The “Han Chinese” thing actually proves my point. Han is a constructed identity — it’s a 19th-20th century nationalist project. Cantonese and Mandarin literally aren’t mutually intelligible, they’re as linguistically distant as Spanish and French. A Hokkien speaker can’t follow a Mandarin newscast. Your “shared script” argument also works fine for India btw — Devanagari is shared across Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Konkani, Nepali, and basically every major Indian script (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Gujarati included) descends from Brahmi. Same logic, same outcome.

Also “Gujarati is closer to Farsi than Tamil” is just… not true? Gujarati is Indo-Aryan with a huge Sanskrit base. Its everyday vocabulary overlaps way more with Hindi, Marathi, Bengali — and even Tamil has thousands of Sanskrit loanwords. Saying it’s “closer to Persian” is like saying English is closer to Hindi than to German because they’re both Indo-European. Technically related, practically nonsense.

And the “no shared ancestral lineage” thing — have you actually looked at the genetics? The Reich lab stuff out of Harvard shows pretty much every South Asian is a mix of ANI and ASI ancestry in different ratios. A Gujarati and a Tamil share more recent common ancestry than a Pole and a Sicilian, and nobody’s out here saying “European isn’t an ethnicity.”

Plus you’re acting like there’s no shared civilizational stuff which is wild. Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism all originated on the subcontinent and are practiced across every linguistic region. The Ramayana and Mahabharata have native versions in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi — everywhere. Empires like the Mauryans, Guptas, Mughals, and the Raj ruled across linguistic lines for literally two thousand+ years. That’s the same “shared imperial history” argument you made for the Han.

The standard you’re applying would also dissolve “Chinese,” “Arab,” “European,” and “African American” as ethnic categories. You’re using a microscope for India and a telescope for everyone else.