I’m of Chinese descent and the Chinese government brainwashes the mass to believe that we all speak “dialects”. I speak Cantonese at home, and if you place me within a group of people speaking Hokkien or Mandarin (varieties of other Chinese languages) I would have no idea what people are talking about. The special thing about written Chinese language is that it is ideographic, meaning that a character conveys an idea, so no matter what language we speak at least we can understand the written text (and other non-Chinese languages have used Chinese characters to represent their language too!) The languages under the Chinese family are mutually unintelligible. Technically all speaking languages are dialects. The way languages are labelled also have political and nationalistic reasons.

India is a huge country with a massive amount of diversity in ethnicity, and languages. Most people aren’t deep into linguistics and are told by how they are taught to label languages whether they know it’s right or wrong (like calling Malayalam a dialect).