Comparison Between Indian And Chinese Culture Cultural Studies Essay

The essay explains what culture is and shows the difference or comparison between Indian and Chinese culture depending upon four cultural factors which are cuisine, festivals, traditional clothing and traditional music.

Culture is developed by beliefs, practices, faith, custom, art intelligence, way to live, food habits, language, and economy. Culture has given identity to the society that named Christian, Hindu, Muslim or Jewish, Buddhist etc. When we come across art or custom we get to know from which religion they belong to. Culture growth is community growth (sadashivan,N.D).

Four factors

Tradition Clothing in china

The Pien-fu, the shen-I, and the ch’ang-p’ao are the three main types of traditional clothing. The pien-fu is a two piece ceremonial costume of a tunic-like top extending to knees and a skirt or a trousers extending to the ankles. The ch’ang-p’ao comparatively is a one piece ceremonial costume extending from the shoulders all the way to heels and the shen-I is the cross between pien-fu and ch’ang-p’ao it consists tunic of a skirt or a trouser like in pien-fu, but the skirt and the tunic are sewed together and essentially one piece like the ch’ang-p’ao. Tunic and trousers and tunic and skirts needed less number of stitches against the number of clothes used. Dark colors were preferred than light colors in their clothing tradition. These different designs came to be one of the unique features of traditional Chinese clothing (Oracle thinkquest,2010).

Chinese cuisine

Cooking Chinese is one of the greatest method in cooking. Chinese cuisine is consists two general components one is main food which contains starch or carbohydrate source, rice, noodles or buns. The second one is accompanying dishes which has vegetables, fish, meat. The primary eating utensil in the Chinese culture for the solid food are chopsticks, whereas spoons are used for soups. Traditionally there are eight main dishes style in Chinese cuisine which are Anhui, Cantonese, Fujian, Hunan, Jiangsu, Shandong, Szechuan, Zhejiang (shanghaifinance,2003).

Chinese festivals

The Chinese festivals starts with its new year which is first day of a year in lunar calendar usually between Jan and early Feb. followed by Lantern festival on the first day of the lunar month consists garden parties, firework displays and folk dance like dragon dance, lion dances. Then comes the dragon boat festival on 5th day of 5th lunar month and it contains activities like dragon boat racing and eating Zong Zi somewhat like pyramid shaped rice wrapped in reed or bamboo leaves (shanghaifinance,2003).

Traditional Chinese music

When listening to Chinese music, those who are unfamiliar with the music will not know what they are listening which is something very different and truly magnificent. The traditional Chinese music had diverse variations depending upon the time period. In traditional Chinese orchestras, the mixture of all the diverse instruments served to make a melodious and beautiful auditory atmosphere. The variations of rhythm, beat, tone quality, and additions in traditional Chinese music are highly distinctive (Oracle thinkquest,2010).

Tradition clothing in India

The style of Indian dressing are marked by both religious and regional variations. Men from all parts of India wear traditional lungi which is originally originated from the south India. It is a short length of a material worn around the thighs of sarong. A dhoti is a longer version of dhoti with a length of material pulled up from legs. Men from northern part of India wear pyjama which are like trousers. Sari is the most traditional type of dress worn by women in India. The style, the texture color of the sari cloth may vary but the great thing about its is that it has ageless charm. The sari can be worn in different styles like Guajarati, Bengali, malyali, Tamil etc. the tightly fitted short blouse under a sari. Apart from choli, ghagra and lehenga are worn by rajasthani women which is like a peaked skirt, dupatta a length of cotton cloth that covers the head. Another popular attire is salawar-kameez worn by women which was developed in Kashmir and Punjab but now its worn throughout the India (Stanely.N,2010).

Indian Cuisine

The Indian food is diversified as its culture. Hinduism and Islam are the two main religions that will contribute to the diverse cuisine culture of India. The Hindus a re traditionally vegetarians but somehow now many have taken up meat. The Muslims are famous for their mughali food, kababs, koftas, kormas, biryani and tandoori items.The northern part of indian cusine consists of rotis, chaparis and parathas with dals, vegetables, chuttneys, and pickels. Kheer, kulfi are the deserts of northern India cuisine items. The main dish of south Indian is rice and is served with sambhar, rasam, curd. After the meals Indians eat cardamom which serves a digestive spices (Stanely.N,2010).

Indian festivals

This is one of the most popular and colorful festival celebrated all over India. It comes at the time of March. People gather around it singing and dancing in Joy on the beat of Dholas and Nagaras. People powders on one and all and sprinkling of color waters. Holi for people is a festival of joy festivities and of rejection of all taboos and restrictions to forget the incalculable obligations that weigh us down and breathe the air of freedom (Stanely.N,2010). Another major festival is Diwali which falls at the end of October or sometimes the start of November, it is a festival that is celebrated by bursting crackers and It involves doing puja and it’s a very joyful festival.

Traditional Indian music

Raga is the soul of Indian music due to its exclusivity and artistic quality. Divine mood, belief, restrictions, and rituals are linked with ever Raga. The main element in classical style may be Sruti which is a base note, Sahitya is lyrics, Raga is the combination of note, Laya is rhythm and Tala are the beats (Stanely.N,2010).

Conclusion

I would like to conclude that I have a learnt a lot from this essay as I have done research and got to know what culture is and the difference between my Indian culture from the Chinese culture and during the time of research I found many information on my culture that I didn’t know about, though I have showed the difference between the two cultures but there are similarities in between them.