History · India

India: The Subcontinent

Five thousand years from the Indus cities to the world's most populous nation — Vedic kingdoms, the Maurya and Gupta empires, the Mughals, two centuries of British rule, Partition, and the world's largest democracy

By Worldlore Editorial · 19 September 2026

A massive red sandstone fortress gate with two domed octagonal towers, a row of small white domes and slender minarets, and the Indian tricolour flying from a flagpole above it
The Lahori Gate and ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi, with the Indian national flag flying above the red sandstone walls. (Biswarup Ganguly / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 3.0)

A civilisation the size of a continent

India is less a country than a subcontinent: 1.4 billion people — more than any other nation — speaking hundreds of languages, following every major religion, in a federal democracy that is the largest ever attempted. Its recorded history runs back five thousand years to the cities of the Indus, and it has been unified under a single power only a handful of times. The modern Republic of India, founded in 1950, is the latest and by far the most inclusive of those attempts.

A short history

  1. c. 2600–1900 BCE

    Indus Valley

    One of the world's first urban civilisations.

  2. c. 1500–500 BCE

    The Vedic age

    Sanskrit, the Vedas, early kingdoms and caste.

  3. c. 322–185 BCE

    The Maurya Empire

    Ashoka unites most of the subcontinent.

  4. c. 320–550 CE

    The Gupta Empire

    A classical golden age of science and art.

  5. 1206–1526

    Delhi Sultanate

    Turkic Muslim rule over the north.

  6. 1526–c. 1720

    The Mughal Empire

    Babur to Aurangzeb; the peak of pre-modern Indian power.

  7. 1757

    Plassey

    The East India Company seizes Bengal.

  8. 1858–1947

    The British Raj

    Direct Crown rule after the 1857 rebellion.

  9. 1947

    Independence and Partition

    India and Pakistan are created amid mass violence.

  10. 1950

    The Republic

    A secular democratic constitution comes into force.

The Indus, and the Vedic age

Around 2600 BCE, planned brick cities with drainage and standardised weights arose across the Indus basin — the Harappan civilisation, contemporary with Egypt and Sumer, and trading with both. Its script has never been read, and it declined around 1900 BCE as rivers shifted.

Excavated dry-stone walls, rooms and a round stone pillar base at an ancient site, with a large rectangular sunken enclosure and scrubland beyond
Excavated stone walls at Dholavira, an Indus Valley (Harappan) site in India, photographed in 2021. (Bhuppigraphy / Wikimedia Commons)

Over the following millennium, Indo-Aryan language and the Vedic religion spread across the Ganges plain, along with early kingdoms and the varna system that became caste. In the 6th century BCE, in the same region, Mahavira and the Buddha founded Jainism and Buddhism.

Empires, classical and southern

Magadha grew into the Maurya Empire, which under Ashoka (reigned c. 268–232 BCE) controlled almost the whole subcontinent. After a bloody war in Kalinga, Ashoka embraced Buddhism and had edicts on righteous rule carved on pillars and rocks across his realm.

Ashoka and after

A tall polished sandstone pillar fragment beside the four-lion capital of Ashoka
The pillar and lion capital Ashoka raised at Sarnath, where the Buddha first taught. The lion capital is the emblem of the Republic of India. (Government of India / Wikimedia Commons)
A large hemispherical Buddhist stupa with carved stone gateways at Sanchi
The Great Stupa at Sanchi, begun under Ashoka. Buddhism spread from India across Asia along trade routes over the following centuries. (Bernard Gagnon / Wikimedia Commons)

The Gupta Empire (c. 320–550 CE) presided over a classical flowering in the north — Sanskrit drama, the decimal place-value system and the use of zero, advances in astronomy and mathematics, and the mature form of the Hindu temple. In the south, beyond Gupta reach, powerful Tamil and Deccan dynasties — Pallavas, Cholas, Chalukyas — built great temple cities and, in the Chola case, a naval empire that reached Southeast Asia.

Sultans and Mughals

Islam came first to Sindh by Arab conquest in 711, and then through Turkic invasions from the north-west. The Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526) ruled much of northern India for three centuries, bringing Persian court culture and holding off the Mongols. In 1526 Babur, a Timurid prince from Central Asia, defeated the last sultan at Panipat and founded the Mughal Empire.

The Mughals reached their height under Akbar, who integrated Hindu Rajput nobles and preached tolerance; under Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal; and under Aurangzeb, who pushed the empire to its greatest extent and then exhausted it in endless southern wars. After Aurangzeb's death in 1707 the empire fractured, and the Hindu Maratha confederacy became the dominant power in India.

The Company and the Raj

Into that fragmentation stepped the English East India Company, a trading firm that became a conqueror. Victory at Plassey in 1757 handed it Bengal, and over the next hundred years it subdued the subcontinent by war and alliance. Company rule brought punishing land taxes, the collapse of India's handloom textile industry, and repeated famines.

Rebellion and Crown

A 19th-century print of fighting during the Indian Rebellion of 1857
The Rebellion of 1857, a vast uprising of sepoys, princes and peasants across northern India. Its brutal suppression ended Company rule. (Wikimedia Commons)
A grand imperial assembly with elephants and troops at the Delhi Durbar
A Delhi Durbar of the British Raj. After 1858 the Crown ruled India directly; Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1876. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Raj built railways, a unified legal system and an English-educated administrative class — alongside continued economic drain, racial hierarchy, and famines that killed millions, including two to three million in Bengal in 1943.

The freedom movement, and Partition

The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, became a mass movement after Mohandas Gandhi returned from South Africa in 1915 and made nonviolent civil disobedience its method — Non-Cooperation, the 1930 Salt March, and Quit India in 1942. The 1919 massacre of an unarmed crowd at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar hardened opinion against British rule.

Toward freedom

Gandhi walking with a staff at the head of a line of followers during the 1930 Salt March
Gandhi on the Salt March, 1930, defying the British salt monopoly by walking to the sea to make salt — the campaign that made him a global figure. (Wikimedia Commons)
Jawaharlal Nehru speaking at a microphone in 1947
Nehru's 'tryst with destiny' speech at midnight on 15 August 1947. He became independent India's first prime minister and served until 1964. (Wikimedia Commons)

Britain, drained by the Second World War, withdrew in 1947, partitioning British India into India and Pakistan.

A crowded refugee train during the 1947 Partition of Punjab
Partition set off one of history's largest migrations: some 15 million people uprooted and between one and two million killed in communal massacres. Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist in January 1948. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Republic

India's constitution, largely drafted under B. R. Ambedkar, came into force on 26 January 1950: a secular, democratic republic with universal suffrage that abolished untouchability. Nehru set the pattern — parliamentary democracy, non-alignment, state-led industrialisation. Wars followed with China (1962) and Pakistan (1965 and 1971, the latter creating Bangladesh). His daughter Indira Gandhi nationalised the banks and won the 1971 war, but suspended democracy in the Emergency of 1975–77 — 21 months of censorship and mass arrests — before losing the election that ended it. She was assassinated by her bodyguards in 1984.

A skyline of glass office towers in Bangalore against a hazy sky
Bengaluru, centre of India's IT industry. A 1991 economic crisis forced liberalisation, ending decades of the 'Licence Raj' and beginning three decades of rapid growth. (Saad Faruque / Wikimedia Commons)

Since the 1991 opening, India has grown fast, built a large middle class and a world-class services sector, and become the world's most populous country. It has also seen the rise of Hindu nationalism — the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, and, since 2014, the strong parliamentary majorities of Narendra Modi's BJP, which has revoked Kashmir's autonomy and reshaped the country's politics around a more assertively Hindu national identity.

What India carries

India's history has no single thread — it is a subcontinent of overlapping languages, faiths and kingdoms that outsiders, from the Mauryas to the Mughals to the British, have periodically tried to rule as one. The achievement of 1947 and 1950 was to hold that diversity together not by force or a single religion but by a constitution and the vote. Keeping it that way, against the pressures of poverty, communal division and majoritarian politics, is the ongoing work of the republic.

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