This thread's pretty chaotic but I kinda like how every possible way of fulfulling the AHC is under discussion. To add my bit:
Linguistic 90%
This is just Hindi lmao. And speaking of Hindi/Sanskrit... A major influence on the development of Standard German was the language of the Martin Luther Bible, and Standard Italian is the same Tuscan used by Dante. So it seems like a dialect popular in poetry/religion can become an accepted linguistic standard... however, these dialects were not backed up by literature alone! Tuscany was competitive in Italian finance and farming alike; meanwhile, the Upper Saxon language of the Martin Luther Bible was backed by Saxony's universities, and influenced further by the Franconian of Nuremberg (a sophisticated manufacturing center with investments all over Central Europe).
To dominate India in the way French dominates France, Sanskrit needs to be a language of commerce, or thoroughly take over education, or both. And if Sanskrit
is doing all that... As more and more demands were piled on Classical Greek, it simplified into Koine Greek (big differences in grammar and pronunciation). As more demands were piled onto Classical Chinese, Classical Chinese became a written standard only; spoken Chinese continued to evolve into a fluid series of dialects with staggering diversity across space and time. But mutated Greek is still Greek, and mutated Chinese is still Chinese. But is mutated Sanskrit Sanskrit? No; it is now a Prakrit. This is why I do not believe Sanskrit can naturally become the language of 90% unity, any more than Avestan could become the language of Sasanid Persia.
Anyways, few major countries had 90% unity before modern standardized education. The ones that got it seem to have had 90-100% of the population speaking similar dialects, and then one dialect among them evolves into/is declared the standard. With India, there's two big language families, and while the Dravidian languages do take a LOT of loanwords from Sanskrit the grammar is very different.
Even with only 1 language family, there's still the question of why Spanish never dominated Spain as French did France. This can be partly attributed to France being ahead in development until the 1970s, but also to Madrid really not being very economically central to Spain, nowhere near the same extent as Paris was in France.
- Paris dominated trade/communication routes across northern France, and so despite Parisians never aggressively colonizing the rest of France their language was influential enough to become the effective standard long before the Revolution and the 1800s regimes made everyone learn it.
- Madrid, despite sitting in the center of a vast zone of Castilian Reconquista colonization/assimilation spanning from Asturias to Cadiz, was also easily outclassed economically by Seville (entry port for Atlantic trade + center of the Guadalquivir farming zone) and Catalonia (Mediterranian manufacturing/crafts hub).
So political unification+aggressive colonization (the "Qin Shi Huang" approach) is not itself the solution to regionalism. Of course, the Ganges will never be as uncompetitive within India as Madrid was within Spain, but there will inevitably be strong regional variation that a standard language will have to overcome.
And it can be overcome... at a political cost. Think about it from the perspective of a 1960s Tamilian (which is easy for me a as a 2020s Tamilian, but I digress): it doesn't matter if Sanskrit is more holy than Hindi, because from your perspective they both present the same challenge to Tamil. They both deny your vernacular a space to grow/exist, and in the worst possible case Tamil may be denigrated by its own native-speakers as a language without relevance to their life and ambitions (a bit like how, unfortunately, the Sindhi language is seen among Indian Sindhis today). It may seem a little less reasonable to be paranoid about that nowadays, when the future of Tamil is assured (artistic production is prolific, strong locally-based business scene) but in the 1960s when people still didn't know what exactly India was going to be like in sixty years it should seem more understandable.
True, but while Urdu was always the plan, it would have been harder to implement if Urdu hadn't taken over Karachi. As it was, the incoming Mohajirs replaced the outgoing Sindhi Hindus, and suddenly Pakistan's temporary capital was dominated by people who were already somewhat used to Urdu. It also failed to take over Dhaka, with the expected consequences for Bengal. A similar dynamic can be seen in Indonesia, where even though the spread of Indonesian owes a lot to the state education system it was already the dominant language of Batavia's bazaars before that.
Religious 90%
The consensus seems to be that this requires an absence of Islam; I partly agree (small Muslim seafarer communities along the western coast don't represent a challenge to 90% unity; invasion across the Indus does). Hinduism is a big-tent label to the point where even Sikhism with its evident Sufi influence wasn't too far outside the mainstream until
it explicitly set itself apart in the 1870s. Meanwhile even local cults like Puri Jagannath lean on pan-Hindu terminology heavily. It's possible that all Indic religions end up considered part of the same/similar traditions even in a world without Islam to offer a contrasting case.
The trouble is that the Indus Valley was invaded so often (Scythians, Parthian House of Suren, Kushans, Hunas, on and on) that eventually someone was going to do it who
also had a religion that they wanted everyone else to know about. Unless some Indian empire also governs Afghanistan, or some state that doesn't care about converting people (Sasanid Persia?) holds Afghanistan on India's behalf, the Indus cannot be defended unless you turn Punjab
into a wasteland bereft of roads or bridges.
Political 100%
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The core of China can be considered as the sum of the following regions:
- The North China Plain. During the Shang and Zhou eras (before 500 BC more or less) this area was synonymous with China. At the time, Chinese culture did not exist to any appreciable extent outside of it.
- The Western Mountains (Shanxi/Shaanxi). In the era of the Qin and Han, this area was sometimes called Guanzhong ("within the [mountain] passes"). When those passes are adequately guarded, the area is a giant castle. The Qin took advantage of this to stay safe while they conquered the rest of China. This area remained the center of every all-China government until the fall of the Northern Song.
- The South. Today, it's the most economically dynamic part of China-- inklings of its future greatness were evident from the Tang onward. However, back in the era of the Zhou it wasn't even part of China. The Qin and Han began subjugating the locals, but without a firm grasp on the coast all they were left with was the inland hills-- which remain somewhat isolated and contain large non-Han minorities even today. Meanwhile, the coast (the most prosperous and "Chinese" part) was settled not in any orderly fashion but by waves of refugees fleeing steppe invasions of the north from the 300s to... well, arguably the 1700s (Hakka migrating south amid the Qing takeover). Culturally, it took a while for the region to even consider itself as anything but "Northerners, but moved down South".
The logic of reassembling China after a period of disorder was remarkably consistent for over a millennium and a half:
he who controls Guanzhong controls the northern plain, and he who dominates the northern plain dominates the southern coast. Even when the south became prosperous enough to pay for the maintenance of an independent southern state, the military inequality between a united north and a united south (north has more horses, more soldiers, flatter terrain for faster road transport, etc.) means that:
- the north is not that hard to unite, and a united north will eventually defeat and take over a united south.
- if a southern regime is to guarantee its survival, it must destroy the north before it unites. This has happened twice: the Ming conquest of northern Mongol warlords propping up a failing Yuan dynasty, and the KMT conquest of northern Chinese warlords propping up a failing Republic.
All of this might still be overcome, if not for the strong economic links across China (symbolized by the Grand Canal), the Imperial conception of China as an all-encompassing earthly order, and the Han conception of themselves as a people of common ancestry, customs, and destiny.
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India, however, does not have any such hierarchy of regions-- multiple states can exist without being a mortal threat to each other, and no region is drastically more defensible/prosperous than any other. There's wars, sure, but regions can hold each other off for a long time. Even during the height of the Gupta dynasty they still had a Deccan rival, the Vakataka dynasty. A lot of grand imperial conflicts in India seem to end in something more like mutual exhaustion: the Palas and Rashtrakutas competing over Kannauj for two hundred years before both being replaced by other dynasties due to unrelated causes, or Vijayanagar first causing the Bahmani sultanate to collapse before getting destroyed itself by the 4 biggest fragments. All that aside, it's not impossible for a native power to bring these regions under one flag, it's happened several times-- but:
- regions will inevitably have high autonomy. Nowadays we call it federalism, but even back then a region with leverage would be able to make its own rules. The Paramaras, a dynasty governing Madhya Pradesh, were key to the Rashtrakuta ambition of reaching the Ganges. When the Rashtrakutas finally collapsed, the Paramaras went on to found their own kingdom with one or two successor dynasties before the Muslim conquest. Bengal also pretty much ruled a sub-empire within the Mughal empire, with the Nawab of Bengal treating lordship over Bihar and Orissa as a natural right. And then there's the 4 great sub-dynasties of the Maratha realm.
- if it breaks again it might stay broken for a long while.
Also, the existence of multiple Indian states, more than the existence of multiple Chinese states, is seen as natural. As stated before, even a South-Chinese Han will admit that their cultural patrimony, and probably most of their ancestry, is of northern origin. However, by the time Gangetic states were in a condition to open up new areas for settlement, these areas were already home to local dynasties (and I don't just mean Dravidians, I mean the Deccan Aryans too) who tried to fit within a larger Indian religious/political/philosophical order but also put their own spin on it-- they patronized literature and art styles to foster a sense of distinctiveness. So maybe if the culture of the Ganges is
worse at expanding and adapting itself to local conditions, then maybe you could get to a point where a Gangetic empire looks out and sees uncivilized areas in need of colonists? But how to get that many people to move around? China's answer was often "if conditions in the north
are really bad, people will move south."
