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

The party lost again in 1989, with a short-lived National Front coalition government under V.P. However, this government lasted only about two years, with Morarji Desai and Charan Singh serving as prime ministers. In the 16th century India came under Mughal rule. The Vijayanagara empire was another significant Indian empire.

Newly coherent social groups in northern and western India, such as the Marathas, the Rajputs, and the Sikhs, gained military and governing ambitions during Mughal rule, which, through collaboration or adversity, gave them both recognition and military experience. 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 sultanate was to control much of North India and to make many forays into South India.

• India maintains a “no first use” nuclear policy and is developing a nuclear triad capability as a part of its “Minimum Credible Deterrence” doctrine.
• Humans came to the Indian subcontinent from Africa more than 55,000 years ago.
• The island country of Sri Lanka is situated some 40 miles (65 km) off the southeast coast of India across the Palk Strait and Gulf of Mannar.
• Since its independence in 1947, India fought four wars with Pakistan and a war with China.

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. A nationalist movement emerged in India, the first in the non-European British Empire and an influence on other nationalist movements. In south India, the Vijayanagara Empire created a long-lasting composite Hindu culture.

The preferred endonym (the name given to the country by its own people) is “Bhārat” in Hindi and other Indian languages. India has the fourth largest number of spoken languages per country in the world, only behind Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Nigeria. It is made up of 28 states and eight union territories, and its national capital is New Delhi, built in the 20th century just south of the historic hub of Old Delhi to serve as India’s administrative center. The Dravidian languages of India were supplanted in the north, creating a broad language familiy-divide, with the Indo-Aryan languages being spoken mainly in the north and west, and the Dravidian in some parts of east India and most of the south. The constitution also recognises 21 other languages – either because many people speak them, or because they are very important for Indian culture.

Trump said he doesn’t want to destroy PM’s career. India reacts to old video

After the India–Pakistan war of 1965, Shastri died in January 1966, soon after signing the Tashkent Peace Declaration. After Nehru died in office in May 1964, Lal Bahadur Shastri was unanimously chosen by the Congress to be parliamentary leader, and thus prime minister. The Congress is considered the ideological centre in Indian political culture; the BJP is right-wing. India hosts more than five hundred wildlife sanctuaries and eighteen biosphere reserves, four of which are part of the World Network of Biosphere Reserves; its eighty-nine wetlands are registered under the Ramsar Convention. In 1972, India enacted the Wildlife Protection Act and Project Tiger to safeguard crucial wilderness; the Forest Conservation Act was enacted in 1980 and amendments added in 1988. In response, the system of national parks and protected areas, first established in 1935, was expanded substantially.

Qutub Minar is a towering minaret that Bet365 was built in the 12th century and is the tallest brick minaret in the world! Welcome to the new Incredible India Digital Portal! 1990s – Government initiates a programme of economic liberalisation and reform, opening up the economy to global trade and investment. India and Pakistan go to war over East Pakistan, leading to the creation of Bangladesh. India is split into two nations at independence – Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan.

The EU-India trade agreement

The Cochin International Airport is the first in the world to operate solely on solar energy. 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.

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. Temple towns of various sizes began to appear everywhere as India underwent another urbanisation. The Indian early medieval age, from 600 to 1200 CE, was defined by regional kingdoms and cultural diversity.

Clear cockpit audio, pilot’s ‘almost certainly intentional’ act: In Air India crash, new claims via Italian news report

In its modern form, it is combined with an underskirt, or Indian petticoat, and tucked in along the waist band for more secure fastening. From ancient times until the advent of the modern, the most widely worn traditional dress in India was draped. Dance has been an essential aspect of Indian films from the first talkies of the 1930s. Among 20th-century directions is the modern dance of Uday Shankar in which classical styles were employed but not adhered to rigidly.

Despite its economic growth, India continues to suffer from poverty. Only the government can use this emblem, according to the State Emblem of India (Prohibition of Improper Use) Act, 2005. The national emblem of India shows four lions standing back-to-back. In 2010, the Indian Armed Forces had 1.32 million active personnel, making it one of the largest militaries in the world.

Towards the end of the 20th century, innovations in British South Asian music and dance, such as Post-Bhangra, fed back into dance in India. Examples are dance-dramas based on the ancient Indian animal fables, Panchatantra, and Nehru’s mid-century meditation on Indian history, The Discovery of India. Whether or not a dance is classical is determined by the Sangeet Natak Academi, the Indian government’s organisation for performing arts.ab Although more dances could perhaps meet the criteria for classical, the Akademi has chosen eight.ac 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.

After 1947, India had a socialist planned economy. The first official leader (Prime Minister) of India was Jawaharlal Nehru. Every year, on this day, Indians celebrate Republic Day.

In the eighth century Islam came to India for the first time and by the eleventh century had firmly established itself in India as a political force. The fifth century saw the unification of India under Ashoka, who had converted to Buddhism, and it is in his reign that Buddhism spread in many parts of Asia. India’s social, economic, and cultural configurations are the products of a long process of regional expansion. His campaign focused on a blend of economic development, national security, and social welfare programs, which resonated widely with the populace.Shri Modi’s third term is expected to build on the foundations laid during his …

The election saw a resurgence of India’s opposition, which won 234 seats. The presidency is largely ceremonial, but can play a significant role if, for example, no party wins an outright majority in elections. A teacher and former governor of Jharkhand State, she is the first person from a tribal community to serve as India’s head of state. But it is also tackling huge, social, economic and environmental problems. Those slices were thrown back onto the northern edge of the Indian landmass and came to form much of the Himalayan mountain system. It is now generally accepted that India’s geographic position, continental outline, and basic geologic structure resulted from a process of plate tectonics—the shifting of enormous, rigid crustal plates over the Earth’s underlying layer of molten material.

About 65% of Indians live in rural areas, or land set aside for farming. Over one quarter of the population (27.5%) was living in poverty in 2004–2005. In terms of PPP, the economy is 3rd largest (worth US$8.720 trillion). It is the 7th largest in the world with a nominal GDP of $2,250 billion (USD).

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. Migration from rural to urban areas has been an important dynamic in India’s recent history.

Kochi Biennale is India’s largest contemporary art exhibition, held every two years in the city. Rameshwaram is home to the world’s second-largest and India’s first-ever sea bridge, the Pamban Bridge. The historic Ashokan pillar originally erected in Sarnath was also the source of inspiration for the national emblem of India.

Hindi became the official language (and a number of other local languages achieved official status), while a vibrant English-language intelligentsia thrived. Many British institutions stayed in place (such as the parliamentary system of government); English continued to be a widely used lingua franca; and India remained within the Commonwealth. Direct administration by the British, which began in 1858, effected a political and economic unification of the subcontinent. Eventually, some of those raiders stayed; by the 13th century much of the subcontinent was under Muslim rule, and the number of Muslims steadily increased. Other religions, notably Buddhism and Jainism, originated in India—though their presence there is now quite small—and throughout the centuries residents of the subcontinent developed a rich intellectual life in such fields as mathematics, astronomy, architecture, literature, music, and the fine arts.