The rights promised to Indians were granted slowly, but technological changes were introduced, and ideas of education, modernity and the public life took root. Gradually expanding rule of the British East India Company followed, turning India into a colonial economy, but also consolidating its sovereignty.

Leaving a legacy of luminous architecture. The Mughal Empire, in 1526, ushered in two centuries of relative peace,

In the Punjab, Sikhism emerged, rejecting institutionalised religion. In the 15th century, the Vijayanagara Empire created a long-lasting composite Hindu culture in south India. Muslim armies from Central Asia intermittently overran India's northern plains, Įventually founding the Delhi Sultanate, and drawing northern India into the cosmopolitan networks of medieval Islam. In the early medieval era, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism became established on India's southern and western coasts. In South India, the Middle kingdoms exported Dravidian-languages scripts and religious cultures to the kingdoms of Southeast Asia. Their collective era was suffused with wide-ranging creativity, but also marked by the declining status of women, and the incorporation of untouchability into an organised system of belief. Įarly political consolidations gave rise to the loose-knit Maurya and Gupta Empires based in the Ganges Basin. īy 400 BCE, stratification and exclusion by caste had emerged within Hinduism, Īnd Buddhism and Jainism had arisen, proclaiming social orders unlinked to heredity. The Dravidian languages of India were supplanted in the northern and western regions. īy 1200 BCE, an archaic form of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, had diffused into India from the northwest, unfolding as the language of the Rigveda, and recording the dawning of Hinduism in India. Settled life emerged on the subcontinent in the western margins of the Indus river basin 9,000 years ago, evolving gradually into the Indus Valley civilisation of the third millennium BCE. Their long occupation, initially in varying forms of isolation as hunter-gatherers, has made the region highly diverse, second only to Africa in human genetic diversity. Modern humans arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa no later than 55,000 years ago. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives its Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand, Myanmar and Indonesia. 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. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. India, officially the Republic of India ( Hindi: Bhārat Gaṇarājya), is a country in South Asia.

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