India
India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area; the most populous country since 2023; and, since its independence in 1947, the world's most populous democracy. 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; its Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Myanmar, Thailand, and Indonesia.
Modern humans arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa no later than 55,000 years ago. Their long occupation, predominantly in isolation as hunter-gatherers, has made the region highly diverse. 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. By, an archaic form of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, had diffused into India from the northwest. Its hymns recorded the early dawnings of Hinduism in India. India's pre-existing Dravidian languages were supplanted in the northern regions. By, caste had emerged within Hinduism, and Buddhism and Jainism had arisen, proclaiming social orders unlinked to heredity. Early political consolidations gave rise to the loose-knit Maurya and Gupta Empires. This era was noted for creativity in art, architecture, and writing, but the status of women declined, and untouchability became an organised belief. In South India, the Middle kingdoms exported Dravidian language scripts and religious cultures to the kingdoms of Southeast Asia.
In the 1st millennium, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism became established on India's southern and western coasts. In the early centuries of the 2nd millennium Muslim armies from Central Asia intermittently overran India's northern plains. The resulting Delhi Sultanate drew northern India into the cosmopolitan networks of medieval Islam. In south India, the Vijayanagara Empire created a long-lasting composite Hindu culture. In the Punjab, Sikhism emerged, rejecting institutionalised religion. The Mughal Empire ushered in two centuries of economic expansion and relative peace, and left a rich architectural legacy. Gradually expanding rule of the British East India Company turned India into a colonial economy but consolidated its sovereignty. British Crown rule began in 1858. The rights promised to Indians were granted slowly, but technological changes were introduced, and modern ideas of education and the public life took root. A nationalist movement emerged in India, the first in the non-European British Empire and an influence on other nationalist movements. Noted for nonviolent resistance after 1920, it became the primary factor in ending British rule. In 1947, the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two independent dominions, 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.
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. 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, India has become a fast-growing major economy and a hub for information technology services, with an expanding middle class. India has reduced its poverty rate, though at the cost of increasing economic inequality. 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. Among the socio-economic challenges India faces are gender inequality, child malnutrition, and rising levels of air pollution. India's land is megadiverse with four biodiversity hotspots. India's wildlife, which has traditionally been viewed with tolerance in its culture, is supported in protected habitats.
Etymology
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 ; Ancient Greek , or the River Indus; Achaemenian Old Persian ; and Sanskrit, or "river," but specifically the Indus river, and by extension its well-settled basin. The Ancient Greeks referred to South Asians as, 'the people of the Indus'.The term Bharat, mentioned in both Indian epic poetry and the Constitution of India, is used in its variations by many Indian languages. A modern rendering of the historical name, which applied originally to North India, Bharat gained increased currency from the mid-19th century as a native name for India.
Hindustan is a Middle Persian name for India that became popular by the 13th century, 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 or to India in its near entirety.
History
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. 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. However, the earliest known modern human fossils in South Asia date to about 30,000 years ago. Evidence for the neolithic period in the western margins of the Indus river basin, at Mehrgarh in Balochistan, Pakistan, dates to after. Domestication of grain-producing plants and animals occurred here. These cultures gradually evolved into the Indus Valley Civilisation, which flourished during in Pakistan and western India. Centred around cities such as Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Dholavira, Ganweriwala, and Rakhigarhi, its characteristic features included standardised weights, steatite seals, a written script, urban planning, public works, and arts and crafts including pottery styles, terracotta human figures and animal statuettes. Networks of towns and villages grew around the cities in a new agro-pastoral economy.Between and, 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. 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 employing iron implements, and prepared for agriculture. The settlement may have involved driving the preexisting people out or enslaving them. 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. Classical Sanskrit, a refined and standardised grammatical form would emerge in the mid-1st millennium BCE and was codified in the Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini. 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.
A second urbanisation had taken place in South Asia by, this time on the Ganges plain. In fortified cities, social differentiation by caste, or varna, had emerged. By the mid-millennium two new ethical and social systems had arisen: Jainism based on the teachings of Mahavira and Buddhism on those of the Buddha. Both religions stressed non-violence and abjured animal sacrifices conducted in Brahmanism, and birth into a fixed hereditary varna. By living ethically, lay people could rise socially and morally in these religions. Chronicling the life of the Buddha was central to the beginnings of recorded history in India. 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, the empire briefly controlled the major urban hubs and arteries of the subcontinent, except in the deep south. The empire's period was notable for creativity in art, architecture, inscriptions, and produced texts, but also for the declining rights of women in the mainstream Indo-Aryan speaking regions. 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. 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.
By the 4th and 5th centuries, the Gupta Empire had created a complex system of administration and taxation in the greater Ganges Plain; this system became a model for later Indian kingdoms. Under the Guptas, a renewed Hinduism based on devotion, rather than the management of ritual, began to assert itself. The renewal was reflected in a flowering of art, literature, and science. In South India, the Sangam literature of the Tamil language reveals that, between and, the southern peninsula was ruled by the Cheras and the Cholas, along the western and eastern plains, respectively, of the Kaveri river valley, and the Pandyas farther south along the Vaigai river valley. By the sixth century, the Pallavas had grown into a regional power. Simultaneously, Buddhism and Jainism, which had favoured a conservative transactionalism, were replaced by kingly devotion to the gods of particular places, which became a characteristic of the Bhakti movement. The Pallavas, in particular, traded extensively with the Roman Empire and with West and Southeast Asia.