India History, Maps, Population, Economy, & Facts

India also contains four of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots, or regions that display significant habitat loss in the presence of high endemism.t India is the habitat for 8.6% of all mammals, 13.7% of bird species, 7.9% of reptile species, 6% of amphibian species, 12.2% of fish species, and 6.0% of all flowering plant species. Temperatures in India have risen by 0.7 °C (1.3 °F) between 1901 and 2018. India’s coastline measures 7,517 kilometres (4,700 mi) in length; of this distance, 5,423 kilometres (3,400 mi) belong to peninsular India and 2,094 kilometres (1,300 mi) to the Andaman, Nicobar, and Lakshadweep island chains. Major Himalayan-origin rivers that substantially flow through India include the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, both of which drain into the Bay of Bengal.

It is used in different Indian languages in different forms. It was originally used for the Indian subcontinent and the areas to its east. The Indo-Aryan languages replaced the Dravidian languages in the northern and western regions of India. It has the Indian Ocean to the west, the Arabian Sea in the southwest, the Bay of Bengal in the southeast, and the Himalayas up north. India is the world’s fourth-largest economy with the world’s largest population, yet EU exports to India remain relatively low, compared to our exports elsewhere.

The decimal number system in use today was first recorded in Indian mathematics. In the classical period of Indian mathematics (400 CE to 1200 CE), important contributions were made by Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, Bhaskara II, Varāhamihira, and Madhava. As a market developed among European residents, it was supplied by Company painting by Indian artists with considerable Western influence. But in the South, under the Pallava and Chola dynasties, sculpture in both stone and bronze had a sustained period of great achievement; the large bronzes with Shiva as Nataraja have become an iconic symbol of India. Over the following centuries a distinctly Indian style of sculpting the human figure developed, with less interest in articulating precise anatomy than ancient Greek sculpture but showing smoothly flowing forms expressing prana (“breath” or life-force). Almost all surviving ancient Indian art thereafter is in various forms of religious sculpture in durable materials, or coins.

History of India

Economic liberalisation has created a large urban middle class and transformed India into a fast growing economy. India’s constitution was adopted in 1950 and established a secular, democratic republic. During the 1930s, the British enacted slow legislative reform; the Indian National Congress won victories in the resulting elections. It was marked by British reforms but also repressive legislation, by more strident Indian calls for self-rule, and by the beginnings of a nonviolent movement of non-co-operation led by Mahatma Gandhi. After World War I, in which approximately one million Indians served, a new period began. The railway network provided critical famine relief, notably reduced the cost of moving goods, and helped nascent Indian-owned industry.

Since its independence in 1947, India fought four wars with Pakistan and a war with China. The Indian Army is becoming more modern by buying and making new weapons. Its Commander-in-Chief is the President of India, but the Ministry of Defence manages the military. All the states (and the territories of Delhi and Puducherry) elect their local government themselves. States and union territories differ in the way they are represented.

Indian music has influenced western genres, notably rock and jazz musicians during the 1960s counterculture. India contains a wide array of musical practices, including many different folk musics from different regions. Trigonometry was further advanced in India, and the modern definitions of sine and cosine were developed there. Indian mathematicians made early contributions to the study of the concept of zero as a number, negative numbers, arithmetic, and algebra.

It predominates in the temperate coniferous forest of the Himalayas, the moist deciduous sal forest of eastern India, and the dry deciduous teak forest of central and southern India. To the south, the remaining peninsular landmass, the Deccan Plateau, is flanked on the west and east by coastal ranges known as the Western and Eastern Ghats; the plateau contains the country’s oldest rock formations, some over one billion years old. India’s defining geologic processes began approximately 70 million years ago, when the Indian Plate, then part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, began a north-eastward drift caused by seafloor spreading to its south-west, and later, south and south-east.

Chess is commonly held to have originated in India as chaturaṅga; There has been a rise in the number of Indian grandmasters. The diversity of Indian food served worldwide has been partially concealed by the dominance of Punjabi cuisine. Rice was partially cooked and layered alternately with sauteed meat, the pot sealed tightly, and slow cooked according to another Persian cooking technique, to produce biryani, a feature of festive dining in many parts of India. The most significant import of cooking techniques into India during the last millennium occurred during the Mughal Empire, spreading into northern India from regions to its northwest, along with dishes such as pilaf.

In total, there are twenty-eight states and eight union territories. Most of these pieces are called states; others are called union territories. For administration purposes, India has been divided into smaller pieces. They can make any government action invalid if it contradicts the Constitution. The Chief Justice of India is the head of the Supreme Court.

Indian merchants, scholars, and sometimes armies were involved in this transmission; Southeast Asians took the initiative as well, with many sojourning in Indian seminaries and translating Buddhist and Hindu texts into their languages. They were imitated all over India and led to both the resurgence of Hinduism and the development of all modern languages of the subcontinent. Its constitution lists the name of the country in each of the languages. In the south of India, many people speak Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam. Hindi is the official language in India with the largest number of speakers.

India is the seventh biggest country in the world by land. However, this government lasted only about two years, with Morarji Desai and Charan Singh serving as prime ministers. In the 16th century India came under Mughal rule.

TIMELINE

These cultures gradually evolved into the Indus Valley Civilisation, which flourished during 2500–1900 BCE in Pakistan and western India. The Ancient Greeks referred to South Asians as Indoi, ‘the people of the Indus’. 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. India’s wildlife, which has traditionally been viewed with tolerance in its culture, is supported in protected habitats. It has disputes over Kashmir with its neighbours, Pakistan and China, unresolved since the mid-20th century. India has been a federal republic since 1950, governed through a democratic parliamentary system.

• By this time, with its economic power severely curtailed by the British parliament and having effectively been made an arm of British administration, the East India Company began more consciously to enter non-economic arenas, including education, social reform, and culture.
• Patna was the capital of the ancient Magadha kingdom and one of the most important cities of ancient India.
• It resulted into the formation of the Delhi Sultanate, which was finally succeeded by the Mughal Empire, under which India once again achieved a large measure of political unity.
• The Indian cricket team won the 1983 and 2011 Cricket World Cup and the 2007 ICC World Twenty20.

By the last quarter of the 18th Century the English had outdone all others and established themselves as the dominant power in India. During the late 16th and the 17th Centuries, the European trading companies in India competed with each other ferociously. The earliest literary source that sheds light on India’s past is the Rig Veda. The History of India begins with the Indus Valley Civilization and the coming of the Aryans.

India hosts more than five hundred wildlife sanctuaries and eighteen biosphere reserves, four of which are part of the World Network of Biosphere Reserves; its eighty-nine wetlands are registered under the Ramsar Convention. In 1972, India enacted the Wildlife Protection Act and Project Tiger to safeguard crucial wilderness; the Forest Conservation Act was enacted in 1980 and amendments added in 1988. In response, the system of national parks and protected areas, first established in 1935, was expanded substantially. The pervasive and ecologically devastating human encroachment of recent decades has critically endangered Indian wildlife.

Dance has been an essential aspect of Indian films from the first talkies of the 1930s. Among 20th-century directions is the modern dance of Uday Shankar in which classical styles were employed but not adhered to rigidly. A devdasi who went on to attain national and international prominence was Thanjavur Balasaraswati. Their sponsorship and promotion, however, has continued in secular, modern India.aa India also has local and modern dance traditions. Modern Indian pop takes influences from classical, folk, and western pop music. Filmi is music written for Indian cinema, generally composed by music directors and sung by playback singers.

Hidimba Devi Temple is dedicated to Hidimba Devi, the wife of Bhima, one of the Pandavas from the Indian epic ‘Mahabharata’. Leh was once a vital stop on the ancient Silk Road, connecting India to Central Asia and China. The Beating Retreat Ceremony at the Attari-Wagah border is a unique ceremony that features a synchronised parade by Indian and Pakistani soldiers.

The sultanate’s raiding and weakening of the regional kingdoms of South India paved the way for the indigenous Vijayanagara Empire. The sultanate was to control much of North India and to make many forays into South India. After the 10th century, Muslim Central Asian nomadic clans, using swift-horse cavalry and raising vast armies united by ethnicity, repeatedly overran South Asia’s north-western plains,r leading eventually to the establishment of the Islamic Delhi Sultanate in 1206. Temple towns of various sizes began to appear everywhere as India underwent another urbanisation.

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;k China, Nepal, Bet 365 and Bhutan to the north; and Bangladesh and Myanmar to the east. The deleted map also depicted Aksai Chin, a territory located in northeastern Ladakh, as part of India. After a period marked by trade disputes, the two countries have recently agreed to reduce tariffs, shifting from a 50 per cent rate imposed by the US on Indian goods to 18 per cent, the lowest among Asian nations.

Yet social legislation has done much to alleviate the disabilities previously suffered by formerly “untouchable” castes, tribal populations, women, and other traditionally disadvantaged segments of society. Earnest attempts have been made to instill a spirit of nationhood in so varied a population, but tensions between neighboring groups have remained and at times have resulted in outbreaks of violence. Religious minorities, including Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains, still account for a significant proportion of the population. As a result of the Indian Independence Movement, British rule came to an end on August 14-15, 1947, celebrated annually as Independence Day. Especially important was the coming of Islam, brought from the northwest by Arab, Turkish, Persian, and other raiders beginning early in the 8th century ce.

By the early 18th century, with the lines between commercial and political dominance being increasingly blurred, several European trading companies, including the English East India Company, had established coastal outposts. In the early 16th century, northern India, then under mainly Muslim rulers, fell again to the superior mobility and firepower of a new generation of Central Asian warriors. Embracing a strong Shaivite tradition and building upon the military technology of the sultanate, the empire came to control much of peninsular India, and was to influence South Indian society for long afterwards. Although at first disruptive for the Indian elites, the sultanate largely left its vast non-Muslim subject population to its own laws and customs. By the 8th and 9th centuries, the effects were felt in Southeast Asia, as South Indian culture and political systems were exported to lands that became part of modern-day Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Brunei, Cambodia, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia.