India was united on the strength of religious culture and Sanskrit language. All over India the lingua franca, or the language, common language, at least for the scholars, not for the common man… The common man could speak any language — Hindi, Parsi, or Bengali, Oriya, Telugu, so many. There are so many languages. In every district you will find some language. But that was not taken into consideration. When education is concerned, every student all over India, they would take education in Sanskrit. Sanskrit language was the…

So our present government, they have introduced a state language as Hindi. There are so many protests and so many quarrels. They would have done better if they would have introduced Sanskrit language as it was previously. So the Sanskrit language was one, and the culture was Vedic. Therefore there was no disunion.

Every part of the country in India, the same system. He may be a Bengali, he may be a Maharastrian, he may be a Gujarati, or he may be Oriya — there were so many provinces — but the culture was the same. Another unity was that sacred places were distributed all over India. Just like Gaya, a sacred place, it is situated in Bihar. And sacred place, Benares, it is situated in Uttar Pradesh. Vrndavana is situated on the border of Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. Similarly, Kashmir, and Punjab also; in South India, Ramesvaram; in Himalayan province, Haridwar.

In this way all these provinces were distributed, and still it is going on. The provincialism is amongst the educated circle. So far the mass of people are concerned, they don’t know what is province. They travel from one province to another. They don’t require any visa. They don’t require any passport. So that was very nice.

From Srila Prabhupada’s lecture on Sri Caitanya-caritamrta, Madhya-lila 21.62-67 — January 6, 1966, New York