India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the world's seventh-largest country by area and the largest by population. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west; China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north; and Bangladesh and Myanmar to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is near Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
Modern humans arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa by 55,000 years ago. Settled life emerged on the western margins of the Indus basin 9,000 years ago, evolving into the Indus Valley Civilisation of the third millennium BCE. By 1200 BCE, an archaic form of Sanskrit diffused into India from the northwest, its earliest hymns containing elements of what would become Hinduism. The pre-existing Dravidian and other languages were gradually superseded in the northern plains. Beginning in the mid-first millennium BCE, caste-based social stratification began to crystallise within early Hinduism. Around the same time, Buddhism and Jainism arose, proclaiming social orders unlinked to heredity. The emergence of the loose-knit Maurya and Gupta Empires gave rise to wide-ranging cultural and scientific creativity. Their eras also witnessed a steady erosion of women's rights, and, by the end, the rigid institutionalisation of untouchability. Across the first millennium CE, the Middle kingdoms of South India transmitted Dravidian language scripts and cultural traditions to Southeast Asia. Well before the millennium's end, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Zoroastrianism had become established on India's southern and western coasts.
Early in the 2nd millennium, Muslim armies from Central Asia intermittently overran India's northern plains, eventually establishing the Delhi Sultanate, and drawing India into the cosmopolitan networks of medieval Islam. The Vijayanagara Empire created a long-lasting composite South Indian culture. Sikhism, emerged in the Punjab, rejecting established religious institutions. The Mughal Empire ushered in two centuries of economic expansion and relative peace, leaving a rich architectural legacy. Gradually expanding rule of the British East India Company turned India into a colonial economy, but consolidated its territorial sovereignty by the mid-19th century. British Crown rule began in 1858. Although equality before the law promised to Indians was slow to materialise, technological changes were introduced while modern education and the public life took root. A nationalist movement emerged in India, the first in the non-European British Empire. Noted for nonviolent resistance after 1920, it drove the end of British rule. In 1947, the British Indian Empire was partitioned into the independent dominions of a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan. A large-scale loss of life and an unprecedented migration accompanied the partition.
