Who are the Indians?
From the drained streets of Mohenjo-daro to the world’s most populous democracy — five thousand years of a civilization that absorbed every conqueror and outlasted every empire.
Last updated: October 2026
They have been farming the same plains for five thousand years, arguing about the same gods for three thousand, and voting — all one billion of them, together — for less than eighty. The Indians are not one people but a civilization of peoples, and their story is the longest continuous experiment in human diversity.
India is not one people but a civilisation of peoples. More than 1.4 billion people live in the Republic of India, making it, according to United Nations estimates, the most populous country in the world. They speak hundreds of languages, follow every major religion, and belong to thousands of communities with their own customs, foods, and histories. The country's constitution recognises twenty-two languages in its Eighth Schedule, with Hindi and English serving as the languages of the central government. A traveller crossing India passes through worlds as different from one another as Portugal is from Poland: the deserts of Rajasthan, the rice paddies of Bengal, the backwaters of Kerala, the Himalayan valleys of the north.
What holds this diversity together is not sameness but a long shared history and a political idea: that a single democratic state can contain many nations. Indians argue fiercely about that idea — about language, religion, caste, and region — and those arguments are part of the story. To understand Indians, it helps to start not with a single identity but with the depth of time: no other large civilisation has carried on in the same place, with so much continuity, for so long.
India's urban story begins with the Indus Valley Civilisation, which flourished from about 2600 to 1900 BCE along the Indus River and its tributaries. Its cities, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, had grid-planned streets, covered drains, granaries, and standardised weights — evidence of sophisticated administration. The script of the Indus civilisation has never been deciphered, so its people remain partly silent to us, but its cities are among the oldest planned urban centres in the world.
From around 1500 BCE, the Vedic traditions took shape in the north, preserved in Sanskrit hymns that were passed down orally for centuries before being written. Out of this world came the foundations of Hindu thought: the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, which remain living texts, retold in every Indian language and performed in theatre, television, and dance. Buddhism and Jainism also arose in India in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, and Buddhism travelled from India across Asia, while Jainism remained a distinctive Indian tradition. The caste system, a hierarchy of birth-based groups, developed over centuries and, although discrimination on the basis of caste is outlawed in modern India, its social legacy remains a central subject of Indian politics and debate.
India's first near-continental empire was built by the Mauryas in the fourth and third centuries BCE. Its most famous ruler, Ashoka, who reigned in the third century BCE, converted to Buddhism after a bloody conquest and had edicts carved on rocks and pillars across his empire, preaching tolerance, respect for all faiths, and the welfare of his subjects. His lion capital is the national emblem of modern India, and his wheel, the chakra, sits at the centre of the Indian flag. The Gupta period, from the fourth to the sixth centuries CE, is often remembered as a classical age of Indian art, mathematics, and astronomy — the decimal system and the concept of zero as a number took shape in India in this era and later travelled westward through the Arab world.
The medieval centuries brought new powers. The Delhi Sultanate, founded in the early thirteenth century, established Muslim rule in the north. The Mughal Empire, founded by Babur in 1526, grew into one of the richest states on earth. Under Akbar, who reigned from 1556 to 1605, the Mughals practised a policy of religious tolerance and built an administrative system that drew Hindus and Muslims alike into government. The Taj Mahal, built by Shah Jahan in the seventeenth century as a tomb for his wife, remains the most famous monument of Mughal India. In the south, the Vijayanagara Empire presided over a flourishing Hindu kingdom. None of these empires ruled all of India at once for long — the subcontinent's default state was plurality, not unity.
European power arrived with trade. The British East India Company, chartered in 1600, gradually turned from a trading enterprise into a territorial ruler, defeating its Indian and European rivals over the eighteenth century. The great rebellion of 1857 — called by the British the Sepoy Mutiny and by many Indians the First War of Independence — shook Company rule, and in 1858 the British Crown took direct control. The Raj, as British rule was called, built railways, telegraphs, universities, and a vast bureaucracy, and it also extracted wealth, imposed taxes, and suppressed dissent. Famines under British rule killed millions, and Indian historians and British historians still argue over how much responsibility colonial policy bears.
The independence movement that ended the Raj became one of the most consequential political movements of the twentieth century. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, grew into a mass organisation. Mohandas Gandhi, returning from South Africa in 1915, made non-violent resistance — satyagraha — its signature method: boycotts of British cloth and salt, marches, and mass civil disobedience. Alongside Gandhi stood figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, Subhas Chandra Bose, who favoured armed struggle, and B. R. Ambedkar, the architect of the constitution and champion of the rights of Dalits, the communities once called untouchables. The movement's success inspired anti-colonial movements across the world.
Independence came in August 1947, together with partition: British India was divided into the dominions of India and Pakistan, and the partition triggered one of the largest mass migrations in history, with millions of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs crossing the new borders amid horrific communal violence. The death toll is disputed, with estimates running into the hundreds of thousands. Pakistan later split again, with Bangladesh winning independence in 1971. Partition remains a live wound in Indian memory and politics, and the dispute over Kashmir, which both India and Pakistan claim, has caused several wars between the two countries.
The Republic of India adopted its constitution in 1950, establishing a parliamentary democracy with universal adult suffrage, fundamental rights, and affirmative action for historically disadvantaged groups. Against the expectations of many observers, democracy survived: India has held regular elections for more than seven decades, with power changing hands peacefully, and its voters number nearly a billion people. The states were reorganised along linguistic lines, a decision that defused many regional tensions. India also pursued an independent foreign policy, joining the Non-Aligned Movement and maintaining relations with both Cold War blocs.
Since economic liberalisation in 1991, India has become one of the world's fastest-growing large economies, with a vast services sector, a global information-technology industry, and a space programme that landed a spacecraft on the Moon in 2023. Its diaspora, one of the largest in the world, is prominent in business, politics, and science in Britain, the United States, the Gulf states, and beyond. Indian cinema, led by the Hindi film industry in Mumbai known as Bollywood, reaches audiences across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and Indian food, music, and literature travel everywhere.
India's challenges are as large as its achievements. Hundreds of millions of people still live in poverty, although the share has fallen sharply. Religious tensions, above all between Hindus and Muslims, periodically erupt into violence, and critics of the government argue that secularism and minority rights are under pressure, while supporters argue that India's democracy and courts remain vigorous. The caste system, climate change, and the management of water and air pollution all test the state. What five thousand years of Indian history suggest is that the country's deepest habit is absorption: invaders, traders, missionaries, and ideas have arrived, been argued with, and been folded into an ever-larger whole. The argument continues.
Further reading in works of reference and scholarship:
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, entries on India, the Indus Valley Civilisation, and the Mughal Empire
- Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (Penguin)
- Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi (Macmillan)
- John Keay, India: A History (HarperCollins)
- Romila Thapar, The Past Before Us (Harvard University Press)
- United Nations, World Population Prospects, estimates for India