The script on the signboard changes several times across one Indian journey

The map of states is largely a map of languages

India reorganised most of its internal boundaries along linguistic lines in the decades after independence, which is why so many state borders correspond closely to where one major language gives way to another. It was a deliberate settlement of a contested question, and it has consequences a traveller notices within an hour of crossing one.

The most visible of these is the writing system. India uses a substantial number of distinct scripts, several of which look nothing like each other, and they are distributed regionally rather than mixed together. Devanagari is shared across a broad northern belt; Bengali and Assamese share a script; Gujarati, Odia and Gurmukhi each have their own.

The southern states are a separate matter again. Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam are four different languages written in four different scripts, and they belong to a language family distinct from the northern ones. Somebody comfortable reading a Delhi bus board will make no progress at all with a Madurai one.

Two link languages, unevenly distributed

In practice most long-distance travel is conducted in one of two languages that are not necessarily local to where you happen to be standing. English carries a great deal of the load, particularly in official signage, ticketing, hotels and anything that involves writing. Hindi carries much of the rest across the north and the centre.

The distribution of the two is genuinely uneven, and it is a politically live subject, so it is better stated plainly than glossed over. In much of the south and parts of the east, English is the more useful second language by a wide margin, and assuming Hindi will serve everywhere is a reliable way to get a cold response.

None of this makes anywhere difficult to travel in. It does mean the ease you had in one state may not follow you into the next, and that the clerk who answered you fluently in Bhopal has a counterpart in Thanjavur who will do exactly the same thing in a different language.

Transport signage follows its own conventions

The railways generally display station names in more than one script, typically the local language, Hindi and English, which makes the network unusually navigable for an outsider. It is one of the quieter services the system provides, and it is the reason a traveller with no local script at all can still identify a platform in the dark.

Buses are less accommodating. State transport vehicles frequently carry destination boards in the local script only, sometimes with a route number and sometimes without one, and the private operators are inconsistent about it. In a busy stand this is the commonest single point of confusion for visitors, and asking is faster than reading.

Numerals help more than people expect. International numerals are used almost universally for platform numbers, coach numbers, route numbers, prices and times, even where every word around them is in a script you cannot read. A ticket is therefore usually partly legible, which is enough to check the parts that matter.

Place names have more than one correct spelling

A great many Indian cities and towns have been officially renamed or respelled over the past few decades, generally to bring the English form closer to local pronunciation. Both versions stay in circulation. Timetables, tickets, signboards, airline systems and everyday speech do not update at the same speed, and often never fully converge.

That produces small practical problems out of all proportion to their seriousness. A booking site may not find a city under the spelling printed on your itinerary; a station code may bear no obvious relation to either version of the name; a driver may know a place only by a name your map does not use.

The workable habit is to hold both forms of a name and, where you can, the station or airport code, which is stable in a way that spelling is not. Codes are short, unambiguous and printed on everything, and they cut through most of this confusion in a single step.

What actually works when you share no language

Writing things down beats speaking them, because a written destination can be passed around, read aloud by somebody else and pointed at. A phone screen does the same job. This sounds obvious until you are in a situation where the third person to look at the screen turns out to be the one who knows the answer.

Asking more than one person is not rudeness, it is calibration. There is a widespread preference for giving a helpful-sounding answer rather than admitting ignorance, which is well meant and occasionally sends people in precisely the wrong direction. Two or three consistent answers are worth considerably more than one confident one.

And it is worth learning the handful of words that carry weight in any language: thank you, water, how much, and the name of where you are going pronounced approximately right. The effort registers out of all proportion to the vocabulary involved, which is a reasonable return on ten minutes of work.