India

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 in the western margins of the Indus river basin 9,000 years ago, evolving into the Indus Valley Civilisation of the third millennium BCE. By 1200 BCE, an archaic form of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, 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 The pre-existing Dravidian and other languages were gradually superseded in India's northern plains. Across the central stretch of these plains, rapid urbanisation took place, and after 500 BCE a caste-based, hereditary, form of social stratification began to solidify within developing Hinduism. During this period, Buddhism and Jainism arose, proclaiming social orders unlinked to heredity. The subsequent emergence of the loose-knit Maurya and Gupta Empires gave rise to wide-ranging cultural and scientific creativity. However, these eras also saw a steady decline in the status of women, culminating by their end in the institutionalisation of untouchability. In South India, across the first millennium CE, the Middle kingdoms 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...