INDIA HISTORY

It has been said that the states of India are more diverse than the countries in Europe. From the largest to the smallest, each has a unique history and culture, dress, festivals and way of celebrating them. Come, explore the sheer variety that makes up our country Indian civilization can be traced back to at least 2500 BC, although the ancient civilizations did not encompass the whole of India as it is known today. The first known civilization settled along the Indus River in what is now Pakistan. This, however, collapsed around 1500 BC. Between 521 and 486 BC, under Darius, the area became part of the Persian Empire. Alexander the Great arrived in India in 326 BC, but did not venture beyond the boundaries of the Persian Empire, which only extended as far as the Indus. India’s two great religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, had already been developed. Various dynasties followed, the last of which was the Gupta Empire (AD 319-606). The invasion of the White Huns brought all this to an end, and northern India became fragmented, and was only reunified with the arrival of Muslims from the west. During this time, the south had been trading by sea with the Romans and Egyptians. It took some time for Muslim forces to forge a permanent presence in northern India: in the late 12th century, Muhammad of Ghori, who had built a powerbase in what is now the Punjab, rapidly expanded eastwards. His conquests led to the establishment of Delhi as a major center of political power and ultimately its position as the Indian capital. The next major influx after the Muslims was the Moghuls, who swept over the mountain passes from Central Asia in the 1520s and maintained effective control of the north until the mid-18th century. The peak of Moghul influence came in the late 16th and early 17th centuries; by the time of the British conquest, at the end of the 18th century, the Moghul Empire was already in severe decline. The British, motivated by trade and geopolitics, managed to take effective control of the whole sub-continent using the telegraph and the railways – both of which they built – as their main instruments of control. The many and varied provinces of India were, for the first time, administered by a single, albeit alien, power. The indigenous campaign for independence began with the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885, but it made little progress until after the end of World War I, when Mahatma Gandhi led the Congress and began the policy of non-cooperation with the British. The colonial authorities were gradually persuaded that reforms were needed, but the Congress itself was split on a key issue – the Muslims, under Muhammad Ali Jinnah, claimed a separate homeland in provinces such as the Punjab and East Bengal, where they formed a majority of the population, but Gandhi wanted India to be a unified and secular state. Jinnah’s view, supported by the last Governor-General, Earl Mountbatten, prevailed and in August 1947, the independent states of India and Pakistan came into being . Since this time India has been a democratic republic, with the first proper elections taking place in 1951, and Hindu law has been modernized to a great extent, eradicating many of the old inequalities. Nonetheless, the caste system, which assigns an individual to a particular stratum in society from birth, has proved resilient to reform.