ABSTRACT
India is a vast country, 2,500 miles in breadth, 1,500 miles in length, endowed with the world’s highest mountains, two great river systems, deserts, and rain forests. Its history is long and complex, reaching back perhaps to 2500 B.C.E. Over the centuries numerous peoples, tribes, languages, and religions have arisen, competed, and jostled one another. Over time, for example, there were some two hundred languages, fourteen of them major. Four major invasions influenced Indian culture and institutions, and all but one (the British in the seventeenth century) entered from the northwest through the Khyber Pass. The Aryans came through in about 1500 B.C.E., Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C.E., and the Muslims in the tenth century. Long stretches of India’s past-especially the period from 1500 to 500 B.C.E.—are mostly a blank for lack of a written record. Archeological analysis of surviving remains can take the story only so far, and that kind of evidence is limited in quantity as well. In short, India does not have a continuous history that can be traced through time without serious breaks, especially in the period before the Muslim invasions.
