Modern humans arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa no later than 55,000 years ago.[26][27][28] Their long occupation, predominantly in isolation as hunter-gatherers, has made the region highly diverse.[29] 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.[30] By 1200 BCE, an archaic form of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, had diffused into India from the northwest.[31][32] Its hymns recorded the early dawnings of Hinduism in India.[33] India's pre-existing Dravidian languages were supplanted in the northern regions.[34] By 400 BCE, caste had emerged within Hinduism,[35] and Buddhism and Jainism had arisen, proclaiming social orders unlinked to heredity.[36] Early political consolidations gave rise to the loose-knit Maurya and Gupta Empires.[37] Widespread creativity suffused this era,[38] but the status of women declined,[39] and untouchability became an organised belief.[l][40] In South India, the Middle kingdoms exported Dravidian language scripts and religious cultures to the kingdoms of Southeast Asia.[41]
In the 1st millennium, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism became established on India's southern and western coasts.[42] In the early centuries of the 2nd millennium Muslim armies from Central Asia intermittently overran India's northern plains.[43] The resulting Delhi Sultanate drew northern India into the cosmopolitan networks of medieval Islam.[44] In south India, the Vijayanagara Empire created a long-lasting composite Hindu culture.[45] In the Punjab, Sikhism emerged, rejecting institutionalised religion.[46] The Mughal Empire ushered in two centuries of economic expansion and relative peace,[47] and left a rich architectural legacy.[48][49] Gradually expanding rule of the British East India Company turned India into a colonial economy but consolidated its sovereignty.[50] British Crown rule began in 1858. The rights promised to Indians were granted slowly,[51][52] but technological changes were introduced, and modern ideas of education and the public life took root.[53] A nationalist movement emerged in India, the first in the non-European British Empire and an influence on other nationalist movements.[54][55] Noted for nonviolent resistance after 1920,[56] it became the primary factor in ending British rule.[57] In 1947, the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two independent dominions,[58][59][60][61] a Hindu-majority dominion of India and a Muslim-majority dominion of Pakistan. A large-scale loss of life and an unprecedented migration accompanied the partition.[62]
India has been a federal republic since 1950, governed through a democratic parliamentary system. It is a pluralistic, multilingual and multi-ethnic society. India's population grew from 361 million in 1951 to over 1.4 billion in 2023.[63] During this time, its nominal per capita income increased from US$64 annually to US$2,601, and its literacy rate from 16.6% to 74%. A comparatively destitute country in 1951,[64] India has become a fast-growing major economy and a hub for information technology services, with an expanding middle class.[65] India has reduced its poverty rate, though at the cost of increasing economic inequality.[66] It is a nuclear-weapon state that ranks high in military expenditure. It has disputes over Kashmir with its neighbours, Pakistan and China, unresolved since the mid-20th century.[67] Among the socio-economic challenges India faces are gender inequality, child malnutrition,[68] and rising levels of air pollution.[69] India's land is megadiverse with four biodiversity hotspots.[70] India's wildlife, which has traditionally been viewed with tolerance in its culture,[71] is supported in protected habitats.
Etymology
Main article: Names for India
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the English proper noun "India" derives most immediately from the Classical Latin India, a reference to a loosely-defined historical region of Asia stretching from South Asia to the borders of China. Further etymons are: Hellenistic Greek India (Ἰνδία); Ancient Greek Indos (Ἰνδός), or the River Indus; Achaemenian Old Persian Hindu (an eastern province of the Achaemenid Empire); and Sanskrit Sindhu, or "river," but specifically the Indus river, and by extension its well-settled basin.[72] The Ancient Greeks referred to South Asians as Indoi, 'the people of the Indus'.[73]
The term Bharat (Bhārat; pronounced [ˈbʱaːɾət] ⓘ), mentioned in both Indian epic poetry and the Constitution of India,[74][75] is used in its variations by many Indian languages. A modern rendering of the historical name Bharatavarsha, which applied originally to North India,[76][77] Bharat gained increased currency from the mid-19th century as a native name for India.[74][78]
Hindustan ([ɦɪndʊˈstaːn] ⓘ) is a Middle Persian name for India that became popular by the 13th century,[79] and was used widely since the era of the Mughal Empire. The meaning of Hindustan has varied, referring to a region encompassing the northern Indian subcontinent (present-day northern India and Pakistan) or to India in its near entirety.[74][78][80]
History
Main article: History of India
Ancient India
Based on coalescence of Mitochondrial DNA and Y Chromosome data, it is thought that the earliest extant lineages of anatomically modern humans or Homo sapiens on the Indian subcontinent had reached there from Africa between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago, and with high likelihood by 55,000 years ago.[26][27][28][81] 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.[29] However, the earliest known modern human fossils in South Asia date to about 30,000 years ago.[27] Evidence for the neolithic period appeared in the western margins of the Indus river basin, in Mehrgarh, Balochistan, Pakistan after 7000 BCE. Domestication of grain-producing plants (including barley) and animals (including humped zebu cattle) occurred here. These cultures gradually evolved into the Indus Valley Civilisation, which flourished during 2500–1900 BCE in Pakistan and western India.[82][30] Centred around cities such as Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Dholavira, Ganweriwala, and Rakhigarhi,[83] its characteristic features included standardised weights; steatite seals; a written script; arts and crafts including pottery styles, terracotta human and animal statuettes; urban planning; and public works.[83] Networks of towns and villages grew around the cities in a new agro-pastoral economy.[84]
Between 1500 BCE and 1200 BCE, an archaic form of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, diffused into India from the northwest. Its evidence today is found in the Rig Veda—the oldest scripture associated with what later became Hinduism—which was composed by Indo-Aryan-speaking tribes migrating east from what is today northern Afghanistan and across the Punjab region.[31][32] The settling of the Ganges river plain took place during the next millennium, when large swathes of the river system's adjoining regions were deforested, at times by setting fires, or later by iron implements, and prepared for agriculture. The settlement may have involved driving the preexisting people out or enslaving them.[85] The Dravidian languages of India were supplanted in the north, creating a broad language familiy-divide, with the Indo-Aryan languages being spoken mainly in the north and west, and the Dravidian in some parts of east India and most of the south.[34] Classical Sanskrit, a refined and standardised grammatical form would emerge in the mid-1st millennium BCE and was codified in the Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight chapters') of Pāṇini.[m] The two major Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, however, were composed in a range of oral storytelling registers called Epic Sanskrit which was used in northern India between 400 BCE and 300 CE, and roughly contemporary with classical Sanskrit.[87]
A second urbanisation had taken place in South Asia by 400 BCE, this time on the Ganges plain. In fortified cities, social differentiation by caste, or varna, had emerged.[35] By the mid-millennium also two new ethical and social systems had arisen: the religions Jainism, based on the teachings of Mahavira and Buddhism on those of the Buddha. Both stressed non-violence and criticised animal sacrifices conducted in Hinduism, and also birth among Hindus into a fixed hereditary varna. By living ethically, lay people could rise socially and morally in these religions. [36] Chronicling the life of the Buddha was central to the beginnings of recorded history in India.[88] The rise of the two religions was a backdrop to the emergence of the first loose-knit geographically extensive power in South Asia, the Maurya Empire. During the rule of the founder's grandson, Ashoka (ca. 268–232 BCE), the empire briefly controlled the major urban hubs and arteries of the subcontinent, except in the deep south.[89][n][o] The empire's period was notable for creativity in art, architecture, inscriptions and produced texts,[92] but also by the consolidation of caste in the Gangetic plain, and the declining rights of women in the mainstream Indo-Aryan speaking regions of India.[93] After the Kalinga War in which his troops visited great violence on the region, Ashoka embraced Buddhism and promoted its tenets in edicts scattered across South Asia.[94] As the edicts forbade both the killing of wild animals and the destruction of forests, Ashoka is seen by some modern environmental historians as an early embodiment of that ethos.[95][96]
