This region is rich in minerals and is bordered by the Western and Eastern Ghats, a range of hills running along the coasts. The Northern Plains, south of the Himalayan Region, is made up of the Gangetic Plains formed by the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra river systems. The Himalayan Region, in the north of India, comprises the world’s highest mountain ranges, including the formidable Himalayas. The new mountains—together with vast amounts of sediment eroded from them—were so heavy that the Indian-Australian Plate just south of the range was forced downward, creating a zone of crustal subsidence. Three other Indian cities—Bengaluru (Bangalore), Chennai (Madras), and Hyderabad—are among the world’s fastest-growing high-technology centers, and most of the world’s major information technology and software companies now have offices in India.
h Republic Day Celebration 26 January, 2025
From ancient times until the advent of the modern, the most widely worn traditional dress in India was draped. Modern Indian pop takes influences from classical, folk, and western pop music. Indian music has influenced western genres, notably rock and jazz musicians during the 1960s counterculture. India contains a wide array of musical practices, including many different folk musics from different regions.
Prime Minister’s Address
Yet social legislation has done much to alleviate the disabilities previously suffered by formerly “untouchable” castes, tribal populations, women, and other traditionally disadvantaged segments of society. Earnest attempts have been made to instill a spirit of nationhood in so varied a population, but tensions between neighboring groups have remained and at times have resulted in outbreaks of violence. Religious minorities, including Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains, still account for a significant proportion of the population. Apart from its many religions and sects, India is home to innumerable castes and tribes, as well as to more than a dozen major and hundreds of minor linguistic groups from several language families unrelated to one another. 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.
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Agriculture in India dates to the 7th millennium bce, and an urban civilization, that of the Indus valley, was established by 2600 bce. India is a multiparty federal republic with two legislative houses; its head of state is the president, and the head of government is the prime minister. The peoples of India comprise widely varying mixtures of ethnic strains drawn from peoples settled in the subcontinent before the dawn of history or from invaders.
Leh was once a vital stop on the ancient Silk Road, connecting India to Central Asia and China. It is also the country’s chief port as well as the industrial and commercial center. The country’s significant rivers are the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and the Indus, all of which play a crucial role in India’s agriculture, providing the needed water resources and enriching the soil with silt.
Bounded by the Great Himalayas in the north, it stretches southwards and at the Tropic of Cancer, tapers off into the Indian Ocean between the Bay of Bengal on the east and the Arabian Sea on the west. Situated in the western coast of the country is Mumbai – the largest and the most-populated city of India. Located in the north-central part of the country in the National Capital Territory of Delhi is, New Delhi – the capital of India. The southwestern and southern parts of India are surrounded by the Indian Ocean, with the Arabian Sea to the west and the Bay of Bengal to the east. As the 7th largest country in the world, India stands apart from the rest of Asia, marked off as it is by mountains and the sea, which give the country a distinct geographical entity. When the two finally collided (approximately 50 million years ago), the northern edge of the Indian-Australian Plate was thrust under the Eurasian Plate at a low angle.
India also contains four of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots, or regions that display significant habitat loss in the presence of high endemism.p India is a megadiverse country, a term employed for 17 countries that display high biological diversity and contain many species exclusively indigenous, or endemic, to them. The retreat of Himalayan glaciers has adversely affected the flow rate of the major Himalayan rivers, including the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. The Himalayas prevent cold Central Asian katabatic winds from blowing in, keeping the bulk of the Indian subcontinent warmer than most locations at similar latitudes.
Virupaksha Temple
India has a very ancient tradition of art, which has exchanged many influences with the rest of Eurasia, especially in the first millennium, when Buddhist art spread with Indian religions to Central, East and Southeast Asia, the last also greatly influenced by Hindu art. It predominates in the temperate coniferous forest of the Himalayas, the moist deciduous sal forest of eastern India, and the dry deciduous teak forest of central and southern India. To the south, the remaining peninsular landmass, the Deccan Plateau, is flanked on the west and east by coastal ranges known as the Western and Eastern Ghats; the plateau contains the country’s oldest rock formations, some over one billion years old. Simultaneously, the vast Tethyan oceanic crust, to its northeast, began to subduct under the Eurasian Plate.
- Kochi Biennale is India’s largest contemporary art exhibition, held every two years in the city.
- The country’s significant rivers are the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and the Indus, all of which play a crucial role in India’s agriculture, providing the needed water resources and enriching the soil with silt.
- The subcontinent was then partitioned along religious lines into two separate countries—India, with a majority of Hindus, and Pakistan, with a majority of Muslims; the eastern portion of Pakistan later split off to form Bangladesh.
- India’s pre-existing Dravidian languages were supplanted in the northern regions.
India has achieved all-round socio-economic progress since its Independence. Darjeeling – The queen of eastern Himalayas Serchhip is often referred to as the “Citrus Capital of Mizoram” due to the abundance of citrus orchards in the region.
- This region is a large and fertile alluvial plain that stretches across several states and is the country’s primary agricultural hub.
- These regions, located between the peninsular plateau and the respective seas, feature wide and fertile deltas formed by the rivers flowing into the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.
- The resulting Delhi Sultanate drew northern India into the cosmopolitan networks of medieval Islam.
- Its government is a constitutional republic that represents a highly diverse population consisting of thousands of ethnic groups and hundreds of languages.
- After the 1965 war with Pakistan, India began to pursue close military and economic ties with the Soviet Union.
Medical advances made in the last 50 years as well as increased agricultural productivity brought about by the “Green Revolution” have caused India’s population to grow rapidly. Its population grew by 17.64% from 2001 to 2011, compared to 21.54% growth in the previous decade (1991–2001). With an estimated 1,428,627,663 residents in 2023, India is the world’s most populous country.
The East India Company was disbanded, and the British government began todirectly administer India. These included the consolidation and demarcation of sovereignty, the surveillance of the population, and the education of citizens. 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. Instead, it balanced and pacified them through new administrative practices and diverse and inclusive ruling elites, leading to more systematic, centralised, and uniform rule.
Delhi
In the early 16th century, northern India, then under mainly Muslim rulers, fell again to the superior mobility and firepower of a new generation of Central Asian warriors. No ruler of this period was able to create an empire and consistently control lands much beyond their core region. The Sangam literature of the Tamil language reveals that, between 200 BCE and 200 CE, daman game app the southern peninsula was ruled by the Cheras, the Cholas, and the Pandyas, dynasties that traded extensively with the Roman Empire and with West and Southeast Asia. Most historians also consider this period to have encompassed several waves of Indo-Aryan migration into the subcontinent from the north-west. During the period 2000–500 BCE, many regions of the subcontinent transitioned from the Chalcolithic cultures to the Iron Age ones.
Widespread creativity suffused this era, but the status of women declined, and untouchability became an organised belief.l In South India, the Middle kingdoms exported Dravidian language scripts and religious cultures to the kingdoms of Southeast Asia. By 1200 BCE, an archaic form of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, had diffused into India from the northwest. Their long occupation, predominantly in isolation as hunter-gatherers, has made the region highly diverse. Modern humans arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa no later than 55,000 years ago.
The Golden Temple
The 522-million-worker Indian labour force is the world’s second largest, as of 2017update. However, due to its low GDP per capita—which ranks 136th in the world in nominal per capita income and 125th in per capita income adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP)—the vast majority of Indians fall into the low-income group. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Indian economy in 2024 was nominally worth $3.94 trillion; it is the fifth-largest economy by market exchange rates and is, at around $15.0 trillion, the third-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). India is the world’s second-largest arms importer; between 2016 and 2020, it accounted for 9.5% of the total global arms imports.
Hindi and English are the two major lingua francas, while 22 scheduled languages have official state recognition. 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). The country has hosted high-profile international sporting events such as the inaugural 1951 Asian Games, the 1982 Asian Games, the 2010 Commonwealth Games, and six men’s and five women’s International Cricket Council world championships. Rice was partially cooked and layered alternately with the 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. Its side seams left open below the waistline and it is worn over the shalwar.
Sri Venkateswara Swamy Vaari Temple
Until 1991, all Indian governments followed protectionist policies that were influenced by socialist economics. The remaining five union territories are directly ruled by the central government through appointed administrators. Appointed by the president, the prime minister is supported by the party or political alliance with a majority of seats in the lower house of parliament. The federal structure was conspicuous for the strength of the central government, which exclusively exercised control of defence, foreign affairs, railways, ports, and currency.
The Indian climate is strongly influenced by the Himalayas and the Thar Desert, both of which drive the economically and culturally pivotal summer and winter monsoons. These parallel chains run from the Arabian Sea coast in Gujarat in the west to the coal-rich Chota Nagpur Plateau in Jharkhand in the east. To the west lies the Thar Desert, the eastern spread of which is checked by the Aravallis. Immediately south of the emerging Himalayas, plate movement created a vast crescent-shaped trough that rapidly filled with river-borne sediment and now constitutes the Indo-Gangetic Plain. 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 far-away markets.
India’s landmass, which forms the northwestern portion of the Indian-Australian Plate, began to drift slowly northward toward the much larger Eurasian Plate several hundred million years ago (after the former broke away from the ancient southern-hemispheric supercontinent known as Gondwana, or Gondwanaland). The above outline map represents India – a large country located on the Indian subcontinent in south-central Asia. The above blank map represents India – a large country located on the Indian subcontinent in south-central Asia. India is a large country located on the Indian subcontinent in south-central Asia. The land of India—together with Bangladesh and most of Pakistan—forms a well-defined subcontinent, set off from the rest of Asia by the imposing northern mountain rampart of the Himalayas and by adjoining mountain ranges to the west and east. It is known from archaeological evidence that a highly sophisticated urbanized culture—the Indus civilization—dominated the northwestern part of the subcontinent from about 2600 to 2000 bce.
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. Especially important was the coming of Islam, brought from the northwest by Arab, Turkish, Persian, and other raiders beginning early in the 8th century ce. 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. India became the world’s most populous country in 2023, according to estimates by the United Nations. 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.