Countries have, historically, been identified as women not just in the written word but also in illustration, poetry, etc. The OP's relationship to his country is entirely on his terms not yours.
Furthermore the role of pronouns are not to refer to people, but generally to refer to nouns. In some cultures it is considered rude to refer to a person as a pronoun. So OP shouldn't be using "India" repetitively (which would tire the reader/listener). One can use "it" to refer to "India", OP will prefers to refer to India as a "she"
Some may find this backwards, or misogynistic. That's their problem.
English doesn't have gendered nouns, but this linguistic quirk runs deep enough in human psychology that we do sometimes use female pronouns to describe these things. Examples: "She's a beauty" (of a car), or "America and her allies."
While I like the theory, its cute, I dont know that that's true. L'automobile is male in Italian and Spanish. And its easy for a native speaker in either language to come up with numerous examples.
In fact gender really is just grammar. We shouldn't see much into it trying to project ourselves into it. Otherwise, why can the same object have different genders through synonyms? Again:
La macchina L'automobile.
La yerba (granted in Spanish its lost its meaning as grass) El cesped
La nave Il barco
La embarcación El bote
Or changes from the addition of a mere diminutive:
Il banco La bancarella
Il barco La barchetta
Gender is just a classification, largely binary (although Spanish retains the neuter) that got the unfortunate sexual labels of male and female
What? LA automobile is female.
> Il barco La barchetta
"IL barco" doesn't mean anything, it's "LA barca" which, again, is female.
I'd say that generally speaking "it's female when they contain people" is correct, but of course not always (LO ufficio = the office).
Going by the languages I have some knowledge of, that doesn't hold true for Portuguese, where the word "country" itself is masculine but the truth is different countries have different genders. I guess it would be the same for other latin languages? (at least for Spanish). German is also the same but the word "country" is neutral.
I guess it does somewhat hold true for my native language, Hebrew, where all the words you specified but "house" are feminine. So I guess it might also hold true for Arabic then?
I asked the question because their English seemed so good to me that it seemed intentional, it also seemed unusual.
To me it's the kind of thing I'd expect to hear from my grandparents. It's weird and old-fashioned. Even most news sources use the genderless "it" for countries nowadays.
It's honestly a bit cringy to read.
>Bhārat Mātā ( Mother India in English) is a national personification of India (Bharat) as a mother goddess.
I don't know how valid, TBH I use pronouns because it's rhetorically tedious to keep typing country name.
But you don't have to. "it" is considered impolite, something you don't use for something you treasure. Furthermore English has a perfectly long history of referring to countries as shes. This has fallen in disuse in the past 50 years as we've gotten fussy about the sexes. But it is certainly not incorrect or foreign to English.
Reality is, India demographics is less blessing and more curse, she has to tackle a far larger overpopulation crisis with fewer resources and opportunities. Her economic growth / ability to generate new jobs has rarely kept up with population growth, and with automation, offshoring spreading out to smaller countries, there won't be same amount of manufacturing jobs to elevate India as it did PRC. India looks to be destined to get old while staying lower middle-income VS PRC who will at least enter high income. And once the old start dying in PRC , there will be huge amounts of generational wealth transfers that analysts predict will increase / sustain highend consumption. What Apple is really anticipating is being squeezed out due to geopolitics and rise in domestic PRC luxury brands.
That said, still India has 1.4B people and aggressive tariff policies to encourage local assembly / sales, but in terms of market power, there will be more high income PRC nationals vs Indians for Apple tax tier products, and that won't meaningfully converge unless India goes all in on income disparity.