A brief history of India

The Indus Valley Civilisation, flourishing around 2600 to 1900 BCE across what is now northwest India and Pakistan, built cities including Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and Dholavira with grid planning, standardised weights, covered drainage and long-distance trade. Its script remains undeciphered, so its politics and beliefs are inferred rather than read.

The Vedic period follows, producing the Sanskrit texts that give it its name and, over centuries, the social ordering that hardened into caste. By the sixth century BCE, north India had sixteen mahajanapadas — large states — and two movements emerged that would spread far beyond it: Buddhism and Jainism.

The Maurya Empire, founded by Chandragupta Maurya around 322 BCE, unified most of the subcontinent. Its most consequential ruler, Ashoka, converted to Buddhism after the Kalinga war and inscribed edicts on pillars and rocks across his territory promoting dhamma, welfare and religious tolerance. The Lion Capital from his pillar at Sarnath is now India's state emblem, and the Ashoka Chakra sits at the centre of the flag.

The Gupta period, roughly 320 to 550 CE, is conventionally described as a classical age — associated with Aryabhata's astronomy and mathematics, Kalidasa's literature, and the decimal place-value system with zero that would eventually transform mathematics worldwide.

The south had its own long-running dynasties, largely independent of northern empires: the Cholas, Cheras, Pandyas, Chalukyas, Pallavas and Vijayanagara. Chola maritime power extended across Southeast Asia, and Tamil literature from the Sangam period is among the oldest surviving in any Indian language.

The Delhi Sultanate, established in 1206, ruled much of north India for three centuries across five dynasties, introducing Persian administrative practice, new architectural forms and Indo-Islamic cultural synthesis.

The Mughal Empire, founded by Babur in 1526, became one of the wealthiest and most powerful states in the world. Akbar's reign consolidated an administrative system and a policy of religious accommodation; Shah Jahan's built the Taj Mahal; Aurangzeb's expanded the empire to its greatest extent while straining it beyond sustainability.

After Aurangzeb's death in 1707 Mughal authority fragmented rapidly. The Marathas became the dominant power across much of the subcontinent, alongside the Sikh Empire in the northwest, Mysore under Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, and numerous successor states.

European trading companies arrived from 1498, when Vasco da Gama reached Calicut. The Portuguese, Dutch, French and English all established coastal footholds. The English East India Company's victory at Plassey in 1757 converted commercial presence into territorial power in Bengal, and expansion continued through conquest, subsidiary alliances and annexation over the following century.

The Rebellion of 1857 — variously called the Sepoy Mutiny and the First War of Independence — was suppressed after a year of widespread fighting. Its consequence was the abolition of Company rule: the Crown assumed direct control in 1858, and the last Mughal emperor was exiled.

British rule reorganised India administratively and economically. It built railways, telegraphs, canals and a codified legal system; it also deindustrialised textile production, restructured agriculture towards cash crops and export, and presided over famines whose death tolls ran into millions, most catastrophically in Bengal in 1943.

Economic historians differ sharply on the balance sheet, but the direction of the transfer is not seriously disputed: India's share of world manufacturing output fell dramatically across the colonial period.

The Indian National Congress was founded in 1885, initially seeking greater Indian participation in government rather than independence. The Muslim League followed in 1906.

Mohandas Gandhi returned from South Africa in 1915 and transformed the movement into a mass one, built on satyagraha — nonviolent resistance. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in 1919, when troops fired on an unarmed gathering, was a decisive break in Indian faith in British rule.

The Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–22, the Salt March of 1930, and the Quit India Movement of 1942 were the major campaigns. Revolutionary strands ran alongside — Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad, and later Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army. B. R. Ambedkar led the struggle for Dalit rights and would go on to chair the Constitution's Drafting Committee.

Independence came on 15 August 1947, and with it Partition. The subcontinent was divided into India and Pakistan along hurried boundary lines. Around fifteen million people were displaced and estimates of deaths range from several hundred thousand to two million. It remains among the largest forced migrations in human history, and its consequences — for Kashmir, for India-Pakistan relations, for communal politics — are entirely present.

The Constitution came into force on 26 January 1950, making India a republic. Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister until 1964, set the early template: a planned economy with a large public sector, non-alignment in foreign policy, and heavy investment in higher education and scientific institutions.

The states were reorganised on linguistic lines in 1956 after sustained agitation. The princely states, over five hundred of them, were integrated into the union in the years after independence, mostly through negotiation led by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, with the accession of Hyderabad and Kashmir contested.

Wars were fought with China in 1962 and with Pakistan in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999. The 1971 war ended with the creation of Bangladesh.

The Green Revolution from the late 1960s transformed food production, moving India from recurring import dependence to self-sufficiency in cereals, with lasting environmental costs in groundwater and soil.

The Emergency of 1975 to 1977, when Indira Gandhi suspended civil liberties, censored the press and jailed opposition leaders, remains the republic's sharpest constitutional crisis. Its electoral repudiation in 1977 is often described as the moment Indian democracy proved durable.

The economic liberalisation of 1991, prompted by a balance of payments crisis, dismantled much of the licence system, opened the economy to foreign investment and trade, and set up the growth of the decades since.

The period since has seen coalition politics give way to single-party majorities and back, the rise of regional parties as national actors, the transformation of the economy by services and now digital infrastructure, and continuing arguments — about secularism, federalism, reservations and citizenship — that are best understood as arguments about how to implement a constitution written in 1949.