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India
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Early India
India
Early India
It all started some 4,500 years ago, when a
complex civilization cropped up in the Indus River Valley (now in Pakistan), south of the majestic mountain ranges that divide
the Indian subcontinent from the rest of Asia. For a thousand years, that civilization's citizens built with bricks, carved
with copper, and wrote in pictographs that have yet to be deciphered. Experts say they even went "global" by trading with
the Mesopotamians.
Then, around 1500 BC, a nomadic central Asian
people--the Aryans--moved into India and put down roots. The mix of Aryans and earlier Indians produced a long-standing caste
system including Brahmans (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (traders), and Shudras (laborers). It also produced Hinduism's
central texts, the Vedas, which at first were passed down orally.
Over the next few centuries, minor empires
rose and fell, and reform movements helped sow the seeds of two more major religions--Buddhism and Jainism--in the same fertile
soil that produced Hinduism. Ancient Persian armies invaded at the end of the 6th century BC, and Alexander the Great followed
in 326 BC. But neither made it much farther than the Indus. By then, Indian civilization had spread east, all the way to the
Ganges River.
During the 3rd century BC, a Ganges-based dynasty
conquered nearly the entire subcontinent and became the Mauryan Empire. One of its greatest kings, Ashoka, rejected violence,
promoted religious tolerance, and sent Buddhist missionaries and cultural envoys both east and west. The Mauryan dynasty soon
collapsed, and regional rulers reemerged, but the international connections enabled ongoing trade with partners from China
to Rome.
Commerce really took off under the Kushana
Kingdom, a central Asian power that spread across northern India in the 1st century AD. The most important Kushana ruler,
Kanishka, convened an important Buddhist council in Kashmir.
In the 4th century, a new dynasty--the Gupta--again
united northern India. Often described as India's "Classical Age," the Gupta era was marked by innovations in fields from
literature to mathematics (including the use of zero). But during the 6th century, the Gupta fell to the Huns, who promptly
fell as well. Regional regents again ruled a shifting patchwork of kingdoms across India, and the peoples of the subcontinent
developed a dazzling array of cultural and linguistic traditions.
Islam first arrived on the subcontinent in
the 8th century, when Arab armies established a small Muslim state in the Sindh region (now part of Pakistan). Yet the religion
of Muhammad didn't really have an impact until a Turkic leader, Mahmud of Ghazni (a.k.a. "the sword of Islam"), began raiding
the northern kingdoms around the year 1000. Mahmud used superior military technology--swift cavalry carrying crossbows--to
conquer India's Punjab region.
His empire soon collapsed, but another Muslim
conqueror, Muhammad of Ghur, captured all of northern India at the end of the 12th century. And his successors founded a sultanate
at Delhi that survived for more than 300 years.
Two other dynasties--the Muslim Bahmani Sultanate
and the Hindu Vijayanagar Empire--struggled for dominance in southern India. Both began to peter out by the early 16th century,
just as a new invasion from the northwest began--this one led by Zahir-ud-Din Babur.
Babur was the great-grandson of Tamerlane,
who had destroyed Delhi back in 1398. (According to reports, Tamerlane left the city with "not a bird moving.") Not to be
outdone, Babur captured and kept Delhi, though his army was outnumbered nearly ten to one. So began the Mughal Empire, though
it didn't really take off until 1556, when Babur's 13-year-old grandson, Akbar, took charge.
Akbar combined military success with administrative
skill and an abiding hunger for knowledge. While his military worked to extend Mughal power across the subcontinent, he built
an effective bureaucracy and implemented a revenue plan that maximized government income without overly taxing the peasants.
He also practiced religious tolerance and reportedly collected some 24,000 books before he died.
Akbar's son and grandson each further extended
Mughal rule (and the grandson, Shah Jahan, built the Taj Mahal). Yet in many ways the empire reached its peak under Akbar.
Later wars of expansion sucked the treasury dry. Meanwhile, the government grew less tolerant of non-Muslims, who in turn
grew less tolerant of the government.
The last major Mughal emperor took the throne
by arresting his father and executing his brother. When he died in 1707, another succession struggle followed. A bevy of provincial
governors asserted their independence, even as Afghan and Persian armies began a series of raids from the northwest. The once-mighty
Mughal Empire became a shadow of its former self, and there was no one left to stop the encroachment of the newest foreign
arrivals: the Europeans.
--Steve Sampson
Copyright © 2007, Every Learner, Inc. All rights reserved.
India
We've taken a trip through 4,000 years of India's ancient history.
Today, we're zooming in on the last five centuries, during which the British Raj rose and fell.
In 1497, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama
rounded Africa's Cape of Good Hope. In 1498, he landed in India, established friendly relations with a local kingdom, and
began building a trade network. By 1510, the Portuguese had established an outpost on India's west coast they would hold for
more than 400 years. Their traders would control Indian Ocean trade until the Dutch supplanted them in the 17th century.
But soon Europeans would do more than trade.
When India's mighty Mughal Empire unraveled in the 18th century, princes began trading concessions to Europeans in exchange
for military assistance. By the 1750s, the British and French--at war all over the world--were squaring off in battles across
India. Within 15 years, Britain had become the dominant European player on the subcontinent, and the British East India Company
had control of India's far east Bengal region.
Founded in 1600, the British East India Company
had started building "factories" (basically, warehouse trading posts) along the coast of the Bay of Bengal in the early 17th
century. The biggest of these factories eventually became forts, as the company grew into a sovereign power within India,
complete with its own troops. By 1773, its power was so great that Parliament passed the Regulating Act, which made the company
answerable to the Crown.
Additional acts followed as the British Empire
extended its reach across India--sometimes by clever politicking, often by military force. In much of India, English became
the economic lingua franca, and British law became the rule. Meanwhile, efficient English factories produced cheap products
from Indian raw materials--even as colonial taxes helped drive their Indian competitors out of business.
By the 1850s, the British East India Company
was building bridges, railroads, and telegraph lines to link India's interior to the coast. It was also functioning less as
an independent company than as an arm of the British government. Then, in 1857, a group of the company's Indian soldiers (called
"sepoys") mutinied--and wound up starting a year-long uprising across much of India.
The British crushed the rebellion, but it still
put an end to the British East India Company. In 1858, the British government assumed direct responsibility for the company's
holdings. In 1876, Queen Victoria took the title Empress of India.
Direct rule didn't change much for ordinary
Indians. If anything, it fed Indian nationalism. In 1905, when the British decided to divide Bengal to improve administrative
efficiency, a new crop of nationalist leaders helped organize a boycott of British goods. Local businesses boomed, imports
dropped, and the British eventually undivided Bengal. Meanwhile, the Indian National Congress called for swaraj ("self-rule").
At the outbreak of World War I, India rallied
to the British cause. But by war's end, the nationalist movement had regained momentum. In 1919, British troops fired on Hindus
who had gathered for a festival despite a last-minute ban on public meetings. They killed nearly 400 people.
National Congress leader Mohandas Gandhi then
organized a national campaign of noncompliance with British rule. Indians boycotted British goods, resigned from British government
jobs, and withdrew their children from British schools. Gandhi called off the noncompliance campaign in 1922, after 22 Indian
policemen were burned to death. But he returned to his civilly disobedient ways in 1930, leading thousands on a march to the
Arabian Sea to protest unfair taxes on salt.
As calls for swaraj grew louder, Parliament
passed a law that provided for independent provincial legislatures in British India. Elections followed, and Congress emerged
as the dominant party. Then, in 1939, the British viceroy declared India's entry into World War II without consulting Indian
leaders. Congress's provincial ministers resigned in protest, and Gandhi declared a new "Quit India" movement.
After the war, the British entered into a new
round of negotiations over Indian independence--and the real possibility of self-rule exposed age-old splits in the "self"
that wanted it. Congress's leaders, mindful of India's cultural and religious diversity, had long espoused a policy of secular
nonpreference. Their goal, they said, was simply to make India into a secular democracy, with no religious or ethnic group
preferred over any other.
Muslim leaders had other ideas. They believed
that with only 12 percent of the total population, India's Muslims could never hope to have enough electoral power to ensure
fair treatment. So, they proposed that the British partition India into two states: one Hindu, one Muslim.
When civil war erupted between India's Hindu
and Muslim populations in 1946, the British figured that partitioning Muslims from Hindus was the best choice. In 1947, India
finally got its swaraj, but so did Pakistan--a "land of the pure" cartographically created out of Muslim-majority provinces.
The two have been at each other's throats practically ever since. Both are nuclear powers.
--Steve Sampson
Copyright © 2007, Every Learner, Inc. All rights reserved.
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