BACKGROUND

History

c. 3000–1700 BCE

Harappan dawn

About five thousand years ago, something quite remarkable happened in an area in what is now Pakistan. An advanced society appeared, building cities that were at least the equal in sophistication of anything anywhere else in the ancient world, and quite rightly giving India the claim to be one of the birthplaces of civilisation. It lasted some thirteen hundred years, and then abruptly disappeared.

This civilisation, now known as Harappan, first came to the attention of scholars in the West when the famous archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler began delving into the remnants of the city of Mohenjo Daro, near Karachi, in the 1920s. That site in itself seemed remarkable enough. But signs of this culture have since been found over a wider and wider area.

First, evidence of a similar city was found at Harappa over 600 kilometres away from Mohenjo Daro, near Lahore. Now traces of similar settlements are being found even further afield, displaying a uniformity of culture over an area hugely bigger than Ancient Egypt or any of the other contemporary civilisations. Harappan sites have been found as far away as the Iranian border in Baluchistan, in India in Gujarat and other sites, and recently even on the northern Afghan border with Russia at Shortughai on the Oxus River.

The idea that this was a powerful, centrally administered empire has taken a battering with these findings, as there are no huge palaces or military installations in any of the sites to suggest this was a stratified empire of conquest. Indeed, the whole of the Harappan civilisation remains something of an enigma. It did leave behind some writing, on household seals believed to have been used for trade, but the script has still to be deciphered, and unlike Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, Harappa left almost no trace of its people. The only remotely human artefact is a poignantly lone bronze figurine of a naked adolescent girl.

Indeed, the Harappans have faded into the mists of time leaving little but the fabric of their homes behind. And even here there is considerable doubt over just what buildings were used for apart from, maybe, their vast granaries. The one thing that is clear is that their water supply and drainage were way ahead of their time. Mohenjo Daro had its own large swimming pool, for instance, and flush toilets and drains. We know they were traders, and Harappan seals have been found in Ur, showing they were trading as far away as Mesopotamia. But their culture and religion remain almost a blank.

The Harappans endured for thirteen or fourteen hundred years until all traces finally vanished beneath sand and silt by about 1700 BCE. But just why they disappeared is something of an enigma too. The traditional view was that they were conquered by the Aryan peoples who moved in with their horses from the north. But scholars are unconvinced by this idea, and recent discoveries suggest that climate change may have been a factor. There is archaeological evidence of cities and villages being abandoned, but little more.

1700–900 BCE

The Aryans and the Vedic period

As the Harappans faded into oblivion, so arrived the period in which Indian culture was born. Not only the Sanskrit language, but the elevated role of priests and the caste system emerged at this time. So too did an extraordinary body of ancient literature, with both the vast epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and the range of religious poems and hymns known collectively as the Vedas.

The Vedas became the first scriptures of Hinduism, and this period is known as the Vedic period after these sacred texts, but no one knows quite who wrote them. The texts refer to a superior, noble kind of fair people as arya and an inferior dark-skinned people or dasa. But the word arya here is a description, not a racial name. Then the British colonisation of India gave it all a very interesting twist.

In 1785, British linguist Sir William Jones pointed out the similarity between many Sanskrit words and words in languages descended from Latin, including English. Scholars soon realised that Sanskrit and these European languages must all originate with one mother language, which they called Indo-European at first – and then Aryan when it was realised that the Persians called themselves arya or Aryiana (hence the name Iran), apparently proving the existence of the aryans as a people, not just a description in the Vedic hymns.

Scholars looked for an Aryan homeland, from which the Aryans had spread out and given their language to Europe and India – and they settled on the steppes of southern Russia. Soon there emerged a picture of the Aryans as brilliant horsemen who swept all before them and conquered the Middle East – and India. The Victorian British embraced this idea completely. It created this picture of tall, fair people sweeping in from the West to bring India all that was exquisite and noble in India’s history – and the British, of course, were the Aryans’ natural heirs.

Then in the 1920s and ’30s, the idea of the noble Aryan conquerors began to take a beating. First came the discoveries of the Harappan cities, which demonstrated that there had been a sophisticated civilization in India long before the Aryans. Then the whole idea became further tainted when it was embraced in such a disfigured way by the Nazis. Soon all that was left was the idea that the Aryans drove the Harappans out of the region with their martial nature and equestrian skills. And then even that was gone with the discovery that the Harappans had vanished several centuries before the arrival of the Aryans.

What does seem likely is that a wave of invasions or migrations into India did occur around 1500 BCE, and the invaders or migrants spread gradually east and south over the course of centuries. It seems highly likely that these invaders were horsemen, for the language of the Vedic literature is full of equestrian terms – and the words for farming activities, such as ploughing are all clearly borrowed from another language. In his history of India, John Keay describes the Aryans as cowboys in every sense of the word – with their wild lifestyle that depended on herding cattle.

Over the centuries, as the Aryans spread out through India, they were both assimilated by and changed the people who were already there. They changed from horsemen to farmers, growing a range of crops including rice. When they first arrived, they knew little of metals except for gold, copper and bronze, but as the Vedic literature testifies, they learned the use of iron, and with iron tools, clearing of forests for farming and settlement became much easier. At the same time, the stratification of society described in the literature, with the creation of an elite priesthood, established a pattern that persists to this day.

c. 600 BCE–320 CE

Kingdoms and empires

By about the seventh century BCE, Indian society was so settled that clans began to carve out permanent territories for themselves known as mahajanapadas. Some such as Kuru and Panchala developed into kingdoms, while others were more republican in nature. As trade grew and towns expanded, rulers became ever more anxious to protect their interests and had the power to do so. By the fifth century BCE, four powerful kingdoms began to dominate the others, and then eventually one, Magadha, came out completely on top.

It was soon after, in 321 BCE, that Alexander the Great made his extraordinary and doomed foray into India. After conquering the Panjab, he was finally persuaded by his men to turn back at the Beas River near what is now Lahore. Yet if Alexander failed, and his control in India soon collapsed, his exploits are said to have inspired India’s first great ruler, Chandragupta. The story goes that Chandragupta was groomed for kingship by India’s answer to Machiavelli, the wily, deformed counsellor Kautilya. Kautilya is credited with writing India’s version of Machiavelli’s The Prince, the Arthashastra, an unvarnished guide to the realpolitik of power, but the chances are he was just one of the contributors to a text compiled much later.

Whatever the truth about Kautilya, there is no doubt that the protegé eclipsed the master. Chandragupta is often described as the Julius Caesar of India though he himself would have liked to be compared to Alexander. With one of the largest armies the world had ever seen, half a million strong, Chandragupta drove the Greeks out of both the Panjab and Afghanistan and created the beginnings of the Mauryan Empire that was to bring almost the entire Indian subcontinent under a single ruler for the first and last time under his grandson Asoka.

Asoka is understandably regarded as the greatest of Indian rulers. After completing his conquest of India at Kalinga (Orissa) in 260 BCE, he became horrified at the bloodshed and suffering he had caused and turned to Buddhism. One of the reasons we know quite a lot about Asoka is that he left behind him stone inscriptions all over India, on colossal stone pillars and cliff faces. No one could understand the script, until in 1837 British Orientalist James Prinsep made a breakthrough, when it became clear that all these ‘rock edicts’ as they came to be known, were saying pretty much the same thing. They were in some ways like multiple copies of the Ten Commandments but espousing Buddhist values of humanity, non-violence (ahimsa) and moral regeneration. Above all, they talked about the dharma, the need to follow a path of right through life.

No one knows just how well Asoka lived up to his ideals, but there were no more wars of conquest in his age, and he helped spread Buddhism right across Asia. His rule is certainly remembered as a golden age, when life was improved by little things such as planting fruit trees along the roads for travellers, digging wells and building rest houses. He even replaced the royal annual hunt with a pilgrimage of righteousness (dharma yatra) in which he journeyed round the empire. After Asoka died, however, the Mauryan Empire gradually began to crumble.

Over the next five hundred years, wave after wave of invasions swept like monsoons into India from the north and China. Yet this did not stop the Indian economy thriving. India was a focus of world trade, with trading links stretching far into China in the east and all the way to Rome in the west, as an abundance of Roman coins found in India testify.

320–c. 1050 CE

The Classical Age

About 320 CE, 640 years after Chandragupta created India’s first great empire, the Mauryan Empire in 320 BCE, another Chandragupta started India’s second, the Gupta Empire. Confusingly, this second Chandragupta is called Chandragupta I. Of course, he is the first Chandra of the Gupta Empire, and was followed by his son Samudra-Gupta and his grandson Chandra-Gupta II. Under each of these three rulers, the empire swelled until it extended its influence over much of the subcontinent except the south-west.

The Gupta age is sometimes called the Indian Classical Age, and it saw an extraordinary flowering of the arts, science and philosophy. This is probably the time when the great playwright Kalidasa was creating dramas such as Shakantula. Kalidasa is thought to have been part of Chandra-Gupta II’s court. It was the age too when great frescoes such as those at the World Heritage site of Ajanta in Maharashtra were painted [see here]. Perhaps the most striking monument of the age, though, was the creation of the classical model for Hindu temples, best seen at Deogarh in Jharkhand.

Indian scientists and mathematicians at this time were probably way ahead of their western counterparts. The concept of zero and the decimal system originated in India, and were well developed here at this time, only reaching the Arab world centuries later. Interestingly, the great astronomer Aryabhata argued at this time that the Earth rotates on its axis and travels around the Sun – something not realised in the West until well over a thousand years later when Copernicus deduced the same thing in the sixteenth century.

In the sixth century, White Huns began to move into India from Central Asia, and the Gupta Empire gradually began to disintegrate into a mix of kingdoms that continually struggled for dominance. Meanwhile, trading continued, and by the twelfth century, the cities of the south-west were home to large communities of Jew and Arab merchants who traded right across the Middle East and into the Mediterranean.

c. 1050–1707 CE

Muslims, Mongols and Mughals

The Arab traders in Kerala, of course, brought Islam to India not long after the time of Muhammad, but it was in the eleventh century that Islam really began to make an impact on India as Muslim raiders began to launch assault after assault on the north-west. Again and again they would sweep down like a storm out of the mountain passes and batter the Panjab with their ferocity. India’s bête noire of the time was Mahmud of Ganzhi. A powerful man with a genius for strategy, Mahmud was ugly enough even for him to acknowledge it himself, once gazing in a mirror and complaining, ‘the sight of a king should brighten the eye of his beholders, but nature has been so capricious to me that my aspect seems the picture of misfortune’. Whatever his looks, he terrified those who were unfortunate enough to find themselves in his path, and made bloody raids into India just after the monsoon every year for sixteen years.

Eventually, though, the Muslim raids quietened down. But it proved to be just the calm before the storm. In 1175, an even more powerful raider, Mohammad of Ghor, drove right across the Gangetic Plain and into Bihar, destroying Buddhist temples as he went. When Mohammad died in 1206, one of his generals, Qutb-ud-din, became the Sultan of Delhi, ruling over most of northern India. The Sultanate of Delhi was the first of the great Muslim powers in India, and it lasted three centuries. Many Indians converted to Islam in this time, especially in the Panjab and Bengal. Muslim rulers were far from tolerant, but there is no evidence, as many Hindu nationalists claim, that there were forced mass conversions to Islam. Even in the Hindu south, some Hindus converted willingly to Islam.

The Muslims, though, were masters in northern India until 1398, when the Mongol hoards led by Tamerlaine swept into India from the east, sacking Delhi and massacring its inhabitants. One historian has said that the reason Tamerlaine’s armies moved so fast was that they were anxious to escape the stench of the great piles of rotting corpses they were leaving behind them. The Sultanate’s power was broken by Tamerlaine’s raid, and shrank to virtually nothing, leaving a chaos of competing kingdoms for over a century. Then in 1526, an Afghan ruler from Kabul called Babur came to power. Babur was a descendant of Tamerlaine, and the dynasty he founded is called the Mughal or Mongol Empire.

Babur, known as the Tiger, was an intriguing figure, a born adventurer who wrote a strikingly direct personal memoir called the Babur-nama, which was once described as ‘amongst the most enthralling and romantic works in the literature of all time’ (D. Ross, Cambridge History of India). When he won his empire, he proved an enlightened ruler who loved poetry and gardening, wrote treatises about the Hindu people he conquered and made studies of the local wildlife.

The Mughal Empire began when Babur defeated a far larger army of the Lodis at Panipat near Delhi with his superior artillery, and so gained control over much of northern India. Babur’s son Humayun proved less effective as a ruler, but his grandson Akbar is seen by some as the greatest Mughal ruler. Unlike his grandfather, Akbar the Great was a warrior not a scholar and his conquests pushed the southern limits of the empire as far as the Krishna River. Akbar proved a tolerant ruler, bringing people of various faiths to his court and even marrying Hindu princesses. Despite his lack of learning, he had a natural wisdom, and his courts were enriched by Persian arts and letters.

In 1605, Akbar was succeeded first by his son Jahangir and then his grandson Shahjahan who was famous for the great Mughal buildings erected in his time, such as the Taj Mahal, the Pearl Mosque and the Red Fort. But the cost of all these buildings, on top of Shahjahan’s military campaigns in the south, placed heavy demands on the empire’s finances and in 1658, his own son Aurangzeb had him imprisoned and made himself emperor.

Aurangzeb’s religious intolerance, however, proved even more of a burden on the people than Shahjahan’s expenditure, and the legendary Hindu resistance fighter Shivagi made his appearance at this time. The Mughal Empire began to disintegrate, just as the Europeans were starting to make their presence felt.

1610–1858 CE

The British arrive

The British established their presence in India in 1610, just five years after Akbar died. The Portuguese had already been in the country for a hundred years, and the Dutch and French were interested, too. But with the aid of the British Navy, the East India Company drove off the Portuguese to establish their base at Surat. Later, the British drove the French out of India, too.

It is one of history’s great mysteries how the British with just a few ships and just a few soldiers managed to take control from half a world away over a huge and long established country of more than three hundred million people. It is often said that they simply took advantage of a power vacuum left by the declining Mughal Empire. Yet as John Keay argues in India: a History, the power vacuum, if there was one, may have been of the East India Company’s own making. Moreover, there was probably no such vacuum anyway, with states such as Hyderabad, Bengal and Pune all thriving. Keay suggests that the key might have been the tenacious loyalty of the British to each other, which ensured they always presented their divided enemies with a united front. The British gradually extended their reach through deals and treaties with local princes and started playing an increasing part in local affairs until, almost without knowing it, the Indians had signed away their power altogether.

There were battles, of course. In 1756, some British officers were imprisoned by the nawab of Bengal Siraj ud-Dawlah in a small dungeon known as the Black Hole of Calcutta (Kolkata) after a skirmish, and some of the British died there. In response, Robert Clive led an army north from Madras (Chennai) against the nawab and with the connivance of the nawab’s commander scored a victory at Plassey. The British were later to see this as a decisive victory, but in the Mughal Empire to the north in Delhi people barely noticed it. That year, Delhi had suffered a far worse defeat, not at the hands of the British, but yet another terrifying raid by the Afghans led by Ahmad Shah Abdali. Abdali plundered Delhi, pillaged its people and subjected its women to ‘pollution’. No wonder, then, that later, when Clive was brought up before a parliamentary committee to justify his behaviour in Calcutta, he argued that he had always been quite restrained:

A great prince was dependent on my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against one another for my smiles; I walked through vaults which were thrown open for me alone, piled either side with gold and jewels. Mr Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!

Through treaties, deals and military conquest – in which a large part of their force was Indian – the British gradually extended their control over the whole of India. It took a long time. It was in 1856 exactly a hundred years after Plassey that the British finally took Oudh in the north, the last major missing piece.

By this time, the British had adopted the earlier ways of East India Company employees, which was to go native, wearing Indian clothes and learning to speak Hindustani. However, as time went on, the British became less and less adaptable and accommodating. They also began to ride roughshod over Indian sensibilities. Ironically, at exactly the time as the British gained full control over India, so the dangers of this disdain began to bubble up.

In 1857, rumour spread among the sepoys (Indian soldiers for the British) that their British guns were greased with cow fat, sacred to the Hindus, and pig fat, unclean to the Muslims. In 1858, the sepoys mutinied, and soon their mutiny had developed into a full-scale rebellion against the British. With the aid of Sikhs, the British were finally able to quash the trouble, but it was a wake-up call for them. The following year, control of India was taken out of the hands of the East India Company and the British started to rule India directly. The British, after claiming to have only ever wanted to trade in India, had finally shown their hand as an imperial power.

1858–1915 CE

The last days of the Raj

The British brought a remarkable system of organisation to the government of India, setting up efficiently run civil services and local-government networks, and establishing universities in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta to educate Indians to the standards needed to work alongside them. These British-trained Indians not only began to participate more and more on provincial and local government bodies, but also gained an education in political theory. As they studied western democracy and capitalism, and learned about the ideas of philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, these educated Indians began to realise they were being denied their rights.

The growing dissatisfaction among the English-educated intelligentsia found its expression in the establishment in 1885 of the Indian National Congress. Initially, Congress was never about fighting for Indian independence. Its aim was simply to get Indians a better deal from the British, especially in terms of trade. The argument was that Britain was draining India of its wealth by unfair trading regulations. Gradually, though, a nationalist movement began to emerge, impatient at the slow pace of improvements. By the turn of the twentieth century, more extreme nationalists such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak had begun to challenge the moderation of Congress.

Interestingly, though, the real tension arose when the British tried to divide Hindus and Muslims by partitioning Bengal into East Bengal and Assam (with their Muslim majority) and West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa (with their Hindu majority). Hindu landlords in East Bengal, who had been milking the Muslim peasants, suddenly saw their power and their income in jeopardy. They helped foment a protest movement against the British, which including a boycott and swadeshi (buy Indian) policy against British goods, especially textiles.

The partition of Bengal alarmed the Muslim population, who began to worry about the rising tide of Indian nationalism, fearing that as a minority they would be far worse off in a Hindu-dominated independent India than they were under the British. In 1906, Muslim leaders gathered together to form the All-India Muslim League to campaign for better representation for Muslims in government and, effectively, against independence from the British.

1915–1946 CE

Gandhi

It was into this divided scene that Mohandas Gandhi stepped in 1915 when he returned from South Africa after his campaign for civil liberties there. Gandhi called for unity between the two halves of the community and forged a pact in 1916 with Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League. He also became involved with a number of non-violent protest movements, which began to give him the kind of moral authority that was to earn him the title mahatma (‘great soul’).

The British had assumed that Congress’s demand for swaraj (self-rule) and other Indian aspirations would be answered by gradually extending participation in government. They might have been right, but the coming of the First World War had changed all that. When war broke out, Indian support for Britain was quite overwhelming. Over two million Indians joined up to fight in far away Flanders and in Mesopotamia. As the author John Buchan put it, ‘It was the performance of India which took the world by surprise and thrilled every British heart’. The problem for the British was that the Indians became aware that Britain was not quite as invincible as they imagined – and that the British needed the Indians. If the British needed the Indians so much, they realised, there was no reason why Indians shouldn’t be able to look after their own affairs.

After the war, the British began to extend Indian participation in government, but at the same time reimposed wartime restrictions on civil liberties. As Indian leaders began to voice their discontent, Gandhi organised a series of non-violent protest actions, which he called satyagraha (from the Sanskrit for truth and firmness), such as work stoppages, in which Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims participated together. As people gathered together for one of the protest meetings in Amritsar in 1919, the British soldiers panicked and opened fire, killing nearly four hundred people. The Amritsar tragedy proved a turning point in support for the protest movement.

While the British tried to extend democracy, Congress called for complete independence. Gandhi’s campaigns of non-violent protest really took off in 1930 when he launched the Salt Satyagraha, in which thousands of Indians, protesting against the tax on salt, marched to the Arabian Sea to make salt from seawater. Tens of thousands were sent to jail, including Gandhi, for non-payment of taxes, but by now Gandhi was a hero in India. The British gave in and Gandhi was called to London as Congress’s representative to negotiate a settlement.

As a result of these negotiations, the British agreed to a form of autonomous provincial governments for India. When elections for this new system took place in 1937, Congress saw victory throughout much of India, except in the provinces where Muslims were in a majority, and so the party took up office. Protests died down, but when the Second World War broke out, the British, with the support of the Muslim League, declared war on India’s behalf without consulting Congress. Congress ministers at once resigned in protest and Gandhi launched a ‘Quit India’ campaign, threatening civil disobedience. In 1942, Gandhi was arrested and held in the Aga Khan Palace in Pune, and was not released until 1944.

1947–1965 CE

Independence

After the war, the British began to realise that independence was inevitable and began negotiations. Congress wanted all India to be freed from British rule as a single nation. The Muslim League, however, was worried about what would happen to Muslims under Hindu majority rule and campaigned for Muslim majority regions in the north to be partitioned off into a separate Muslim nation (see here). As negotiations dragged on, violent clashes between Muslims and Hindus began to erupt all across northern India. Appalled at the violence, Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru began to concede that partition might be inevitable.

Despite Gandhi’s efforts to prevent the break-up of India, partition was finally agreed to be inevitable. Pakistan and East Bengal were to go their own separate ways. Millions of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim refugees began streaming both ways across the new borders at terrible cost (see here). As independence came at midnight on 15 August 1947, Gandhi was in Calcutta mourning the tragedy of partition rather than celebrating the independence he had campaigned for for so long and at such great personal cost. A year later, he was dead, struck down by the bullet of a Hindu fanatic.

With Gandhi’s death, the leadership of the country fell entirely into the hands of Nehru, who became India’s first prime minister when the new constitution came into force on 26 January 1950, a date celebrated in India every year as Republic Day.

Nehru proved to be one of the world’s great leaders and steered his country through the first tricky years of independence with great skill and humanity. Indeed, such was his charisma and success that Indians have longed to recapture his essence ever since, voting first his daughter Indira Gandhi into power, then his grandson Rajiv Gandhi, and, who knows, maybe one day his great-grandson Rahul Gandhi.

Under Nehru’s leadership, the government tried to launch India on the path to development with a programme of agricultural and industrial reform, and the establishment of a nationwide educational system. In 1952, the first of a series of five-year plans was inaugurated, which included everything from spurs to industry to major infrastructure projects such as dams. Efforts to reform land ownership, though, were frustrated by the rural land-owning elite.

Economically, progress was slower than some people hoped – although (as discussed on see here) it was perhaps more substantial than is generally acknowledged. But Nehru’s great achievement was to establish India as a liberal democracy, despite its history and despite the often violent tensions in the country, which could so easily have pulled it in some other direction – as its neighbour Pakistan has so clearly demonstrated with its succession of coups and military dictatorships. By the time Nehru died in 1964, India looked as natural a democratic nation as any other in the Commonwealth. It had not been inevitable.

1966–1991 CE

Indira Gandhi

It soon became clear just how frail India’s stability could be. When Nehru died, he was succeeded as prime minister by Lal Bahadur Shastri. Shastri was perceived as a weak man, and by the time he died later that year, India was in a state of economic crisis and embarked on one of a series of wars with Pakistan over Kashmir (see here).

With Shastri’s death, Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi became prime minister. She proved as charismatic and as powerful a leader as her father had been, but with much less of his softening urbanity and socialist ideals. To start with she had almost universal support, and the success of the Green Revolution in making India self-sufficient in grain, combined with her announced plan to ‘Abolish Poverty’, helped her gain a sweeping victory in the 1972 elections. But her radical reorganisation of the Congress party (see here), combined with an economic crisis brought about by a worldwide oil shortage and a succession of poor harvests, severely undermined her position. A series of harsh economic measures brought the economy back under control, but opposition to Mrs Gandhi was growing.

In 1975, a run of grassroots protest movements spurred her to declare a state of national emergency, jailing opposition politicians, censoring the press and effectively making Mrs Gandhi dictator. The Indian public was growing resentful, and in 1977 she decided to risk releasing the opposition politicians from jail and called an election to give her government a shot in the arm. The released politicians joined forces with Jagjivan Ram, a Dalit defector from the Congress party, to form the Janata (People’s) Party. Janata won the elections and thus became the first non-Congress party in power since independence. The Janata government, though, headed by Morarji Desai, proved divided and ineffective and lasted just two years before Mrs Gandhi and Congress were returned to power.

Shortly after the elections, Mrs Gandhi’s son Sanjay, who had been becoming the power behind the throne, was killed in a plane crash. Mrs Ghandi then turned to her other son Rajiv and persuaded him to enter politics. In the aftermath of the battle with Sikh separatists at the Golden Temple of Amritsar, Mrs Gandhi was assassinated in 1984 by her Sikh bodyguards and Rajiv was selected by Congress to take her place. With the young, fresh Rajiv as their leader, Congress won their most impressive victory yet in the 1984 elections.

The country began to improve dramatically on the economic front under Rajiv Gandhi, but his handling of political troubles in Panjab, Assam and Sri Lanka proved uncertain. Spending on the military was rocketing to scandalous levels and the government began to be rocked by a series of corruption scandals. In 1989, Congress was voted out of power again, and two years later, while campaigning for re-election Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a Sri Lankan Tamil separatist. Later that same year, Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, now India’s Prime Minister, lifted the restrictions on trade known as the ‘Licence Raj’, opening up India to foreign business for the first time. A new era had begun.

The landscape

The Indian subcontinent occupies a great diamond of land that broke off from Africa and drifted north to crash into Asia some forty million years ago. As India ploughed into Asia, so it crumpled up the edge of Asia into the gigantic range of mountains of which the Himalayas form the southern edge. Amazingly, India, though slowed in its progress by the collision, is still drifting north, and it is still pushing the Himalayas higher. Mount Everest is rising by just a centimetre or two every year, but the difference is measurable with the latest satellite technology.

The peaks of the Himalayas soar skywards all along the northern edge of India for over 2,400 kilometres (1,500 miles). The Himalayas get their name from the Sanskrit for abode (alaya) of snow (hima), and it is apt for their great heights ensure the summits are capped in snow all year round, presenting a glimmering, glistening spectacle on the skyline from the plains below when the weather is clear. They reach their highest points in the north-west in the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir, where there are some of the world’s loftiest peaks, including Kangchenjunga, India’s highest mountain at 8,598 metres (28,209 feet). Along the southern edge are forest covered hills, in which there are the famous hill stations such as Simla, where the British used to come to escape the heat in the dry season.

Beyond the foothills lies the vast Northern Plain, a belt of flat, floodwater deposited land some 280 to 400 kilometres (175 to 250 miles) wide, where the Ganga, India’s sacred river, and its tributaries flow. This is where India’s richest farmland lies, and it is where the vast majority of Indians live. At the north-west end of the plain lies Delhi, while at the south-east lies Kolkata (Calcutta). When monsoon comes and the floodwaters flow, the land turns a brilliant, sparkling green, but in the dry season, long months without water turn the leaves dull and the earth to a yellow-brown dust that billows into the air as wind whips across the level ground.

To the east, just over a narrow strip of land beyond the city of Darjeeling, lies the Assam Valley, watered by the second of India’s three great rivers, the Brahmaputra. The hills here get some of the world’s highest rainfall figures, creating the lush greenery that forms some of India’s richest wildlife environments as well as its best tea. To the west lies the Thar desert, a huge, dry and undulating sandy plain that extends far into Pakistan.

Beyond the Ganga Plain to the south lies the vast expanse of peninsular India. At the northern end are the low hills of the Aravalli and Vindhya Ranges. In complete contrast to the neighbouring plain, they are dry and rocky and only sparsely inhabited by herders in the west and farmers growing coarse grain such as millet in the east. Further south is the Deccan plateau, a vast triangular tableland bounded by the Satpura hills in the north and the mountain ranges known as the Western and Eastern Ghats along the southern edges, which drop down to the coastal margins, cloaked in rainforest. The Deccan is the oldest and most stable part of India geologically, and the rock here has survived since long before India parted from Africa. Most of the area is tilled or grazed, but it is not the best farming land, and the farmers here are mostly quite poor. All the good farmland in the south lies along the lowland coastal margins, especially in Gujarat.

Climate

Most of India has a subtropical climate, with temperatures varying only a little during the year. The northern plains have hotter summers and cooler winters though, and the mountains are much cooler all the year round.

There are three phases to the weather in India – the cool, dry winter from October to March, the hot, dry summer from April to June and then the warm, wet rains of the monsoon period. Everyone refers to the rains as the monsoon but the word monsoon comes from the Arab word mausim, which means season, so even the dry spell could be referred to as a monsoon.

The monsoon rains are crucial to India. Even though fields are widely irrigated, the rain brought by the monsoon is crucial to the economy. A failed monsoon can blight food crops and bring poor food harvests and even famine. In recent years, there has been increasing concern about the late arrival of monsoons. In the Ganga Plain, the irrigation depends on the groundwater kept replenished by the rains. Farmers may survive a partial failure of the monsoon one year, but if it happens several times in a row, the effect can be disastrous. Too much rain, on the other hand, can also be disastrous, bringing devastating floods, especially to low-lying regions such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

For eight months of the year, from October to May, the weather over much of the subcontinent is hot and dry. By the end of this dry season, with the rivers running low, the land is parched and dusty and people anxiously await the rains. Every day, the newspapers are filled with predictions about when they are going to arrive.

In late May, the skies are generally still clear and the weather baking hot and dry. But this is the time when things begin to change. Over the land, warm air is beginning to rise really sharply, drawing in a cool breeze off the Indian Ocean in the south-west along the coast of Malabar. Meanwhile, far to the north, a high-level wind roars along the top of the Himalayas from west to east. For a while this jet stream, as it is called, locks the warm air in above India. So the breeze in the south-west brings only subtle changes. Then as the summer progresses in northern Asia, so the sun’s focus moves further north and the jet stream shifts north too. For a while, its progress is blocked by the high mountain peaks. Then suddenly, the jet stream jumps right over the mountains to the north.

With the jet stream out of the way, the warm air is free to rise over the mass of the Indian subcontinent. Very soon, the winds begin to stream in off the sea in the south-west, laden with moisture. The shift in the air alerts people to the change that is on its way. As sodden incoming air rises up over the Western Ghats it lets loose a deluge of water. A similar process takes place over the Bay of Bengal, lashing the Gangetic Plain with rain. The monsoon has begun.

Before long, the monsoon winds are sweeping north over all of India. As they move, they bring with them moist air that creates massive clouds as it rises above the hot, dry land. Almost every day, these clouds unleash a downpour that drenches fields, villages and towns in some of the world’s heaviest rainfalls. The rain goes on for another four months.

The rains continue until late September as the land begins to cool again. Temperatures between land and sea eventually even out. The south-west winds die down; the rains stop. Eventually it is the land that is cool and the sea that is warm. As warm air rises over the sea, so it draws air off the cool land. The winds in India blow mostly from the north-east and the dry weather returns.

On average, India gets about 1,250 millimetres (49 inches) of rain every year, but some of the hill regions get much more. The Western Ghats where the monsoons arrive get over 3,000 millimetres of rain – sometimes much more – and Cherranpunji in the Khasi hills of the north-east gets some of the world’s heaviest rainfalls, with nearly 11,000 millimetres falling every year.

Environment

When it comes to global warming, India quite rightly claims that it bears little responsibility for the problem. It has 17 per cent of the world’s population, and even now it contributes less than 4 per cent of the world’s atmospheric carbon. In the past, it has contributed even less. Unfortunately, though, India may well be one of the first countries to suffer its effects. Already there are signs that India could be hit by severe droughts if global warming kicks in, while just a small rise in sea levels could bring devastation to flood-prone areas of the north-east. So although up until now it has played a ‘no blame no pain’ game, in future India may have to start leading the world on climate-change issues, rather than standing aside, purely out of self-interest.

Meanwhile, India has environmental problems of its own, not least of which is feeding its growing population. First of all, there is getting to be a real shortage of water. Years of intensive irrigation to sustain the high yields of the Green Revolution (see here) have robbed the groundwater of its reserves and increased salt levels. Higher and higher levels of artificial fertilisers and pesticides are having to be applied to keep yields up, polluting drinking water. And the demand for fuel wood to feed the stoves of India’s growing population has led to the widespread destruction of trees and forests.

In the cities, car use is expanding dramatically. Tens of millions of cars are going to be added to India’s already clogged roads, bringing congestion and adding a whole range of extra pollutants besides greenhouse gases. Also, India has a less than perfect record when it comes to industrial effluents. Indeed, many companies have probably set up shop here simply because the controls are more relaxed. Toxic waste could become a major problem. People might hope the terrible tragedy at Bhopal was a one-off, but it may not be.

The Bhopal disaster occurred on 3 December 1984, when the Union Carbide pesticide plant in the city released 27 tonnes of methyl isocyanate into the air. The BBC estimates that 3,000 people died straight away and a further 15,000 have died since as a direct result. Amnesty International thinks the toll was much higher. The battle for compensation has still not been resolved, almost a quarter of a century on.

Yet perhaps the most acute environmental problem facing Indian cities is lack of clean water. The number of children who die through drinking contaminated water is unknown, but it is certainly high. Water-treatment and supply facilities have simply failed to keep pace with the expansion of cities and even in India’s biggest, most thriving cities many slum dwellers have no access to clean water at all, let alone decent sewage facilities. As a result, health problems such as diarrhoea are rife.

Wildlife

Few countries have such a diverse range of habitats as India, from the high mountain ranges of the Himalayas to the flat grasslands of the Deccan, from the lush subtropical forests of Assam to the scorched wastes of the Thar. No wonder, then, that an almost unrivalled variety of plant and animal species live here. There are more than 5,000 kinds of larger animal in India including 340 different mammals, 1,200 species of bird and 2,000 different fish. There are also an astonishing 45,000 species of plants here, of which a full third grow nowhere else. Some 15,000 different kinds of flowering plants bloom in India, too – 6 per cent of all the world’s flowering plants.

In the forests of the Himalayan foothills, that most emblematic of Indian animals, the elephant still roams wild. It roams wild, too, in the remote southern forests of the Deccan. Many elephants, of course, are domesticated and act as beasts of burden in the teak and mahogany forests, as well as carrying tourists. Yet there still four pockets where about 19,000 elephants are found in their natural state: Tamil Nadu; central Orissa, Bihar and West Bengal; the North-eastern Hill States; and the Himalayan foothills.

The Himalayan foothills are also home to bears and blackbuck antelope. Rhododendrons grow here as big as trees, amid oak and magnolia, while in the shade beneath are many rare and stunningly beautiful orchids. High up above in the mountains, wild goat and sheep, ibex and serow, cling agilely to the steep slopes, and in the snowy wastes beyond wander yak and the fabled snow leopard.

No animal has inspired the kind of excitement and fascination that the tiger does. Yet in the wild, Indian tigers have been hunted almost to extinction. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were thought to be one hundred thousand or more tigers in India. Now there may be fewer than two thousand. Many were hunted to death. Many were poached for their skins and their believed medicinal qualities – as some are still today. Many simply ran out of places to live as forests were cleared and farmland expanded. Back in 1972, Indira Gandhi inaugurated Project Tiger to set aside nine areas of pristine forest as a refuge for the few remaining tigers in places such as Bandhavgarh in Madhya Pradesh and Ranthambore in Rajasthan. But the project has had only limited impact. Poaching is still a massive problem, with dozens of tigers killed every year. Many feel that the tiger will be extinct in the wild in India by 2010.

Most India’s other big cats are under threat, too. The jungle cat and the clouded leopard are both under threat of extinction. The Asiatic lion, once the very symbol of India, is rarest of all, with just a handful animals surviving in the Gir forest in Gujarat. The Asiatic cheetah has become extinct in India within the last decade. The one-horned rhinoceros, India’s one other big animal, could soon go the same way. Deforestation and the demand for rhino for medicinal purposes have decimated numbers, and there are now barely a thousand left, clinging on in the wildlife sanctuaries in Assam, where there are forests of bamboo and vast swathes of tall grass.

Down below on the Northern Plain, there is one of world’s richest bird habitats. The paddy fields are the haunt of the dull-brown paddy bird, India’s most common heron, while everywhere there are cows and buffalo, there are also snowy white egret nipping into feed off the grubs and parasites that live on the cattle. Here, too, are often seen kingfishers – considered sacred in some areas – as well as golden orioles, bee-eaters, hoopoes, bulbuls and babblers. On the lakes and wetlands of Rajasthan, stunning displays of Siberian crane, heron, stork, ibis, spoonbill and pelican are often seen, made all the more beautiful by their reflection in the still waters as they wing their way overhead. Peafowl are abundant in Gujarat and Rajasthan, while in the Rann of Kachchh, brilliant pink flourishes of flamingoes are seen, with the world’s largest breeding colony. Among the forest birds are the wonderful looking hornbill and the brilliantly coloured jungle fowl.

To the south in the Deccan, many areas are still covered with thick sandalwood forest where deer such as the sambar and the chital roam, as well as the cat-sized mouse deer or chevrotin. On the Western Ghats, there are thick forests of Mesua (Indian rose chestnut), Toona ciliate (Indian mahogany), Hopea and Eugenia (jamun fruit tree) as well as the lofty gurjun, which soar over 50 metres (165 feet) tall to the north in Assam. Civets live here. On the very southern tip of India lush teak and rosewood forests are home to bonnet macaque monkeys, as well as an abundance of exotic and colourful birds such as parakeets. Other monkeys such as the Assamese macaque and the pig-tailed macaque live in the northern forests. The most ubiquitous monkeys, though, are the Rhesus macaque and the Hanuman langurs. Hanuman was the name of the monkey god who helped the hero in the epic Ramayana, and the Hanuman langur is regarded as sacred.

No summary of Indian wildlife would be complete without mentioning the country’s snakes. Nearly four hundred species of snake live in India, including the Indian python, which lives in marshy areas and grassland. Over a fifth of Indian snake species are poisonous including kraits, cobras and saltwater snakes. The deadliest of all is the king cobra. Indian cobras kill more people than any other wild animal in the world.

Languages

India is linguistically incredibly rich, with more tongues spoken here than nearly any other nation on earth. India’s languages divide into two great families: the Dravidian languages such as Kannada spoken mainly in the south of India and Indo-European languages such Assamese spoken mainly in the north. All the Indo-European languages are descended from Sanskrit, the sacred language of Hindu literature, now only used for Hindu rituals. Dravidian languages are, essentially, languages spoken by people of the Dravidian ethnic group.

Eighteen languages were officially recognised in the original Indian constitution. Of these thirteen are Indo-European, four are Dravidian and one is Sino-Tibetan (Manipuri).

Indo-European languages are the mother tongue of nearly three-quarters of all Indians. Hindi alone is the mother tongue of three hundred million Indians, and is the official language in Delhi and in a large bloc of northern states – Bihar, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. Elsewhere Assamese is the official language in Assam; Bengali in West Bengal and Tripura; Gujarati in Gujarat; Kashmiri in Jammu and Kashmir; Konkani in Goa; Marathi in Maharashtra; Nepali in northern West Bengal; Oriya in Orissa; and Punjabi in the Panjab. Most Muslims speak Urdu, except in the far south, while Sindhi is spoken in the Kachchh district of Gujarat.

Nearly all other Indians speak a Dravidian language, mostly in the south. Four Dravidian languages have constitutional status: Kannada in Karnataka; Malayalam in Kerala; Tamil in Tamil Nadu; and Telugu in Andhra Pradesh.

Of course, beyond these mother tongues are two languages spoken by so many Indians that they are effectively lingua francas – Hindi and English. In the cities, in particular, where there is often a mix of people from different parts of the country, people talk to each other in Hindi or English. Indeed as migrants move around the country, especially to the cities, Hindi is becoming more and more ubiquitous, to the point where many people are worried that local languages will be wiped out. They may well be right. English is essential to get on in business; Hindi is essential for getting on with a wide range of people. Why bother with a third language that is only spoken locally?

Music

India has a tradition of music as rich and complex as Europe’s, with a huge range of different styles, and the impact of western influences in recent years has created even more variety.

Folk music

The original music of India is the folk music, and many of its traditions date back thousands of years. The arrival of Bollywood music and music from the West has eroded its popularity, and folk music has all but disappeared in some areas. Nonetheless, it is going through something of a revival at the moment, partly because of western interest in ‘world music’ and partly because some Indian youth are finding a new pride in their heritage. There’s a huge range of different folk traditions in India, but the strongest are those of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, the Panjab and Bengal. India’s tribal peoples, such as the Gonds of remote parts of central India, also produce their own distinctive music.

The music of Rajasthan plays such an important part in the life of the region that there are numerous musician castes, such as the langas and saperas. In the past, every wedding, every theatre performance and even local markets was accompanied by the earthy sound of Rajasthan’s traditional music. It has its own string instruments, such as the ravanhata, a kind of two-stringed violin. In the neighbouring Panjab, farmers had their own dance music called bhangra, which in the 1990s created a minor sensation in the UK when it was taken up and transformed into a modern dance music style by Indians living in London.

One particularly strong strand in Indian folk music in recent years has been the poetic song called Bhavageete, which means ‘emotion poetry’ and features the work of many expressionist poets such as Kuvempu.

Classical music

It was from folk music that India’s great classical music tradition began to develop in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. There are two broad strands to Indian classical music – the northern strand of Hindustani music and the southern strand called Carnatic.

The Hindustani style is far more austere and elaborate than the southern style, and has a strong Muslim influence, introduced by the Persian Mughals. Indeed, many of the greatest Hindustani-style musicians have been Muslim. Typically the great Muslim musicians take the title ustad (meaning master) while the great Hindu musicians are called pandit (a kind of guru). For Hindustani musicians, the music has a spiritual quality, and the music is traditionally taught by establishing a strong spiritual bond between master and pupil on a one-to-one basis – typically father to son – although this tradition is softening now. Each musician tends to immerse him or herself in a particular gharana or school, which dictates everything from musical content to performance style.

At the heart of Hindustani classical music is the raga or raag. Ragas are distinct musical scales or melodic patterns, each based round a particular dominant note and each featuring distinctive ascending or descending phrases. There are about two hundred of them altogether, each linked with a particular mood or particular time. Every raga has its own time of day, and should be listened to or played only at the right time, such as sunrise or midnight. Like jazz, Indian classical music is improvisational in nature, and each raga provides a starting point for improvisation. Unlike jazz, however, the raga provides a much stricter framework, and the great skill of the musician is to create a rich improvisation while adhering to the framework.

While the raga gives a structure for the melody, the rhythm is structured by taals. Every piece goes through cycles of different taals, each with a different beat. Some of these rhythms are incredibly complex and take many years to master. Indeed, many are so intricate that untrained western ears often simply can’t hear them.

Hindustani classical music is played on a huge variety of unique instruments such as the bowed sarangi and a hammered zither called a santoor. The best known are the six- or seven-stringed sitar, played most famously by Ravi Shankar, and the smaller sarod, of which the most widely known exponent is Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. The highest form of classical music, though, is singing, and even instrumental players often try to make their playing sound like the human voice.

Carnatic music is less austere than Hindustani, and to westerners sounds far more passionate – though Hindustani musicians will tell you that is simply a matter of how you hear it. Song is central to Carnatic music, and the greatest figure of Carnatic music was the singer Thyagaraja (1767–1847). In recent times, M.S. Subbulakshmi (1916–2004) was perhaps the most famous Carnatic singer.

Film

Bollywood films have created their own musical genre, aptly known as filmi, which has become hugely popular in India and abroad. Big, bold and brash, filmi draws on the traditions of both Indian classical and Indian folk music, but simplifies them and gives them a sugary but lively uptempo modern twist and adds in the large sound of western music. Songs from Bollywood movies are often the biggest selling pop songs in India.

Pop and rock

Many young Indian musicians in both India and the UK are creating fusions of western music and Indian music styles. Not just bhangra, but hip-hop, filmi, r’n’b, ragas, modern jazz and every other musical style you can imagine are being thrown together in these fusion styles. Recently, though, young people in cities such as Kolkata and Mumbai have begun to pick up on heavy rock music, with bands such as Parikrama and Pentagram coming to the fore.

Dance

India is famous across the world for its distinctive dance styles, with many traditions dating back thousands of years. There are dozens of these, of which the best known is Bharata Natyam. Bharata Natyam was created in Tamil Nadu some time in the last century, but its roots go back much further through Cathir, the art of temple dancers, to the dawn of Indian history. It is thought to have been created by Bharata Muni, a Hindu sage, who wrote a key treatise on dance called the Natya Shastra. Bharata Natyam incorporates all the precise movements, hand gestures and facial expressions that Indian dance is famous for. Each gesture and movement the dancer performs has its own special meaning. It is supposed to be a fire dance – that is, it represents fire, one of the basic mystical elements of the human body. The Odissi style of dance is a water dance, while Mohiniattam is the air dance.

Perhaps the most exciting form of dance is the Kathak, which originated in northern India. In this, the dancer, with a hundred bells on each ankle, stamps and spins spectacularly at incredible speed. The name Kathak comes from the Sanskrit for ‘story’, and it often involves telling the story of three phases of life – creation (symbolised by Brahma), preservation (symbolised by Vishnu) and destruction (symbolised by Shiva), with the dance moving from a slow start to a dramatic high-speed climax.

Manipuri originated in Manipur in the north-east of the country on the border with Burma. Known for its delicate, graceful turning and swaying it was originally danced only in temples, but thanks largely to the efforts of the famous poet Rabindranath Tagore, it is now danced on stage as well.

The most widely seen dance in India by far, though, is none of these pure traditional forms, but that curious modern hybrid – Bollywood film dancing. Early Bollywood films often did base their dance sequences on classical dances, but modern films are a dynamic blend of different Indian dance styles with modern western dance styles. Every Bollywood film is punctuated by its item numbers in which the heroine dances with a giant chorus of dancers in some spectacular setting – usually these sequences have nothing to do with the film’s plot.

Art

India has a tradition of painting that stretches back further into prehistoric times than nearly any where else in the world. At Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh, there are remarkable paintings in rock shelters dating back at least twelve thousand years, showing elephants, sambar and bison, peacocks, snakes and deer. There are even representations of bows and arrows, swords and shields. Astonishingly many of them are almost as vividly coloured as the day they were painted.

Perhaps the most celebrated ancient paintings in India, though, are the stunning images in the Ajanta caves in Maharashtra. These Buddhist paintings are sometimes described as the Sistine Chapel of India, but they are unique to India and there is nothing like them for sophistication and skill from this time in history anywhere in the world. Most were painted in the Gupta period (fifth and sixth centuries CE) but the oldest date back to the second century BCE, and tell stories of Buddha’s life.

Almost as stunning as the Ajanta paintings are the Chola cave paintings in Tamil Nadu, which were discovered in 1931 under later images in a passageway in the ancient Brihadisvara Temple. These beautiful, often erotic images date back to the twelfth century CE. Yet, Chola and Ajanta are not alone. All over India, there are wonderful frescoes from almost every era in the last few thousand years.

This is not to say of course that Indians only painted on walls. Wall paintings are simply the ones that have survived best. There is a brilliant tradition in India of miniature paintings but many of the oldest and best have been lost over time. The oldest surviving miniatures are palm leaf manuscripts from the eleventh century illustrating the life of Buddha. It was under the Mughal emperors Jahangir and Shahjahan, though, that Persian influence brought Indian miniature art to its pinnacle in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

During British rule, old patrons of art fell away, and western art began to adorn the walls of Indian houses – not just those of the British but Indians too. In the 1920s and 1930s, India’s great poet Rabindranath Tagore created a brilliant blend of Asian art and western avant-garde. After independence in 1947, a group of six artists – K.H. Ara, S.K. Bakre, H.A. Gade, M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza and F.N. Souza – banded together as the Progressive Artist’s Group to establish a new direction for Indian art, and the group’s impact was profound and lasting, inspiring a whole generation of Indian artists such as Bal Chabda and Ram Kumar. In the last few decades, though, a number of Indian artists, like their western counterparts, have been breaking beyond the bounds of conventional painting and sculpture to experiment with multimedia creations. In galleries such as the aptly named Nature Morte in Delhi, artists such as Ranbir Kaleka and Shilpa Gupta display their radical new works.

Architecture

Like Indian art, Indian architecture has a long and venerable tradition. Of course, India’s oldest buildings date back to the time of the Harappan civilisation three to four thousand years ago, but none of the Harappan buildings survive intact. Nevertheless, there are some very old buildings in India – most significantly the great Buddhist stupas or burial mounds built at the time of the Mauryan Empire (321–232 BCE). In the same period, there were great palaces, as the ruins at Pataliputra testify, and the columns of laws (see here) erected by the emperor Asoka. Yet the most stunning creations from this period are the many temples and shrines, carved out of solid rock.

In the south of India, there are Hindu temples. They may not be as old as the Buddhist creations, but are still ancient. At Aihole and Pattadakal, there is a host of small temples, many dating back to the sixth century CE. Here, there are signs of the two traditions that were later to dominate Hindu temple architecture: the northern Nagara style and the southern Dravidian style. The Dravidian style is characterised by a stepped pyramid, while the Nagara is rounded as with the Sun Temple at Konark and the Brihadeeswara Temple at Thanjavur.

It was perhaps with the coming of the Mughal emperors, bringing an Islamic influence that Indian architecture reached its apogee. Graceful onion domes and elegant arches, tranquil sahn (courtyards) and shady liwans (cloisters) all became a part of Indian architecture. Buildings such as the Jama Masjid mosque in Old Delhi and of course the Taj Mahal in Agra have hardly their equals in beauty anywhere in the world.

It is easy to be fooled into thinking that India must always have been a deeply religious, spiritually inclined country looking at its surviving architecture of ancient temples and mausoleums. But just as churches are often the only survivors from medieval times in English towns and villages, so these are simply the only buildings built of stone to last. Countless secular buildings have gone the way of time, and in recent years scholars have begun to pay them more attention and to look for clues as to what they must have been like.

The British, of course, put their own stamp on Indian architecture with their introduction of grand secular buildings in neo-classical and neo-gothic styles. The most famous of these British creations is the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai, originally known as Victoria Station, in honour of the British Empress of India.

The last years of British rule saw the creation of not just single buildings, but a whole planned cityscape in New Delhi, where the British architect Edwin Lutyens created a majestic city with broad, tree-lined avenues and graceful buildings that was so unlike the crowded, chaotic cities found in other parts of the country that it still feels like an alien implant nearly a century on. In the 1950s, not put off by the hubris of such schemes, newly independent India got the famous avant-garde French architect Le Corbusier to design an even more alien townscape in the hard-edged concrete starkness of Chandigarh, and another European modernist Otto Koenigsberger to create Bhubaneshwar, Bhopal and Gandhinagar – a city named in honour of Gandhi, but seemingly at odds with everything he stood for.

Now, India’s new prosperity is stimulating a boom in building, and Indian architects building in the western contemporary style, such as Charles Correa and Balkrishna Doshi, have found a great deal of work. Perhaps most famous (or infamous) of the new generation of Indian architects, though, is Mumbai-based, aptly named Hafeez Contractor, whose planned Himalayan peak-inspired hotel tower for Noida, a town in Uttar Pradesh in view of the Himalayas, could see it become the world’s tallest building at over 800 metres (2,600 feet) tall. The northern city of Gurgaon is also planning a world-beating tower, while after always being low-level cities, both Mumbai and Delhi plan to have Manhattan-like skylines of skyscrapers in the near future.

Literature

For thousands of years, the Indian literary tradition, one of the world’s oldest, was primarily in oral verse. The earliest works were composed to be sung or recited rather than written down. Authors typically remain anonymous.

This is true of the three great early collections of literature that date from the Vedic: the four Hindu sacred texts of the Veda and the two great secular epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The name of the poet Valmiki is sometimes cited as the author of the Ramayana, but it was probably sung by bards and passed down through the generations for centuries before Valmiki actually wrote it down around the fourth century BCE. Indeed it is thought it may have been created in the fifteenth century BCE. Similarly, the Mahabharata is sometimes credited to the author Vyasa, but Vyasa probably just wrote down a much older oral work.

Ramayana

The Ramayana tells the story of Rama, an incarnation of the god Vishnu, who goes into exile with his brother Laxman and his wife Sita, who is an incarnation of the goddess Lakshmi. The evil ten-headed demon Ravanna from Lanka (modern Sri Lanka) hears about Sita’s extraordinary beauty and decides he must have her. Disguised first as a golden deer and then a priest, Ravanna abducts her, despite the efforts of Jatayu the eagle to save her. Rama and his friends, who include the monkey god Hanuman, set off on a great quest to rescue Sita. Just as Rama is on the point of despair, Hanuman realises he can grow big enough to step across the seas to Lanka where he finds Sita weeping. Helped by all the world’s creatures, Rama builds a bridge to Lanka. Rama does battle with Ravanna and, after much strife, defeats and kills him. Hanuman brings Sita to Rama, who, surprisingly, is cold to her. He has fulfilled his honour by rescuing her, but she has been in a stranger’s house. She starts to throw herself on a fire. The god of fire, Agni, saves her and hands her back to Rama who accepts her now her integrity is proven.

Mahabharata

The Mahabharata is the tale of a truly gargantuan civil war, told in a truly gargantuan poem. Comprised of nearly a hundred thousand verses, it is probably the world’s longest poem ever. The most famous bit is a segment called the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita is written as a sermon by the god Krishna, in which he lays out the basic duties of a Hindu in terms of a warrior’s duty. A warrior, Vishnu urges, must fulfil his dharma (see here) by fighting the righteous battle. ‘There is more joy in doing one’s own duty badly,’ he says, ‘than doing another man’s duty well.’

Early Indian literature

The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are the two great pieces of classical Sanskrit literature, but there were others in its great secular period from 200 BCE to about 1100 CE. It was in this time that there was a flowering of Indian drama, with plays often based on famous epics. It began with the playwright Bharata, whose Natya Shastra (c. 200 BCE) became the bible for any dramatist, as well as for other stage performers such as dancers. The greatest dramatist of this period, though, sometimes described as India’s Shakespeare, was Kalidasa. Kalidasa lived some time between the first century BCE and the fifth century CE. His most famous plays are the Recognition of Shakuntala, Malavika and Agnimitra and Pertaining to Vikrama and Urvashi. There were also five great poems in Sanskrit from this period drawing on the Mahabharata for inspiration, including Kalidasa’s Rahuvamsa and the Kiratarjuniya of Bharavi.

In southern India, at the same time, great poems about love and war were being written not in Sanskrit but in Tamil. It was in Tamil Nadu that there arose in the sixth and seventh centuries the tradtion of the bhakti (devotional), which was to have a profound impact on Indian writing over the next thousand years. The pinnacle of the bhakti is said to be Tulsi Das’s poem Ramcharitmanas, written in the fifteenth century.

The coming of the Persians and Turks brought a new Islamic influence into Indian writing, affecting not just those who wrote in Urdu, but also those who wrote in Bengali, Gujarati and Kashmiri. The Islamic influence added the ghazal, a Persian form of love poetry similar to the European sonnet, to the Hindu bhakti. The Indian ghazal reached its high point in the Urdu lyric verse of Mir and Ghalib.

The Raj

When the British arrived, contact with western thought and education, and the arrival of the printing press, had a profound effect on Indian writing. In the nineteenth century, the ports of Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai fostered the development of a new tradition of prose literature – novels, short stories and plays – that overwhelmed traditional Indian verse. A few Urdu poets continued to compose in the old ways, but Bengali poets often found themselves imitating English poets such as Percy Shelley and, later, T.S. Eliot.

The greatest literary figure of the Raj, though, was the Bengali poet and artist Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). For the first fifty years of his life, he was a little-known poet writing in Bengali, but all that changed in 1912, when he began translating a collection of his poems called Gitanjali into English. W.B. Yeats saw the poems and was enthralled. Tagore became an overnight sensation around the world, and within a year he had become the first Indian to win the Nobel Prize. Within three years he had been honoured with a knighthood, though he later renounced this in 1919, following the Amritsar massacre of Indian demonstrators by British troops (see here).

Independent India

In recent years, a whole raft of Indian novelists writing in English have made a name for themselves around the world, including Salman Rushdie whose Midnight’s Children celebrated lives begun at the moment of Independence, Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance), Vikram Seth (A Suitable Boy), Anita Desai (Feasting, Fasting) and Amitav Ghosh (The Shadow Lines). V.S. Naipaul (In a Free State), Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Heat and Dust), Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) and Kiran Desai (The Inheritance of Loss) have all won the Booker Prize, as well as Salman Rushdie for Midnight’s Children. R.K. Narayan retells classic Indian folk tales in Gods, Demons and Others.

Media

Print and online

With a population of over a billion, at least half of whom can read, it is not surprising that India produces a lot of journals. But the total is truly awesome. Over five thousand different newspapers are produced every single day, and on top of the dailies there are some forty thousand magazines. Indian news stores would be groaning if they carried anything more than a fraction of these. About half the journals are written in Hindi (about twenty thousand), about a sixth in English (seven thousand five hundred), and 1 to 2 per cent in Marathi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu.

The Hindi newspapers with the biggest circulation are the Dainik Jagran and the Dainak Bhaskar. The key newspapers in English are the Hindu, the Times of India, the Economic Times and the Indian Express. All of these are relatively conservative in both their political outlook and their choice of stories. India does not have racy tabloid newspapers in the vein of the UK Sun. Besides the newspapers, there are now a number of news magazines in the style of Time, such as India Today and Frontline (published by the Hindu), and Outlook, Sunday and The Week.

Most of the big newspapers now have online versions, but one of the most interesting news outlets on the web is Tehelka, one of the few places where a genuine alternative voice is heard. It was Tehelka that exposed corruption in the Vajpayee government, and was closed down for its pains. It was soon up and running again, and is now a well-established, well-written site offering a wide coverage of a range of issues. Writers such as V.S. Naipaul and Arundhati Roy make regular appearances on the pages of Tehelka.

The consumer boom in India has spawned a large and rapidly growing raft of glossy magazines. Top of the list are the Bollywood fanzines such as Filmfare and Screen, which are joined by online sites such as Planet Bollywood and Bollywood Online. Then there are women’s and fashion magazines such as Femina, Verve, Cosmopolitan and the more staid Desh Videsh with its emphasis on traditional weddings. Links to all the Indian magazines can be found at Thokalath.com.

Television

Ever since the Indian broadcast market was opened up by liberalisation in 1991 and 1992, India has seen a growing tide of TV channels, both on satellite and cable. There are now well over one hundred channels supplying viewing to at least four hundred million viewers in India in seventy million homes. When liberalisation first started, satellites were almost exclusively at major hotels, but soon enterprising entrepreneurs would hook up a satellite and supply the neighbourhood via cables. Now, more and more Indian users have their own satellite dishes or a direct link into commercial cable networks.

Prior to liberalisation, broadcasting was almost entirely in the hands of the state TV station Doordashan and the radio network All India Radio. There was considerable criticism that Doordashan showed undue government bias. In the 1989 election, Doordashan’s endorsement of Rajiv Gandhi was all too obvious. The opening up of the airwaves to competition forced Doordashan to take a more balanced view. It also forced Doordashan to completely revamp its entire output as it began to lose viewers to the more exciting fare offered by satellite channels such as the Zee, Sun, CNN and Rupert Murdoch’s Star. Cable opened the way to a whole host of new channels such as MTV, STAR plus, BBC, Prime Sports, Nickelodeon and the very popular Channel V, hosted by scantily clad Mumbai models. Only a small proportion of households can as yet receive cable, but the number is growing. All these channels have opened India up to a whole new range of influences and experiences, but there are still limits on what is permissible. For example, in spring 2007, the satellite channel FTV was banned for showing programmes such as Midnight Hot in which ‘skimpily dressed and semi-naked models are shown’ in way that is ‘against good taste and decency’.

Food

India is renowned for its inventive and rich use of spices. Indian food is incredibly varied, and there are a host of very distinctive regional cuisines, with spices and herbs featuring strongly in all of them. Another strong strand is vegetarianism. Although meat and fish are eaten in many places, almost a third of all Indians are vegetarian and many more eat very little meat. The tradition of vegetarianism arose in the age of Asoka (273–232 BCE), India’s great Buddhist emperor, and has stuck.

The staples of Indian food are rice, atta (whole wheat) and a huge range of pulses such as chana, toor and urad. Most of the pulses are made into kind of dry porridge called dal, except for chana, which is eaten whole for breakfast or made into flour. The mainstay of Indian cooking, though, is what westerners call a curry but actually covers a huge range of dishes. Curries are made by adding a masala, or mix of spices, to fried vegetables towards the end of cooking. Masalas vary enormously, but they typically include spices such as chilli, turmeric, ginger, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, pepper, cumin, fenugreek and coriander (both as leaf and seed). Garam masala is a hot mix of five spices including cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, black pepper and chilli. Interestingly, tomatos, chillis and potatoes, now such an integral part of Indian cooking, are relatively recent additions, introduced by the Portuguese from America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Indian cooking is often divided into that from the north and the south, though each area covers a wide range of cuisines. Northern Indian cooking has strong Turkish and Persian influences. It is much less vegetarian than southern cooking, and the food is much richer, incorporating cream, yoghourt, almonds, sultanas and saffron. The dairy products in northern food tend to be processed to make ghee (clarified butter), paneer (cheese) and yoghourt, rather than used as plain milk. Another important element in northern cooking is tandoori, which gets its name from the deep clay oven or tandoor. Breads such as naan, kulcha and khakra are all baked in a tandoor. Chicken can be marinated in yoghourt, herbs and spices and cooked in a tandoor to make tandoori chicken. When the chicken is boneless it is called tikka, and when a masala of spices is added, it is called chicken tikka masala. The Mughal influence is evident in the north in the variety of meat dishes and kebabs, often described as Mughlai cooking. Bengalis eat a lot of fish, and often add fish bones to vegetable curries. In Bihar, many people use a type of flour called satu rather than rice. Gujaratis like to add sugar to their cooking.

In southern India, rice and coconut are the key ingredients. There is almost no meat, and heavy dairy products such as ghee and paneer are rarely used. Although such meals are common in the north, too, a typical southern meal consists of a mound of rice surrounded by a huge range of little portions of different curries, dals, chutneys, curds and so on, traditionally served on a metal tray called a thali, or on a banana leaf.

Going to India

Doing business

As the Indian economy continues to boom and open up, more and more westerners are finding themselves travelling to India on business. In some ways, India is a very easy country in which to do business if you speak English. Although there are over twenty spoken languages in India and Hindi is the most widely spoken of these languages, most Indians in the world of business speak English. This one factor is a huge plus point. It means that not only do you understand them but they also understand you, and if they speak English they also understand at least a little of your culture. Indeed, many Indians in the business world were even educated in the USA or the UK. That said, some foreigners find that Indians speak English so quickly, or with such a strong accent, that it can be difficult to understand them. It is probably worth asking the person you are speaking with, very politely and tactfully, to speak a little more slowly if this happens so as to avoid the chances of misunderstanding.

Despite the common language, however, cultural differences can play a part. Some Indians are highly westernised, especially in Mumbai and Delhi, and doing business with them is little different from doing business with anyone in the West. With others, however, there are distinct differences in approach that it pays to understand.

Religion and family

Indians tend to give higher priority to family and religion than their western counterparts. This means that business will always be put aside if there is an important family or religious event. This not only means that you are unlikely to get much business done on any of the many religious festivals during the year, but also you may often find a meeting cancelled at the last minute because of an important family occasion. This is neither unprofessional nor rude. The Indian businessman simply puts great store on his family, and would expect you to do the same. Indeed, they are more likely to establish a rapport with someone who also values family. Westerners are often surprised by just how important the little observances of religion are to many Indian businessmen. Even when in a tearing hurry to get to catch a plane, they will always take the time to do something such as stop when crossing the Ganga to throw a coin in the sacred river.

Many businesses in India are family run – many more than in the West. This does not mean they are amateurish or even small scale. It simply means that family loyalty is placed much higher on the scale than you might expect. It is very much the norm for a son to follow his father in the same business – at every level of society. This is partly because of the caste system, which pretty much ensured that sons pursued the same line of business as their fathers. But it is also a family thing. People would have been surprised, for instance, if Mukesh Ambani hadn’t returned from Stanford Business School early to join his father’s business, Reliance, and take over when he died. The same is true of Ratan Tata at Tata, who also gave up his American university course early to come back to take his place under his ailing father at Tata. Loyalty is given and loyalty is expected both in the biggest multinationals and the smallest cornershop.

Respect

Hand in hand with their respect for religion and family comes a degree of civility that can sometimes take westerners by surprise. Many more traditionally minded Indians expect business to be conducted in a polite and very formal way. The informality that westerners sometimes take for granted is often taken as a sign of rudeness and disrespect by Indians. To establish a good relationship with an Indian business partner, you at least need to start with a degree of formal politeness many westerners would feel is artificial and unfriendly – but Indians regard as simply respectful. Only once you both know and trust each other should you probably move to a more relaxed approach. This is not a general rule, of course, because many Indians, especially among the young generation who have been brought up on MTV and Star, are very happy to do things in an off-the-cuff western way. Indeed, some get a positive buzz from this approach. All the same, it really makes sense to err on the safe side until you know better.

Similarly, the aggression and straight-talking that can sometimes seem dynamic and businesslike in the West, can often seem plain disrespectful in India. Indians on the whole do not like being subjected to pressure tactics. Far from speeding a deal towards a conclusion, this will tend to ensure the whole process breaks down. Indians don’t set much store by brilliant statistical analyses, dynamic plans and stunning PowerPoint presentations. Instead, they rely a little more on intuition. It is essential for them to build up a rapport and relationship of trust. Any sign of frustration at delays will jeopardise the process by undermining trust.

For Indians, respect is very important, and any sign of disrespect is a real barrier to good business. This can be seen even in what westerners might regard as little things. Indians will always expect you to address them with their full title unless they tell you otherwise, such as Mr or Mrs or Professor or Doctor. It’s really worth taking the trouble beforehand to find out if they do have a title and then using it. If you don’t know their name, use Sir or Madam. Similarly, when you’re handed a business card, treat it respectfully. Don’t simply shove it away in a pocket, but carefully put it somewhere where is it is clearly valued. And be sure to take the card with your right hand.

Politeness can also lead to misunderstandings. Many Indians do not like to say directly ‘no’ because it is thought rude to cause disappointment. So they might say, ‘We’ll see…’ or ‘Possibly…’ instead. If you hear that kind of non-committal remark you can be fairly sure that things are looking pretty negative.

Interestingly, this requirement for politeness does not mean negotiations are carried out in an atmosphere of hushed genteel exchanges. Haggling is much more a part of Indian culture than it is in the West. Indians will often haggle even at the supermarket. They spend their life haggling and are very argumentative about it. But even when being deeply argumentative, it is rarely personally rude or impolite. One tip, apparently, when negotiating with an argumentative Indian partner, is to use the power of silence.

Hierarchies

The very hierarchical nature of Indian society means you must always pay due deference to the right person. If you walk into a meeting room and there are several people there, you should always pay your respects to the most senior person there, even if they are furthest from you. Also, the most senior person will always be the one who signs the deal or not. If you still dealing with a junior, you can be sure the deal is some way off. The flip side of this deference is that people lower down the ladder will never contradict their boss or openly disagree with him. So you cannot assume that because they are silent they agree with everything he says.

The hierarchical nature of Indian business means there is very clear demarcation of status and tasks. It can often take hours or even days to get something as simple as moving a computer from one desk to another done. This is because it is the peon’s (dogsbody’s) task to do it, and if he isn’t available, no one else will. The hierarchical nature of Indian business also means people expect to be told what to do by their superiors. The western idea of leaving juniors to get on with a task by themselves and use their initiative is rare in India. What this means in practical terms is, if you are in the position of superior, they will clearly expect you to check up on them, to set deadlines and chase them – though in a polite way, since they are expecting to be told and will act accordingly.

‘Indian Standard Time’

One thing that often frustrates westerners doing business in India is the slowness or rather falling behind on schedules that have been set. Deliveries and deals are frequently subject to inexplicable delays that come out of the blue on a contract that seems to be going fine. American companies report that Indian companies have a very different understanding of the term ‘ship date’. In the USA, the ship date is the day the product is shipped out of the factory. In India, the ship date is simply the day it is ready, or might be ready, for shipping. It may be weeks before the product is actually shipped out.

Surprisingly to westerners, this is not because of a lackadaisical approach to business. It is because delays and interruptions are accepted as part of life in India. Deadlines are not the be-all and end-all they are in the West. Programmes depend more on people and events than schedules. So if things happen, schedules change, and that is accepted. When they are working, Indians will work as hard and fast and efficiently as anyone in the world. This is why it is important to establish what is needed clearly in advance and pay frequent visits to make sure that everything is going to plan. It is really worth politely asking your Indian business partner to make allowances for possible delays and then work your schedule out accordingly.

Some holidays in India

Republic Day: 26 January

Holi: 15 March

Ram Navani: 6 April

Raksha Bandhan: 9 August

Independence Day: 15 August

Gandhi Jayanti: 2 October

Idu’l Fitr: 25 October

Useful websites

Indian Embassy: Doing business in India

www.indianembassy.org/newsite/Doing_business_In_India

This site has a range of useful and detailed information on everything from the financial and tax systems in India to intellectual property rights, special economic zones and labour laws.

World Bank: Doing business

www.doingbusiness.org

The World Bank site provides very useful and detailed information about just how easy it is to do business in India compared to other countries, including employing workers, getting credit, registering property and so on.

Madaan: Investing in India

www.madaan.com/investing.htm

A very useful guide provided by an American law firm.