Almost every region in India has a literary tradition that goes back several centuries. One of the earliest texts to have survived is the Rigveda-sanhita. It is an Aryan collection of hymns to the gods and is more than 3,000 years old.

The Vedic language of the Aryans later developed into the language of Sanskrit. One of the most famous Sanskrit works is the Mahabharata which is the world's longest poem. Gradually, however, Sanskrit stopped being spoken as an everyday language and was used only by scholars. A new literature began to grow instead in Hindi, the language spoken in north India. Tulsidas, a sixteenth-century poet, wrote Ramcharitamanas, the story of the mythical Hindu God-king Rama. It remains one of India's best-known books today.

Literature also flourished in other regions. Rabindranath Tagore, who was born in Bengal, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. He is perhaps the greatest Bengali poet, though he also wrote novels and painted.

“In the English-speaking World”