International perceptions of India

IRL, our perception of "India" is actually of north India. India is Aryan; "Indian" restaurants (at least in America; not sure how it works in the UK) are much closer to Punjabi than, say, Gujarati cuisine. This isn't "natural"; it evolved this way for historical reasons.

After a thousand years of divergence, Andalusada's Indian subcontinent has diverged in two ways, hinted at before but spelled out explicitly here:

• The colonial hegemon is French. England, Scotland, Portugal and a few other players all have their own presence on the subcontinent, but most of that looks disproportionately large on maps because otherwise it wouldn't be visible at all.
• Colonialism has been much less successful. Because of various trends that are still too far in the future for me to explain yet, the French Empire has not been able to build a united French Raj. While Paris controls much more of India than you might expect (especially given that unlike the United Kingdom IRL they have not had a solid century of domestic tranquility), Gujarat and points north have repeatedly fought the Firangis to a standstill, and Bengal has successfully played its French and Scottish (later Anglo-Scottish) neighbors off each other so long and so well that it's become an established buffer state.

So what are the consequences of this?

The psychogeography of India is at least tripartite.

• The three poles of the subcontinent are the (French-affiliated, Dravidian-Marathi) south, "Bengal" (broadly northeast India, including quite a bit that isn't actually Bengali), and "India" (the unspecified north-northwest that's able to more or less hold its own.)
• "India" is still considered to be exotic; independence has made it something of a terra incognita. (Even now, it's perfectly normal for maps of the region to be simply and startlingly wrong.)
• "Indian" restaurants (in the IRL sense) don't exist any more than "European" ones do. That said, however, foreigners have (say) a much broader and vaguer sense of what counts as "Bengal" than the locals do.

Franco-Dravidian normativity

France has firm control over the Deccan Plateau, and it's lasted longer than anybody else has had a significant presence in the subcontinent. As a result, a lot of the foundational stuff about Indology was written by the French about their subjects.

• South Indian loanwords and concepts are much more familiar than northern ones, and the terminology used to describe them generally is what's used in French territory. Siddha medicine, for instance, is probably more familiar than ayurveda. (The crore is definitely known as the cautie.) English is starting to absorb Bengali words, but not nearly as many, and France is doing the same.
• A huge number of subcontinental loanwords and proper nouns have been Romanized using French, not English, orthography. ("Kerala" is better known as Queirale, for instance.) Depending on the balance of the Great Powers, orthography and word selection may well have political connotations.
• The Mar Thoma churches are rather more familiar than they are IRL, and they're assumed to have many more followers than they actually do. Religious coexistence in southern India is assumed to be under relatively enlightened Christian dominance (which in fairness it actually is now, but it's also used very anachronistically.)
• Non-Dravidian Indian culture is defined in relation to Dravidian culture.
• North Indians are defined in opposition to Franco-Dravidian hegemony. Even if, say, any given Kashmiri has no stake in or contact with the politics of the day, it's assumed that they do, and listeners will be somewhat surprised to learn otherwise.