History Of India Facts, Timelines, Events, Personalities & Culture

Crafts of Kutch – Rogan art, ajrakh & more (Gujarat , India) Mechuka is often referred to as the ‘Last Shangri-La’ of India due to its remote location and pristine natural beauty. Standing as the highest waterfall in Mizoram and the 13th highest in India, Vantawng Waterfalls captivates visitors with its magnificence. The Neermahal is one of the only two water palaces in India. The Kachari Ruins are mysterious mushroom-domed pillars built by the Dimasa Kachari Kingdoms before the Ahom invasion in the 13th century. The Cochin International Airport is the first in the world to operate solely on solar energy.

Government and politics

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. Other languages spoken in India come from the Austro-Asiatic group. There are two main language families in India, the Indo-Aryan and the Dravidian languages. There are many different languages and cultures in India.

There were also many other Indian dynasties (empires) such as the Chalukyas, Cholas, Pallavas, and Pandyas. It has become a very popular name for India since the middle of the 19th century. It original meaning was the northern part of India. The ancient Greeks called Indians as Indoi (Ἰνδοί), which means «the people of the Indus». Most of Indians follow Hinduism at 80%, but people of different religions such as Buddhism, Sikhism and Islam also live there.

Religion in India is characterised by a diversity of beliefs and practices. The compromise resolution became articles 343–351 of India’s constitution, which came into effect on 26 January 1950. Among them Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad, in decreasing order by population. In the 2011 census, there were 53 million-plus urban agglomerations in India. The slowing down of the overall population growth rate was due to the sharp decline in the growth rate in rural areas since 1991. The number of people living in urban areas grew by 31.2% between 1991 and 2001.

The oldest extant mathematical document produced on the Indian subcontinent is the birch bark Bakhshali manuscript from the 7th century CE. India has the largest population of Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains, the third-largest population of Muslims (after Indonesia and Pakistan) and the ninth largest of Buddhists. This list includes major regional languages, but also others—such as Sanskrit, which no longer has first language speakers in India, and Urdu, which is not region-specific—because of their value to India’s cultural heritage. Hindi language protagonists wanted Hindi in the Devanagari script to be the sole «national language» of India whereas delegates from South India preferred English to have a place in the Constitution. The official language of India’s federal government was chosen by the Constituent Assembly of India in September 1949 after three years of debate between two opposing camps.

By living ethically, lay people could rise socially and morally in these religions. The settlement may have involved driving the preexisting people out or enslaving them. These cultures gradually evolved into the Indus Valley Civilisation, which flourished during bet365 India 2500–1900 BCE in Pakistan and western 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. 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. Indian royalty, big and small, and the temples they patronised drew citizens in significant numbers to the capital cities, which became economic hubs as well. The Pallavas, in particular, traded extensively with the Roman Empire and with West and Southeast Asia. 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.

The major secular holidays in India are Independence Day (August 15), Republic Day (January 26), and Gandhi Jayanti (October 2, Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary). India has won a record eight field hockey gold medals in the summer Olympics. India is one of the more successful cricket teams, having won two Cricket World Cups, two T20 World Cups, and three Champions Trophies.

Indian classical music has Vedic origins, and split in the 13th century into the two main traditions of Hindustani and Carnatic music. A later landmark in Indian mathematics was the development of the series expansions for trigonometric functions (sine, cosine, and arc tangent) by mathematicians of the Kerala school in the 15th century CE. In the 19th century, cheap Kalighat paintings of gods and everyday life, done on paper, were urban folk art from Calcutta, which later saw the Bengal School of Art, reflecting the art colleges founded by the British, the first movement in modern Indian painting.

Its further access to the riches of Bengal and the subsequent increased strength and size of its army enabled it to annexe or subdue most of India by the 1820s. As the empire disintegrated, many among these elites were able to seek and control their own affairs. The Mughal state’s economic policies, deriving most revenues from agriculture and mandating that taxes be paid in the well-regulated silver currency, caused peasants and artisans to enter larger markets. The sultanate’s raiding and weakening of the regional kingdoms of South India paved the way for the indigenous Vijayanagara Empire.

• The Eighth Schedule of India’s Constitution also recognises 22 languages, including Hindi but not English, which the government is obligated to develop.
• 1990s – Government initiates a programme of economic liberalisation and reform, opening up the economy to global trade and investment.
• India bears a disproportionately large burden of the world’s tuberculosis rates, with World Health Organization (WHO) statistics for 2022 estimating 2.8 million new infections annually, accounting for 26% of the global total.
• There was an increase in the number of large-scale famines, and, despite the risks of infrastructure development borne by Indian taxpayers, little industrial employment was generated for Indians.

The twin hills of Khandagiri and Udaigiri are famous for their rock-cut caves, constructed by Jain monks during the 1st and 2nd century BC. Gurugram has a link with Indian epic ‘Mahabharata’. Hidimba Devi Temple is dedicated to Hidimba Devi, the wife of Bhima, one of the Pandavas from the Indian epic ‘Mahabharata’.

All three parts are in New Delhi, the capital city of India. That means a strong federal government with weak state governments. Its original form said that India would be a «sovereign, democratic republic». India is ruled under the Constitution of India. The Congress is known as centre in Indian political culture, while the BJP is known as right-wing. India is a parliamentary republic with a multi-party system.

Native speakers of Hindi represented about 41% of the Indian population in the 2001 Indian census. Around 5% of the people speak a Tibeto-Burman language. About 69% of Indians speak an Indo-Arayan language, and about 26% speak a Dravidian language. The largest cities in India are Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Ahmedabad. In 2023, India passed China to become the world’s most populous country. Despite its economic growth, India continues to suffer from poverty.

Government Schemes

Parcheesi is derived from Pachisi another traditional Indian pastime, which in early modern times was played on a giant marble court by Mughal emperor Akbar. 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. India has distinctive vegetarian cuisines, each a feature of the geographical and cultural histories of its adherents. The foundation of a typical Indian meal is a cereal cooked plainly and complemented with savoury dishes.

India accounts for the bulk of the Indian subcontinent, lying atop the Indian tectonic plate, and a part of the Indo-Australian Plate. The rush of technology and the commercialisation of agriculture in the second half of the 19th century was marked by economic setbacks, and many small farmers became dependent on the whims of faraway markets. After the rebellion was suppressed in 1858, the East India Company was disbanded, and the British government began to directly administer India.

Shri Narendra Modi was sworn-in as India’s Prime Minister for the third time on 9th June 2024, following another decisive victory in the 2024 Parliamentary elections. Dynamic, dedicated and determined, Narendra Modi arrives as a ray of hope in the lives of a billion Indians. India is one of the oldest civilizations in the world with a kaleidoscopic variety and rich cultural heritage.

Uncover India’s

Traditional sports include kabaddi, kho kho, and gilli-danda, which are played throughout India. The number of Indian Grandmasters has increased recently. Chess, which originated in India, is also becoming popular. Tennis has become popular due to the victories of the India Davis Cup team.

Hindustan (ɦɪndʊˈstaːn ⓘ) 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. A modern rendering of the historical name Bharatavarsha, which applied originally to North India, Bharat gained increased currency from the mid-19th century as a native name for India. Among the socio-economic challenges India faces are gender inequality, child malnutrition, and rising levels of air pollution. India has reduced its poverty rate, though at the cost of increasing economic inequality. 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’s population grew from 361 million in 1951 to over 1.4 billion in 2023.

Hampi Bazar was a street market that served as a ‘mall’ for the Vijayanagar empire. Ramoji Film City is the largest film studio in the world. Indore has held the title of India’s cleanest city for six consecutive years, from 2017 to 2022. St. Thomas Church served as a prison for Indian freedom fighters while Britain was in power.