The world's largest population fills its seventh-largest country
The Republic of India is South Asia's giant—seventh by area, first by population—washed by Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea, and Bay of Bengal. Modern humans arrived by about 55,000 years ago; Indus urbanism rose in the third millennium BCE; Vedic Sanskrit appears by 1200 BCE.
India's land neighbours are Pakistan in the west, Bangladesh and Myanmar in the east, and China, Nepal and Bhutan along the northern frontier. The English name comes through Latin and Greek from the Indus River, ultimately from Old Persian Hinduš. Bharat, a modern form of Bharatavarsha that first meant North India, appears in epic poetry and the constitution and spread as a native name from the mid-19th century; Hindustan, a Persian term, became popular by the 13th century and was widely used under the Mughals.
DNA lineages suggest modern humans came out of Africa to the subcontinent sometime in a window of 50,000 to 80,000 years back, very probably by 55,000. Farming villages arose around Mehrgarh in Balochistan, the Ganges plain was cleared for agriculture in a later millennium, and Indo-Aryan languages came to dominate the north and west, Dravidian ones the south. By the middle of the first millennium BCE fortified Ganges cities had caste divisions, and Jainism and Buddhism arose preaching non-violence.
Ashoka, around 268 to 232 BCE, ruled nearly all the subcontinent except the deep south; after his bloody conquest of Kalinga he embraced Buddhism and carved edicts urging ethical conduct across his empire. The Gupta Empire of the 4th and 5th centuries set an administrative model and fostered a devotional Hinduism. Tamil Sangam poems show the Cheras, Cholas and Pandyas ruling the south between 200 BCE and 200 CE, and Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Zoroastrianism took root on the coasts in the later first millennium.
The Delhi Sultanate, founded in 1206, repelled Mongol raids in the 13th century, drawing refugee scholars and artisans who shaped an Indo-Islamic culture, while the Shaivite Vijayanagara Empire dominated much of the peninsula. The 1950 constitution made India a federal parliamentary republic, and states were reorganised along linguistic lines in 1956.
Source: India
