The history of India

India's history runs from some of the earliest farming villages in Asia and the cities of the Indus Valley, through the Vedic age that shaped Hinduism and the birth of Buddhism and Jainism, to a long sequence of empires: the Mauryas, the Guptas, the great regional kingdoms of the south, the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals. For most of its history the subcontinent was divided among many states, yet it shared languages, religions and ideas that gave it a common civilisation. From the eighteenth century the British East India Company and then the British Crown brought nearly all of it under foreign rule. Independence in 1947 came with the Partition that created Pakistan, and the Republic of India, founded in 1950, has since grown into the world's most populous country and one of its largest economies.

Stone tools show that early humans lived in the subcontinent for hundreds of thousands of years, and fossils from the Narmada valley are around half a million years old. Modern humans arrived from Africa, probably between about 73,000 and 55,000 years ago, and their descendants form the deepest layer of South Asia's population.

Farming came early. At Mehrgarh, at the foot of the Bolan Pass in what is now Pakistan, people were growing wheat and barley and herding cattle, sheep and goats by about 7000 BCE, part of the wider Neolithic Revolution.

From about 3300 BCE these villages grew into the Indus Valley Civilisation, one of the three earliest urban civilisations alongside Mesopotamia and Egypt and the largest in extent. In its mature phase, from about 2600 to 1900 BCE, it covered most of modern Pakistan and much of northwestern India. Its cities, among them Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan and Dholavira, Kalibangan, Rakhigarhi and Lothal in India, were laid out on grid plans with baked-brick houses, covered drains, granaries and great public baths. Standardised weights and seals carved with animals and short inscriptions were used across the whole region, and Indus goods reached Mesopotamia by sea. The population may have reached five million.

The Indus script has never been deciphered, so the civilisation's language, rulers and beliefs remain unknown. After about 1900 BCE the great cities were gradually abandoned, probably because of a drier climate and shifting rivers, and people moved east and into smaller villages.

In the second millennium BCE speakers of Indo-Aryan languages, an eastern branch of the Indo-European family, moved into the northwest, probably from Central Asia. Their oldest religious text, the Rigveda, composed in an early form of Sanskrit, is a collection of hymns to gods such as Indra, Agni and Varuna. The Vedic period, from about 1500 to 500 BCE, saw these pastoral tribes spread into the Ganges plain, adopt iron tools and settled farming, and form kingdoms such as Kuru and Panchala. Society came to be ordered into four varnas, priests, warriors, merchants and labourers, the root of the later caste system. Later Vedic texts, the Upanishads, explored the self and ultimate reality and became central to Hinduism and Indian philosophy.

By about 600 BCE towns had reappeared along the Ganges and sixteen great states, the mahajanapadas, competed for power; some were monarchies and others oligarchic republics. In this world of new cities and trade, wandering ascetics questioned the authority of Vedic ritual. Two founded lasting religions: Mahavira, who gave Jainism its classical form, and Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, who taught in the middle Ganges region in about the fifth century BCE. Buddhism would later spread across Asia.

The kingdom of Magadha, in modern Bihar, gradually absorbed its neighbours from its capital at Pataliputra (modern Patna). Meanwhile the northwest was drawn into the affairs of Iran: Darius the Great made Gandhara and the Indus region provinces of the Achaemenid Empire in the late sixth century BCE, and in 326 BCE Alexander the Great crossed the Indus and defeated King Porus at the Hydaspes before his exhausted army forced him to turn back.

Soon afterwards Chandragupta Maurya overthrew the Nanda kings of Magadha and built the Maurya Empire, the first state to rule most of the subcontinent. He fought Alexander's successor Seleucus, whose Seleucid Empire ceded the lands west of the Indus in exchange for 500 war elephants. The Greek envoy Megasthenes described the splendour of Pataliputra.

Chandragupta's grandson Ashoka, who ruled from about 268 to 232 BCE, conquered Kalinga on the east coast in a war that, by his own account, killed or displaced hundreds of thousands. Afterwards he embraced Buddhism and proclaimed a policy of dharma, moral conduct, tolerance and care for all living beings, in edicts carved on rocks and pillars across his empire. These are the oldest deciphered written records in India. He also sent Buddhist missions abroad, including to Sri Lanka. The empire declined after his death, and in 185 BCE the last Maurya king was assassinated by his general Pushyamitra Shunga.

The five centuries after the Mauryas were politically fragmented but culturally creative. The Shungas held the Ganges heartland, while in the northwest a series of foreign dynasties ruled: Indo-Greek kings from Bactria, the most famous of whom, Menander, appears in Buddhist literature, followed by Scythians, Parthians and finally the Kushan Empire. Under Kanishka in the second century CE the Kushans ruled from Central Asia to the Ganges, patronised Buddhism and controlled a stretch of the Silk Road. In Gandhara and Mathura sculptors produced some of the first images of the Buddha in human form, the Gandharan style showing clear Greek influence.

In the Deccan the Satavahana dynasty ruled from the second century BCE to the third century CE, and Buddhist monks carved the cave monasteries of western India. Further south, the Tamil kingdoms of the Cheras, Cholas and Pandyas produced the Sangam poetry, the earliest literature in Tamil. Ports on the southern coasts traded pepper, pearls, textiles and gems with the Roman world, and Roman coins have been found in large numbers in Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

In about 320 CE Chandragupta I, a king of Magadha, took the title of great king of kings, and his successors Samudragupta and Chandragupta II built the Gupta Empire across northern India. The Gupta period, from the fourth to the sixth century, is often called India's classical age, though historians now treat the label with caution. The playwright and poet Kalidasa wrote in Sanskrit, Hindu temple architecture began to take shape, and the Puranas reshaped popular Hinduism around the worship of Vishnu, Shiva and the goddess. The astronomer Aryabhata, born in 476, calculated the length of the year and argued that the earth rotates; the decimal place-value system with a symbol for zero, later passed through the Arab world to Europe, was developed by Indian mathematicians in this era and the century after. The Chinese pilgrim Faxian, who travelled through the empire between 405 and 411, found it prosperous and mildly governed.

From the mid-fifth century the Alchon Huns attacked from the northwest, and by the mid-sixth century the empire had broken up. In the seventh century Harsha briefly united much of the north from Kannauj between 606 and 647.

For the next six centuries India was a world of powerful regional kingdoms. The Chalukyas of Badami, whose king Pulakeshin II stopped Harsha's advance south, and the Pallavas of Kanchipuram, who built the shore temples of Mamallapuram, contested the Deccan and the south. In the north, three powers, the Gurjara-Pratiharas of the west, the Rashtrakutas of the Deccan and the Pala Empire of Bengal, fought for generations over the city of Kannauj. The Rashtrakutas carved the Kailasa temple at Ellora out of a single hillside, while the Palas were the last great royal patrons of Buddhism in India, supporting Nalanda and Vikramashila.

The most far-reaching of these states was the Chola dynasty of the Tamil country. Rajaraja I, who ruled from 985 to 1014, built the great Brihadeeswarar temple at Thanjavur and conquered northern Sri Lanka, and his son Rajendra I led an army to the Ganges and, around 1025, sent a fleet against Srivijaya, the trading empire of Sumatra. Indian merchants, priests and scholars carried Hindu and Buddhist culture across Southeast Asia, shaping the kingdoms of Java, Cambodia and beyond.

Arab forces conquered Sindh in 711, and Arab and Persian merchants settled peacefully on the western coast, but the decisive change came from Afghanistan. Mahmud of Ghazni, ruler of the Ghaznavid Empire, raided northern India repeatedly between about 1000 and 1027, plundering wealthy temple cities including Somnath. At the end of the twelfth century Muhammad of Ghor went further: defeated by the Rajput king Prithviraj Chauhan at Tarain in 1191, he won there the following year and his generals overran the Ganges plain. After his death, his former slave commander Qutb ud-Din Aibak made himself sultan in 1206, founding the Delhi Sultanate with its capital at Delhi.

Five dynasties of Turkic and Afghan origin ruled the Sultanate until 1526: the Mamluks, the Khaljis, the Tughlaqs, the Sayyids and the Lodis. Iltutmish consolidated the state and his daughter Razia ruled briefly as sultan from 1236 to 1240. Alauddin Khalji repelled repeated invasions by the Mongol Empire and its successors and sent armies deep into the south. Muhammad bin Tughluq, whose court the traveller Ibn Battuta served as a judge, ruled the largest area of any sultan but alienated his subjects with schemes such as moving the capital to Daulatabad in the Deccan. In 1398 Tamerlane sacked Delhi and massacred much of its population, and the Sultanate never fully recovered.

The Sultanate brought Islam to political power across the north, along with Persian as the language of government and the Indo-Islamic style of architecture seen in the Qutb Minar. Sufi orders won many followers, and in time a large Muslim population grew, especially in Punjab and Bengal. Poets such as Kabir drew on both Hindu and Muslim devotion, and in Punjab Guru Nanak, born in 1469, founded Sikhism.

As the Sultanate's grip on the south weakened, two new powers emerged there. The Bahmani Sultanate broke away in 1347 and later split into five Deccan sultanates, including Bijapur, Golconda and Ahmadnagar. To their south, the brothers Harihara and Bukka founded the Vijayanagara Empire in 1336. Its capital at Hampi, on the Tungabhadra river, became one of the largest cities in the world. The two blocs fought for two centuries over the fertile Raichur doab, until a coalition of the sultanates crushed Vijayanagara at Talikota in 1565 and sacked its capital.

Meanwhile Europeans arrived by sea. In 1498 the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama reached Calicut on the Malabar coast, and in 1510 the Portuguese Empire seized Goa, which became the centre of its Asian trade and remained Portuguese for four and a half centuries.

In 1526 Babur, a Central Asian prince descended from both Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, defeated the last Lodi sultan at the first Battle of Panipat and founded the Mughal Empire. His son Humayun was driven into exile in Persia by the Afghan ruler Sher Shah Suri, and only regained the throne in 1555. Humayun's son Akbar, who reigned from 1556 to 1605, built the empire into the dominant power of the subcontinent. He drew Rajput princes into the imperial service through alliance and marriage, created a graded ranking system for nobles and officials, and pursued a policy of universal tolerance, abolishing the tax on non-Muslims and hosting debates among Muslim, Hindu, Jain, Zoroastrian and Christian scholars.

Under Jahangir and Shah Jahan the Mughal court was one of the richest in the world. Persian poetry, miniature painting and architecture flourished, and Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal at Agra as a tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, as well as the Red Fort of his new capital at Delhi. India produced roughly a quarter of the world's manufactures, above all cotton textiles. Aurangzeb, who seized the throne from his father and reigned from 1658 to 1707, extended the empire to its greatest size, conquering Bijapur and Golconda. But he also reimposed the tax on non-Muslims and destroyed a number of temples, policies that historians still debate, and his decades of war in the Deccan drained the treasury. After his death the empire fragmented rapidly. Provincial governors in Bengal, Awadh and Hyderabad became independent rulers in all but name, and in 1739 the Persian ruler Nader Shah sacked Delhi and carried off the Peacock Throne.

The most formidable challenge to the Mughals came from the Marathas of the western Deccan. Shivaji, a Hindu warrior from a family that had served the Deccan sultans, carved out a kingdom in the hill country around Pune with fortresses and fast-moving light cavalry, and was crowned at Raigad in 1674. After his death the Marathas survived Aurangzeb's long campaigns against them, and in the eighteenth century, under hereditary chief ministers known as Peshwas, the Maratha Empire became the strongest power in India, collecting tribute from Gujarat to Bengal. Its expansion in the north was checked at the third Battle of Panipat in 1761, where the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Durrani inflicted a crushing defeat, and the Maratha confederacy of rival chiefs never regained its unity.

In Punjab, the Sikh community had become a militant order, the Khalsa, under its tenth Guru, Gobind Singh. Ranjit Singh united the Sikh chiefs and took Lahore in 1799, ruling the Sikh Empire until his death in 1839.

The English East India Company, chartered in 1600, opened a trading post at Surat in 1612 and later founded the settlements that became Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata. The turning point came in Bengal, the richest Mughal province. In 1757 Robert Clive defeated the Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah at Plassey, helped by the defection of his commander, and after victory at Buxar in 1764 the Company received the right to collect Bengal's revenues in 1765. Heavy taxation and the Bengal famine of 1770, which killed millions, followed.

Over the next ninety years the Company, now effectively a state with its own army of Indian soldiers, the sepoys, defeated Mysore in 1799, broke Maratha power by 1818 and annexed Punjab after the Anglo-Sikh wars in 1849. Hundreds of princely states survived as subordinate allies. The Company introduced English education, abolished widow-burning in 1829, a reform supported by Indian thinkers such as Ram Mohan Roy, and began building railways in 1853. Its annexation of states whose rulers lacked a natural heir, and of Awadh in 1856, angered princes and soldiers alike.

In May 1857 sepoys at Meerut mutinied, partly over rumours that new rifle cartridges were greased with cow and pig fat, and marched on Delhi, where they proclaimed the aged Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah II their leader. The rebellion spread across the north and centre, joined by figures such as the Rani of Jhansi and Nana Sahib, and both sides committed massacres. The British took most of 1858 to crush it, with brutal reprisals. The last Mughal emperor was exiled to Rangoon, and the Company was abolished.

From 1858 India was ruled directly by the British Crown through a viceroy, and in 1877 Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. The British Raj was the centrepiece of the British Empire. It built railways, canals, universities and a unified administration and legal system, but Indian handloom industries suffered from competition with machine-made goods of the Industrial Revolution, and the colony's revenues and army served imperial ends. Repeated famines killed tens of millions; the great famine of 1876 to 1878 alone killed between six and ten million people.

Educated Indians formed the Indian National Congress in 1885, at first to seek a greater voice in government. Lord Curzon's partition of Bengal in 1905 provoked mass protest and a boycott of British goods, and was reversed in 1911, when the capital was moved from Calcutta to Delhi. The All-India Muslim League was founded in 1906. More than a million Indians served in World War I, and nationalists expected reward, but in 1919 troops under General Reginald Dyer fired on an unarmed crowd at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, killing hundreds.

Mahatma Gandhi, who had developed non-violent resistance in South Africa, turned Congress into a mass movement. The Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920 to 1922, the Salt March of 1930 and the civil disobedience that followed drew in millions of peasants, women and city workers. In World War II some two and a half million Indians served in the British forces, while Congress launched the Quit India movement in August 1942 and its leaders were imprisoned; Subhas Chandra Bose led an Indian National Army alongside Japan. The Bengal famine of 1943 killed an estimated two to three million people, and most historians hold wartime colonial policy largely responsible.

By 1945 Britain was ready to leave, but Congress, led by Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, and the Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, could not agree on a constitution. The League, which had called for separate Muslim-majority states in its Lahore Resolution of 1940, won most Muslim seats in the 1946 elections, and its Direct Action Day in August 1946 set off killings in Calcutta that spread to other regions. The last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, brought the date of withdrawal forward, and at midnight on 14 to 15 August 1947 British India was divided into two dominions, India and Pakistan, with Punjab and Bengal split between them.

The Partition of India caused one of the largest migrations in history. Around 10 to 12 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims fled across the new borders, and communal massacres, especially in Punjab, killed hundreds of thousands, with estimates ranging up to a million or more. On 30 January 1948 Gandhi was assassinated in Delhi by a Hindu nationalist who opposed his appeals for reconciliation with Muslims.

The new state absorbed more than 500 princely states, largely through the efforts of Vallabhbhai Patel; Hyderabad was taken by military action in 1948. The Hindu ruler of Muslim-majority Kashmir acceded to India in October 1947 as Pakistan-backed tribal forces invaded, and the resulting war ended in a UN-brokered ceasefire in 1949 that left the region divided. Both countries claim all of Kashmir, China also holds part of the former princely state, and the dispute has shaped their relations ever since.

The Constitution, drafted by a committee chaired by B. R. Ambedkar, a jurist from the Dalit community once called untouchable, took effect on 26 January 1950. It made India a secular, federal parliamentary republic, outlawed untouchability and established universal adult suffrage.

Nehru, prime minister until his death in 1964, pursued a mixed economy with five-year plans, heavy state industry and scientific institutions. Abroad he was a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement. States were reorganised along linguistic lines in 1956, and India took Goa from Portugal in 1961. A border dispute with China ended in a short war in 1962 that India lost, and a second war with Pakistan followed in 1965.

Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi became prime minister in 1966. In 1971, after Pakistan's army launched a brutal crackdown in East Pakistan and millions of refugees fled into India, Indian forces intervened in support of Bengali independence fighters, and the war ended in December with the creation of Bangladesh. India tested a nuclear device in 1974. In June 1975, after a court found her guilty of electoral malpractice, Indira Gandhi declared a state of Emergency, jailing opponents and censoring the press until 1977, when voters turned Congress out of office for the first time in favour of the Janata coalition.

She returned to power in 1980. In June 1984 she ordered the army to remove armed Sikh separatists from the Golden Temple in Amritsar, and in October she was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards. Thousands of Sikhs were killed in reprisal riots, most of them in Delhi. In December 1984 a gas leak at a pesticide plant in Bhopal killed thousands, a catastrophe often described as the worst industrial disaster in history. Her son Rajiv Gandhi governed until 1989 and was assassinated in 1991 by a Sri Lankan Tamil separatist group.

A foreign-exchange crisis in 1991 led the government of P. V. Narasimha Rao, with Manmohan Singh as finance minister, to dismantle much of the licensing system, open the economy to trade and investment and begin decades of faster growth, led by services and information technology. Politics also changed. Lower-caste and regional parties gained ground, and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rose on a campaign over the site of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, which activists demolished in December 1992, setting off riots in which some 2,000 people died. Under the BJP's Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India carried out nuclear tests in 1998, followed by Pakistan, and the two fought a limited war at Kargil in Kashmir in 1999. Riots in Gujarat in 2002 killed more than a thousand people, most of them Muslims. A Congress-led coalition under Manmohan Singh governed from 2004 to 2014, a period that included the attacks on Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants in November 2008.

Narendra Modi led the BJP to an outright majority in 2014, the first for any party in thirty years, and won again in 2019. In August 2019 his government revoked the special constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir and split the state into two union territories; the Supreme Court upheld the decision in December 2023. Supporters see a decisive government pursuing infrastructure, welfare and national strength, while critics and some international observers have raised concerns about the treatment of minorities and the health of democratic institutions.

In the 2024 general election, held in seven phases between April and June, the BJP won 240 of 543 seats and lost its single-party majority, but its National Democratic Alliance won 293 seats, and Modi began a third term in June with the support of coalition partners. The opposition INDIA bloc, led by Congress, won 234. In April 2025 gunmen killed 26 civilians, most of them tourists, near Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir. India blamed militant groups based in Pakistan and on 7 May launched strikes on targets in Pakistan and Pakistani-administered Kashmir, which it described as terrorist infrastructure; Pakistan denied involvement in the attack, said civilians had been killed and retaliated. Four days of fighting ended in a ceasefire on 10 May. With around 1.46 billion people in 2025, India is the most populous country on earth and among the largest economies in the world.