India, officially the Republic of India,* "Official name: Republic of India; Bharat Ganarajya (Hindi)"; "Official name: English: Republic of India; Hindi: Bharat Ganarajya" is a country in South Asia. It is the world's seventh-largest country by area and its most populous. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west, China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north, and Bangladesh and Myanmar to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is near Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
Modern humans arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa by 55,000 years ago. Settled life emerged in the western margins of the Indus river basin 9,000 years ago, evolving into the Indus Valley Civilisation of the third millennium BCE. By , an archaic form of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, diffused into India from the northwest, its earliest hymns containing elements of what would become Hinduism. The pre-existing Dravidian and other languages were gradually superseded in India's northern plains. Across the central stretch of these plains, rapid urbanisation took place, and after 500 BCE a caste-based, hereditary form of social stratification began to solidify as Hinduism took fuller shape. During this period, Buddhism and Jainism arose, proclaiming social orders unlinked to heredity. The subsequent emergence of the loose-knit Maurya and Gupta Empires gave rise to wide-ranging cultural and scientific creativity. However, these eras saw a steady decline in women's status, alongside the eventual institutionalisation of untouchability. In South India, across the first millennium CE, the Middle kingdoms transmitted Dravidian language scripts and cultural traditions to Southeast Asia. Well before the millennium's end, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Zoroastrianism had become established on India's southern and western coasts.
Early in the 2nd millennium, Muslim armies from Central Asia intermittently overran India's northern plains, eventually establishing the Delhi Sultanate and drawing India into the cosmopolitan networks of medieval Islam. The Vijayanagara Empire built a powerful military-fiscal state that fostered a flourishing, distinctively South Indian Hindu culture. During this era, Sikhism emerged in the Punjab, promoting an egalitarian devotion that transcended traditional Hindu and Muslim boundaries.<ref name="Sikhism-emergence> " ... founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak (1469–1539). Like Kabir, Guru Nanak was part of the Sant tradition ... that rejected institutionalized forms of religion." "Like the sufis, the bhakti teachers emphasized the individual's own devotion to the divine. … Kabir and Nanak, emphasized worship of a personal God without form. In so doing they distanced themselves from distinctive Hindu and Muslim symbols." “Sikhism … was founded by Guru Nanak in the religious revival of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He preached a doctrine of universal toleration and seeking what was good and common in all religion, and recruited followers among Hindus and Muslims….” "Around the fourteenth century a number of Sants or saint-poets emerged in north India. They questioned the usefulness of the Brahmans/priests, rituals and the caste system. … Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, also emerged from a similar socio-religious background and his ideas were enriched by both Hindu and Islamic currents of thought." "... a religious leader in the northwest of the subcontinent, Guru Nanak (1469–1539), received a revelation from God urging him to bring Hindus and Muslims together. His teachings and those of his immediate successors led to the emergence of an egalitarian faith called Sikhism." </ref> The Mughal Empire ushered in two centuries of economic expansion and relative peace, "Above all, the long period of relative peace ushered in by Akbar's power, and maintained by his successors throughout the seventeenth century, contributed to India's economic expansion." leaving a lasting legacy of administrative centralisation "A further key to Akbar's successes were the administrative reforms that created an enduring framework for rule. ...Nobles were awarded ranks, known as mansab, demarcated decimally, and were expected to provide horsemen according to the rank number for the emperor's use. They were appointed to positions in two parallel hierarchies, one with civil responsibilities and one military – thus a check on each other – at levels from district, to province, to centre, throughout the empire. ... Even a relatively centralized empire like this, however, was limited in its reach into local communities. Mughal officials typically negotiated for delivery of the revenue demand with lineage heads and chieftains, homogenized in Mughal usage as zamindars (land-holders)." and cultural synthesis. "Chronicles, both visual and written, tell us that instrumentalists from Khurasan and Central Asia as well as singers from India resided in Akbar's court. ... By far the most famous singer was the legendary Tansen (d. 1586), whom Akbar acquired from a subject prince early in his reign in 1562." "Mughal translations provided many Hindus with access to their religious texts between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Few early modern people knew Sanskrit, a language that was never a common vernacular and, even as a literary tongue, had long been limited to an educated elite. In contrast, many Indians of diverse religious backgrounds learned Persian to work for the Mughal state." "The poems of Ghālib and Mīr represent the best of the Urdu ghazal; and the Urdu ghazal, as an anonymous wit has remarked, is the Muslims' greatest gift to India, after the Tāj Mahal." " For nearly four centuries, the Taj Mahal has stood as an architectural masterpiece, famous worldwide for the technology of its construction, and, even more, for the quality of its workmanship and the exquisite balance and proportion of its forms." "More than any other ruler, Shah Jahan sought to use architecture to project the emperor's formal and semi-divine character. ... Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in his de novo city, Shahjahanabad, ... The number of surviving structures is great, reminding us that the mechanisms of Mughal economy encouraged constant spending and cash flow. ... the elegant imperial taste ... is widely emulated across India." The expanding rule of the British East India Company consolidated territorial control over the subcontinent " Changes essential to the modern state, including the unification of sovereignty, ... introduced during the same period ... The date 1848 as starting point for the 'modern state' in India ..." while transforming India into a colonial economy. "An increasing number of historians consider the 1820s or 1830s to be the true beginning of the colonial period, on the other hand, for it was only then that fundamental transformations in economic and political structures occurred." "India became its prime periphery, supplying capital ... labor, artisanal goods, and raw materials, while becoming a market for finished British manufactures." Crown rule, or the British Raj, began in 1858. "British colonialism had two major phases in South Asia: Company rule (1757–1858) and the British Raj (1858–1947)." Although equality before the law promised to Indians was slow to materialise, "When the governance of India was transferred from the East India Company to the Crown in 1858, she (Queen Victoria) and Prince Albert intervened in an unprecedented fashion to turn the proclamation of the transfer of power into a document of tolerance and clemency. ... known in the Indian subcontinent as 'the Magna Carta of Indian liberties', a phrase which Indian nationalists such as Gandhi later took up as they sought to test equality under imperial law" (pages 38–39)" "... (the proclamation) kept faith with the principles of liberal imperialism and appeared to hold out the promise that British rule would benefit Indians and Britons alike. But as is too often the case ... the failure on the part of the British to live up to the wording of the proclamation would later be used by Indian nationalists as proof of the hollowness of imperial principles" both British India and, to a lesser extent, the princely states "... most (princely) states in the late nineteenth century understood by economic prosperity a concept very similar to how British India saw economic development—the growth of commerce and cultivation. Railways and irrigation were the key instruments to achieve these aims. But promoting trade, building railways, and supplying irrigation water to cultivators were all challenges more difficult to meet in the states. This was so because most of them were small in size, situated in hilly land, dry and landlocked, and without perennial rivers. When possible they built railways and joined them with the network of lines that connected the port cities of British India. The nineteenth-century globalization, together with initial differences in geographical endowments, favored British India more than the princely states." saw technological changes "Modern technological changes, among them canals, railways, and telegraph were introduced into India within years of their introduction in Europe" as modern education and more organised public life took root. "Under these circumstances, it was not long before the seed idea of nationalism, planted by their reading of Western books, began to take root in the minds of intelligent and energetic Indians." " after 1857 ... these decades were marked by a rich profusion and elaboration of voluntary organizations; a surge in publication of newspapers, pamphlets and posters; and the writing of fiction and poetry as well as political, philosophical, and historical non-fiction. With this activity, a new level of public life emerged, ranging from meetings and processions to politicized street theatre ..." A nationalist movement emerged in India, the first in the non-European British Empire. Noted for nonviolent resistance after 1920,: "The year 1919 was a watershed in the modern history of India. [...] By its end the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms... were enacted. [...] The year, however, also brought the repressive Rowlatt bills and the catastrophe of the Amritsar massacre. For many, if not most, Indians the reforms had become a poisoned chalice. They chose instead a novel course of political action, that of 'non-violent non-cooperation', and a new leader, Mohandas K. Gandhi, only recently returned from twenty years in South Africa. Gandhi would endure as a lasting symbol of moral leadership for the entire world community." it was a major factor in ending British rule.: "Gandhi was the leading genius of the later and ultimately successful campaign for India's independence" In 1947, the British Indian Empire was partitioned into the independent dominions of a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan. The partition brought large-scale loss of life and unprecedented migration. . .