Cities, empires and faiths
The Indus Valley civilisation built planned brick cities with drainage as early as 2600 BCE. Over the following millennia the subcontinent produced the Maurya and Gupta empires, the mathematics of zero and the decimal system, and four world religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism.
From the sixteenth century the Mughals ruled much of the north, leaving the Taj Mahal and a fusion of Persian and Indian art. European trading companies followed the wealth, and by the nineteenth century the British Crown governed the whole subcontinent as the jewel of its empire.
The ocean and the diaspora
India's ties to Africa predate Europe by centuries. Monsoon-driven dhow trade linked Gujarat and the Malabar coast to Zanzibar, Mombasa and the Swahili towns, carrying cloth, beads and spices long before the Portuguese arrived. From 1860 the British shipped indentured Indian labourers to the sugar plantations of Natal, and later to build the Uganda Railway.
It was in South Africa, where he arrived in 1893 and stayed twenty-one years, that a young lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi developed satyagraha, the method of non-violent resistance he would carry home. Indian trading communities took root across East and Southern Africa — until, in 1972, Idi Amin expelled tens of thousands of Asians from Uganda, most holding British passports.
The connection continues in medicine. Indian firms such as Cipla broke the price of antiretroviral drugs in 2001, and India remains the source of a large share of the affordable generic medicines that African health systems depend on. India helped found the Non-Aligned Movement, and still presents itself as a leader of the Global South.
Freedom, partition and the republic
The independence movement, led by the Indian National Congress and figures such as Gandhi and Nehru, won freedom on 15 August 1947 — but at the cost of partition into India and Pakistan, which uprooted millions and killed perhaps a million in communal violence.
India adopted a democratic constitution in 1950, championed by B. R. Ambedkar, that abolished untouchability in law. It has held regular elections ever since, liberalised its economy from 1991, and grown into a hub of software, space launches and cinema, while grappling with poverty, caste and religious tension.