India

The world's most populous country and its largest democracy, assembled from a subcontinent that had rarely been one state. The Indus valley civilisation built planned cities with drainage before 2000 BCE and left a script nobody has read. The Mauryas under Ashoka governed most of the subcontinent in the third century BCE, the Guptas presided over a classical flowering, the Delhi Sultanate and then the Mughals made the north Persianate, and the Marathas broke Mughal power before the British broke theirs. The East India Company took Bengal's revenues after Plassey in 1757 and ruled through a private army until the revolt of 1857 brought direct Crown rule. Famine policy, deindustrialisation of the textile trade and the drain of revenue are the economic charges against the Raj; railways, a common language of administration and a legal system are what it left behind. Gandhi's mass campaigns from 1919 made the independence movement genuinely popular. Independence and partition came together in August 1947. Ambedkar's constitution abolished untouchability and created the world's largest system of affirmative action. Five hundred and sixty-two princely states were integrated, mostly by negotiation. India tested nuclear weapons in 1974 and 1998. The country has over 1.4 billion people and became the most populous in 2023. The constitution recognises twenty-two scheduled languages and Hindi and English are used federally. Forty-three of its sites are World Heritage listed. It is the world's largest producer of milk and of films. The Chandrayaan-3 lander reached the lunar south pole in 2023, the first to do so.

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