User:Amartya ray2001/Sandbox/History section India Article

History
Indian history can be broadly categorized into five major eras; Vedic Era, Golden age, Mughal Rule, the British Era and Modern India. For more details vide:

Vedic Era
Stone Age rock shelters with paintings at the Bhimbetka rock shelters in Madhya Pradesh are the earliest known traces of human life in India. The first known permanent settlements appeared about 8,500 years ago and gradually developed into the Indus Valley Civilisation, dating back to 3400 BCE in western India. It was followed by the Vedic period, which laid the foundations of Hinduism and other cultural aspects of early Indian society, and ended in the 500s BCE. From around 550 BCE, many independent kingdoms and republics known as the Mahajanapadas were established across the country.

Golden age
In the third century BCE, most of South Asia was united into the Maurya Empire by Chandragupta Maurya and flourished under Ashoka the Great. From the third century CE, the Gupta dynasty oversaw the period referred to as ancient "India's Golden Age". Empires in Southern India included those of the Chalukyas, the Cholas and the Vijayanagara Empire. Science, technology, engineering, art, logic, language, literature, mathematics, astronomy, religion and philosophy flourished under the patronage of these kings. Trade and commerce were also at it's peak during this era. Aryabhata the philosopher was from this age. The place-value system, first seen in the 3rd century Bakhshali Manuscript, was clearly in place in his work. While he did not use a symbol for zero, the French mathematician Georges Ifrah argues that knowledge of zero was implicit in Aryabhata's place-value system as a place holder for the powers of ten with null coefficients. The approximate numerical value of pi ($$\pi$$) is also believed to have been first calculated by him.

Mughal Rule
Following invasions from Central Asia between the 10th and 12th centuries, much of North India came under the rule of the Delhi Sultanate and later the Mughal Empire. Under the rule of Akbar the Great, India enjoyed much cultural and economic progress as well as religious harmony. Mughal emperors gradually expanded their empires to cover large parts of the subcontinent. However, in North-Eastern India, the dominant power was the Ahom kingdom of Assam, among the few kingdoms to have resisted Mughal subjugation. The first major threat to Mughal imperial power came from a Hindu Rajput king Maha Rana Pratap of Mewar in the 16th century and later from a Hindu state known as the Maratha confederacy, that ruled much of India in the mid-18th century. Akbar Shah II acceded to the much diminished empire of the Mughals and ruled until 1837. His son Bahadur Shah Zafar would be the last emperor of Mughals before the British deposed him in 1858 and the Mughal dynasty would officially come to an end.

British Era
From the 16th century, European powers such as Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain established trading posts and later took advantage of internal conflicts to establish colonies in the country. The British East India Company had been given permission by the Mughal emperor Jahangir in 1617 to trade in India. Gradually their increasing influence led the de-jure Mughal emperor Farrukh Siyar to grant them dastaks or permits for duty free trade in Bengal in 1717. The Nawab of Bengal Siraj Ud Daulah, the de facto ruler of the Bengal province, opposed British attempts to use these permits. This led to the Battle of Plassey in 1757, in which the 'army' of East India Company, led by Robert Clive, defeated the Nawab's forces and the subsequent commencement of the Company rule in India. The rule lasted until 1858, when, after the Indian rebellion of 1857 and consequent of the Government of India Act 1858, the British government assumed the task of directly administering India in the new British Raj. The direct British imperialist rule saw a rapid development of the railways, roads, canals, bridges and telegraph links so that raw materials, such as cotton, could be transported more efficiently from the hinterlands to ports, such as Bombay, for subsequent export to England. Similarly, costlier finished goods from England were transported back just as efficiently, for sale in the burgeoning Indian markets. Although famines were not new to the subcontinent, the Raj was marked by an increase in the number of large-scale famines in India. Despite efforts by the colonial authorities to reduce the impact of the severe famines caused by numerous drought and crop failures, British economic and trade policies towards colonial India contributed to the problems and between 1760 - 1944, tens of millions died within British India due to famine. In the 20th century, a nationwide struggle for independence was launched by the Indian National Congress and other political organisations. Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi led millions of people in several national campaigns of non-violent civil disobedience. Gandhi promoted the principle of ahimsa very successfully by applying it to all spheres of life, particularly to politics. His non-violent resistance movement satyagraha had an immense impact on India, impressed public opinion in Western countries and influenced the leaders of various civil rights movements such as Martin Luther King Jr. In Gandhi’s thought ahimsa precludes not only the act of inflicting a physical injury, but also mental states like evil thoughts and hatred, unkind behavior such as harsh words, dishonesty and lying, all of which he saw as manifestations of violence incompatible with ahimsa.

Modern India
On 15 August 1947, India gained independence from British rule, but at the same time the Muslim-majority areas were partitioned to form a separate state of Pakistan. On 26 January 1950, India became a republic and a new constitution came into effect.

Since independence, India has faced challenges from religious violence, casteism, naxalism, terrorism and regional separatist insurgencies, especially in Jammu and Kashmir and Northeast India. Since the 1990s terrorist attacks have affected many Indian cities. India has unresolved territorial disputes with the People's Republic of China, which, in 1962, escalated into the Sino-Indian War, and with Pakistan, which resulted in wars in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999. India is a founding member of the United Nations (as British India) and the Non-Aligned Movement.

India is a state armed with nuclear weapons; having conducted its first nuclear test in 1974, followed by another five tests in 1998. Beginning 1991, significant economic reforms have transformed India into one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, increasing its global clout. All these factors propelled her to become a full time G-20 member state. In spite of its recent economic successes, military might and global clout Indians continue to die due to malnutrition and hunger. The Supreme Court of India took cognizance of the fact that food rot in government silos and ordered the them to distribute the food for free to millions of its poor.