Arabic.

Islam. The two major religions of India are Hinduism (80%) and Islam (13.4%). The Muslim population of India is the third largest in the world.

Bharat. The geographical term Bharat is recognised by the Constitution of India as an official name for the country. It is is used by many Indian languages in its variations (Bhārat in Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Konkani and Marathi; Bharôt in Assamese and Bengali etc.). The eponym of Bharat is Bharata, a theological figure that Hindu scriptures describe as a legendary emperor of ancient India.

Hyderabad. Bombay was renamed to Mumbai in 1995; Madras was renamed to Chennai in 1996; Calcutta changed name to Kolkata in 2001. Bhopal, Bangalore and Mysore are speculated to be renamed in the future.