India's urban history begins long before most of the histories taught in the West. Between 3300 and 1300 BC, on the banks of the Indus and of the now-dry Ghaggar-Hakra river, the Indus Valley Civilisation flourished. It's also called the Harappan civilisation, after Harappa, its first excavated site, and it was one of the three great Bronze Age civilisations alongside Egypt and Mesopotamia. In its mature phase, between 2600 and 1900 BC, it covered much of present-day Pakistan, north-west India and north-east Afghanistan: the largest of the three.
Its cities are striking for how modern they were. Harappa and Mohenjo-daro may each have had between 30.000 and 40.000 inhabitants. They were laid out on a regular grid, with streets aligned to the cardinal points, drainage systems, wells, public baths such as the Great Bath of Mohenjo-daro, and granaries. More than a thousand settlements have been found. Their trade reached as far as Mesopotamia, they used a standardised system of weights and measures, and they produced thousands of steatite seals bearing a script that nobody has managed to decipher to this day.
Around 1900 BC the great cities went into decline and were gradually abandoned. There was no single cause and no violent destruction. Today the decline is attributed mainly to climate change and the drying up of the Ghaggar-Hakra, which would have pushed the population to migrate east towards the Ganges plain. The old idea of an 'Aryan invasion' that razed these cities has been ruled out; historians speak instead of a slow displacement and a gradual merging of populations.
After the decline of the Indus cities came the so-called Vedic period (roughly 1500-500 BC), named after the Vedas. These are a body of hymns, prayers and ritual formulas composed in early Sanskrit and passed down by memory for centuries before being written down. The Rigveda, the oldest of them, is one of the world's oldest religious texts still in use. Over time, this cultural world would give rise to what we now call Hinduism.
It was an age of herding and farming societies settled on the Indo-Gangetic plain, organised first into tribes and later into small kingdoms. During these centuries the varna system took shape. It divided society into four broad categories: Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants and farmers) and Shudras (servants). Hardened and subdivided over the millennia into thousands of hereditary castes (jati), it would shape Indian life deeply, and often oppressively, right up to the present.
By the middle of the first millennium BC the mahajanapadas had emerged, sixteen great kingdoms and republics that dominated northern India. Among them, Magadha began to stand out. It lay in what is now the state of Bihar, and its capital, Pataliputra (modern Patna), would become the seat of power from which the subcontinent's first great empires were forged. This same cultural ferment gave birth to two new religions, largely as a reaction against Brahmin ritualism and the weight of caste.
Around the 6th-5th centuries BC, on the same Ganges plain where the great kingdoms competed, two teachers lived who founded religions that would change the history of Asia. Siddhartha Gautama was a prince of the Shakya clan, born in Lumbini (now in Nepal). He gave up palace life to look for an answer to suffering and, according to tradition, reached enlightenment under a tree in Bodh Gaya, becoming the Buddha, 'the awakened one'. He preached for the first time at Sarnath, near Varanasi, and founded Buddhism. Its teaching rests on the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path to liberation from the cycle of rebirth.
At almost the same time, Mahavira systematised and spread Jainism, a tradition even more radical in what it asked of its followers: non-violence (ahimsa) towards every living being, extreme asceticism and respect for all forms of life. Both religions rejected the exclusive authority of the Brahmins and the value of ritual sacrifice. They opened the path to liberation to people of any caste, which explains much of their early appeal.
Buddhism in particular would find an extraordinary champion in the emperor Ashoka. It later spread to Sri Lanka, South-East Asia, China, Korea, Japan and Tibet, becoming one of the world's great religions. Curiously, in its homeland it ended up almost disappearing, reabsorbed by Hinduism. Jainism, meanwhile, survived as a small but influential minority, especially in the trade and finance of western India.
Around 321 BC, taking advantage of the vacuum left by Alexander the Great's withdrawal from north-west India, a man named Chandragupta Maurya overthrew the Nanda dynasty of Magadha. He founded the Maurya Empire, the first to unify almost the entire subcontinent. According to tradition, he was guided by his shrewd adviser Chanakya (Kautilya), author of the famous political treatise the Arthashastra. Chandragupta built a centralised state with its capital at Pataliputra, and it came to impress the Greek ambassadors.
The empire reached its peak under his grandson Ashoka (who reigned c. 268-232 BC), one of the most remarkable rulers of the ancient world. Around 260 BC, Ashoka conquered the kingdom of Kalinga (present-day Odisha) in a horrific war. According to his own inscriptions, it left a hundred thousand dead, many more dead from hunger and disease, and tens of thousands deported. Horrified by the slaughter he himself had caused, the emperor converted to Buddhism and renounced wars of conquest.
From then on, Ashoka proclaimed a policy of dhamma: righteousness, tolerance, non-violence and the welfare of his subjects. He had it carved on pillars and rocks across the empire. These are the famous Edicts of Ashoka, written not in learned Sanskrit but in the local languages so that ordinary people could understand them. He promoted Buddhism and sent missions as far as Sri Lanka and the Hellenistic world. He also left a lasting symbol: the Lion Capital of Sarnath, with its four lions, is today the national emblem of the Republic of India, and the wheel of his dhamma sits at the centre of the flag.
After the fall of the Mauryas, around 185 BC, India fragmented again for centuries. Kingdoms succeeded one another, and invaders came in through the north-west: Indo-Bactrian Greeks, Scythians, Parthians and the Kushans. The Kushans' great king Kanishka was another patron of Buddhism, and under their rule the Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhara flourished. Only in the 4th century AD did a new power reunite the north and open what is often called the golden age of Indian civilisation.
The Gupta Empire was founded by Chandragupta I around 320 AD and brought to its height by Samudragupta and Chandragupta II. It ruled the north of the subcontinent for more than two centuries. It was a time of stability and prosperity in which science, the arts and literature reached great heights. The mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata calculated the solar year with remarkable precision and worked with the decimal system. In these centuries the use of zero as a number became established, one of India's great contributions to the world. The poet and playwright Kalidasa wrote works that are still considered high points of Sanskrit literature.
Under the Guptas temples were built, the frescoes of the Ajanta caves were painted, and much of the iconography and mythology of classical Hinduism was fixed. The empire weakened from the 5th century onwards under raids by the Hephthalite Huns and eventually broke apart. India returned to political fragmentation, but the cultural, religious and scientific synthesis of the Gupta era remained a classical reference point for everything that came after.
While the great empires succeeded one another in the north, southern India went its own way. This is the peninsula beyond the Deccan plateau, with Dravidian languages (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam) very different from Sanskrit and its northern descendants. Its history rarely appears in accounts centred on Delhi. As early as the first centuries AD, the Tamil kingdoms of the Chera, Chola and Pandya traded with Rome: Roman amphorae and coins have been found in southern ports, evidence of a busy trade in spices, pearls and textiles.
Between the 9th and 13th centuries, the Chola dynasty built the most powerful maritime empire ever to come out of southern India. Under Raja Raja Chola I and his son Rajendra I, the Cholas dominated the south of the subcontinent. They also sent fleets against Sri Lanka, the Maldives and even the Srivijaya empire in present-day Indonesia, an exceptional case of naval power projection in Indian history. They left colossal temples, such as the Brihadishvara temple in Thanjavur, now a World Heritage Site, and a tradition of Shiva Nataraja bronzes admired around the world.
This deep south developed a civilisation of temples and devotional poetry (the bhakti movement). It also produced great dynasties, including the Pallavas, Chalukyas, Rashtrakutas and Hoysalas, that were rarely conquered for long by the powers of the north. That relative autonomy explains why the south still keeps such a distinct cultural and linguistic identity today. It also explains why Islam, and later Delhi, reached it at a very different pace and to a very different extent than on the Ganges plain.
Islam reached India by two routes and at two different times. First it came peacefully and early, through Arab merchants who from the 7th century traded in the ports of the west coast, especially in Kerala and Gujarat. Then it came by the sword: in the early 8th century the Arabs conquered Sindh, and between the 10th and 12th centuries waves of raids arrived from Central Asia. Among them were the devastating campaigns of Mahmud of Ghazni, notorious for plundering temples, and those of the Ghurid sultanate.
These conquests gave birth in 1206 to the Delhi Sultanate, the first great Muslim state established in the heart of India. It would last until 1526 under five successive dynasties: the Slave (Mamluk), Khalji, Tughlaq, Sayyid and Lodi dynasties. The sultanate came to extend its power over much of the subcontinent. It held off the Mongol invasions and even survived Timur's brutal sack of Delhi in 1398.
It was an age of profound change. Indo-Islamic architecture left monuments such as Delhi's Qutb Minar, begun around 1199, and a new blend of styles with arches, domes and calligraphy. Urdu was born, a language that grew out of contact between the Persian of the court and local speech. In religion, alongside episodes of temple destruction and forced conversion, Sufism also flourished. Its mystics, with their message of love and devotion, built bridges with bhakti Hinduism. India had become, for good, a land where Hinduism and Islam lived side by side, in coexistence and in tension.
In 1526 a Central Asian prince named Babur, a direct descendant of Timur and Genghis Khan, defeated the last sultan of Delhi at the First Battle of Panipat. He founded the Mughal Empire, which would rule India for more than three centuries, at least in name, until 1857. The name 'Mughal' is in fact a corruption of 'Mongol'. Under this dynasty India lived through one of the most brilliant periods in its history.
Its towering figure was Akbar (who reigned from 1556 to 1605), Babur's grandson. He took the throne at thirteen and turned a military conquest into a lasting empire. Akbar expanded the borders and created an efficient system of administration and taxation. Above all, he practised a policy of religious tolerance unusual for his time. He abolished the tax on non-Muslims, married Hindu Rajput princesses, brought the Hindu nobility into his government and sponsored debates among scholars of every religion. His great-grandson Shah Jahan (1628-1658) took the splendour of the court and of Mughal art to its peak. Between 1630 and 1653 he had the Taj Mahal built in Agra, the white marble mausoleum raised in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in childbirth. Today it is considered the masterpiece of Indo-Islamic architecture and one of the most admired buildings on the planet.
The last of the great emperors, Aurangzeb (1658-1707), came to the throne after imprisoning his father and killing his brothers. He expanded the empire to its greatest territorial extent but broke with Akbar's tolerance. He reinstated the tax on non-Muslims, hardened religious policy and drained the treasury in endless wars in the south, especially against the Marathas of the Hindu leader Shivaji. After his death in 1707 the empire began a slow but unstoppable decline. Real power fragmented among provincial governors, Marathas, Sikhs and other regional powers, and that vacuum would be the Europeans' way in.
The Europeans reached India by sea in search of spices. In 1498 the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama landed at Calicut, on the Kerala coast, opening the direct route between Europe and India around Africa. Portugal set up a network of coastal forts, with Goa as its jewel, and for a century dominated trade in the Indian Ocean. The Dutch, the French and the English followed. The English East India Company, founded in 1600, began as a trading business with factories in ports such as Madras, Bombay and Calcutta, but ended up becoming a political and military power.
The turning point was the Battle of Plassey in 1757. Exploiting the Mughal collapse and local rivalries, the Company defeated the Nawab of Bengal and took control of India's richest region. Over the following century the Company, a private corporation with its own army, annexed or subordinated one kingdom after another until it controlled almost the whole subcontinent. Its rule was often predatory. The great Bengal famine of 1770, made worse by the Company's tax policies, claimed millions of lives, and it was only the first in a long series of famines that mark the colonial period.
In 1857 a great uprising broke out, known as the Sepoy Mutiny or, to many Indians, the First War of Independence. It began as a mutiny of Indian soldiers in the Company's army and spread across the north, with Delhi and the elderly Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar as its symbols. It was crushed with enormous harshness. In its wake, the British Crown abolished the Company and took over direct rule. The British Raj was born, and Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1876. How to weigh those nearly two centuries is a matter of legitimate historical debate. The British built railways, telegraphs, an administrative and educational system and a unified legal framework. But they also drained the country's wealth and deindustrialised its textile crafts. They also mismanaged, or let happen, catastrophic famines, such as the Bengal famine of 1943, in which between two and three million people died while food was being exported. The overall death toll from famines in the colonial period is disputed, but it runs into the tens of millions across the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Resistance to British rule took political form in 1885 with the founding of the Indian National Congress. It began as a moderate forum for the educated elite seeking greater participation, and in time became the great vehicle of Indian nationalism. In 1906 the Muslim League was also founded, and it would begin to press the specific interests of the Muslim minority. But the figure who turned the struggle into a mass movement was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
Gandhi was a lawyer trained in London and hardened by campaigns against discrimination in South Africa, and he would come to be called Mahatma, 'great soul'. He returned to India in 1915 and turned non-violent resistance (satyagraha) into a formidable political weapon. He led three great campaigns. The first was the Non-Cooperation Movement (1920-1922). The second was the civil disobedience campaign, with the famous Salt March of 1930, when he walked more than 300 kilometres to the sea to make salt in defiance of the British monopoly. The third was the Quit India movement of 1942, launched in the middle of the Second World War under the slogan 'do or die'. Alongside him worked figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru, the future prime minister, and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.
Besides independence, Gandhi preached unity between Hindus and Muslims, the abolition of untouchability (he called the so-called untouchables harijan, 'children of God') and a simple, self-sufficient life. His strategy earned him worldwide respect and repeated spells in prison. When the Second World War left Britain exhausted and determined to withdraw, the question was no longer whether India would be independent, but how, and in how many pieces. That was where the wound of Partition opened.
India's long-awaited independence arrived wrapped in tragedy. As British withdrawal became inevitable after the war, the Muslim League won its demand for a separate state for Muslims: Pakistan. The League was led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The Congress, and Gandhi himself, opposed dividing the country. But fear of civil war and pressure of time led to the subcontinent being partitioned into two states along religious lines.
On 15 August 1947 India was born as an independent nation, with Nehru as prime minister; Pakistan had been born the day before. But the borders were drawn in haste by a British lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe, who barely knew the country. They split the provinces of Punjab and Bengal in two and left millions of people on the 'wrong side' of a religious line. What followed was one of the largest forced migrations in history. Between twelve and twenty million people crossed the new borders, Hindus and Sikhs towards India and Muslims towards Pakistan. They did so amid an explosion of horrific sectarian violence: massacres, trains full of corpses, burned villages, and tens of thousands of women abducted or raped.
Death tolls are debated and vary enormously from source to source. The most widely cited estimates put the number of victims at between 200.000 and two million, and some recent studies put it higher still. Partition left a wound that never fully healed. India and Pakistan have since fought several wars, above all over Kashmir, whose sovereignty is still disputed. Gandhi himself had toured the massacre zones preaching reconciliation. He was assassinated on 30 January 1948 by a Hindu extremist who considered him too favourable to Muslims. In Indian memory, independence and Partition are the two inseparable faces of a single founding moment.
Against the predictions of those who believed that a country so vast, poor and diverse could never sustain democracy, India adopted a Constitution in 1950 that made it a federal, secular and democratic republic, with universal suffrage from day one and the formal abolition of untouchability. Its chief architect, Bhimrao Ambedkar, was himself a Dalit (the term now preferred by those once called untouchables) and became a symbol of the struggle for equality. Since then India has held elections without interruption, and today it is the world's largest democracy by number of voters, with hundreds of millions of people going to the polls.
The road was not a straight one. After the decades of Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi —who declared a controversial state of emergency between 1975 and 1977 and was assassinated in 1984 by her Sikh bodyguards—, India moved from a closed, planned economy to a liberalising opening from 1991 onwards that sent its growth soaring. Today it is one of the world's largest economies, a powerhouse in information technology and space programmes —in 2023 it became the first country to land a probe near the lunar south pole—, and in 2023 it overtook China as the most populous country on the planet, with some 1.4 billion inhabitants.
This modern India still carries enormous challenges: deep inequality, the persistence of caste despite its legal ban, religious tensions between the Hindu majority and the large Muslim minority, border disputes and pressure on the environment. It is a country where extreme poverty lives alongside a middle class of hundreds of millions, where ancient temples sit next to tech parks, with more than twenty official languages and a thousand dialects. Hard to sum up and impossible to reduce to a single image, India faces the 21st century claiming both its ancient civilisational heritage and its ambition to be a great power.
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Rajasthan literally means 'the land of kings', and for centuries those kings were the Rajputs, the Hindu warrior clans who ruled northwestern India from around the 7th century. Divided into rival dynasties —the Sisodias of Mewar, the Rathores of Marwar, the Kachwahas of Amber-Jaipur, the Bhatis of Jaisalmer and many more—, the Rajputs made war, honour and loyalty the centre of their culture, and claimed a mythical descent linked to the sun, the moon and fire.
Theirs is a history of stubborn resistance against invaders from the north. They faced the sultans of Delhi and then the Mughals with a mix of almost suicidal courage and political pragmatism. From that culture of honour comes the terrible tradition of jauhar and saka: when a Rajput fortress was about to fall, it is said that the women immolated themselves on the pyre to avoid the dishonour of capture, while the men rode out in ritual dress to fight to the death. These episodes, which took place for example during the sieges of Chittorgarh, are heavy with legend and later reworking, and are now read with critical distance, but they shaped the warrior identity of the region.
Over time, most Rajput kingdoms ended up accepting Mughal sovereignty, above all under Akbar, who brought them in through marriage alliances and gave them high posts in his army and administration. It was an ambivalent relationship of submission and collaboration that allowed the Rajputs to keep their thrones and their prestige. Only Mewar held out as a symbol of unyielding resistance.
If any kingdom embodies Rajput pride, it is Mewar, ruled by the Sisodia dynasty, which prided itself on never fully bowing its head to Delhi. Its old capital, the fortress of Chittorgarh, suffered three devastating sieges and as many legendary jauhars; the most famous, by Sultan Alauddin Khalji in 1303, became wrapped in the legend of Queen Padmini. It was precisely to escape Chittor's vulnerability that the kingdom retreated inland.
Mewar's greatest hero is Maharana Pratap, who at the battle of Haldighati in 1576 chose to face Akbar's armies rather than submit. Although he did not win a decisive victory and spent years as a fugitive in the hills, he always refused to recognise Mughal sovereignty, and so Rajput memory enshrined him as an eternal symbol of freedom. While almost every other kingdom made terms with Akbar, Mewar resisted.
In 1559, Maharana Udai Singh II had founded a new, better-protected capital beside an artificial lake at the foot of the Aravalli hills: Udaipur. With its white marble palaces reflected in Lake Pichola —the City Palace, the Lake Palace floating on the water— and its chain of reservoirs, Udaipur earned the nickname 'the Venice of the East' and the title of India's most romantic city. Behind that postcard lies a hard history: that of a kingdom that chose defensive isolation over surrender.
West of Mewar stretches Marwar, the 'land of death' —because of its arid climate—, the kingdom of the Rathore Rajputs. Its historic capital, Jodhpur, was founded in 1459 by Rao Jodha, who moved the court there from old Mandore and built on a rocky outcrop the fortress that dominates the city: Mehrangarh, one of the largest and most imposing in India, with walls that seem to sprout from the rock and carved stone palaces inside.
Jodhpur is famous as the 'blue city': many of the houses in the old town, huddled at the foot of the fortress, are painted an intense indigo blue. Several explanations have been offered —from the colour's association with the Brahmin caste to its supposed cooling and insect-repelling effect—, and none is entirely certain; what is certain is that the sea of blue rooftops beneath the ochre bulk of Mehrangarh is one of the most characteristic images of Rajasthan.
The Rathores of Marwar, like the other Rajputs, ended up serving the Mughals as generals and governors, and their cavalry was famous throughout India. The region even gave its name to a garment: 'jodhpur' riding breeches, tight at the calf, became popular in the West from the equestrian dress of the local nobility. Beneath the desert and the walls beats that old culture of the horse, the sword and warrior honour.
Deep in the Thar Desert, almost on the border with Pakistan, stands Jaisalmer, the 'golden city', named for the honey colour of the sandstone it is built from, which seems to melt into the sand at sunset. It was founded in 1156 by the ruler Rawal Jaisal, of the Bhati clan, on a hill overlooking the caravan routes. Its fortress, Sonar Qila, is one of the few 'living forts' in the world: much of the population still lives inside its walls, among Jain temples, palaces and havelis of stone lace.
Jaisalmer's prosperity came from its position. For centuries it was a key stop on the trade routes linking India with Central Asia, Persia and Arabia: camel caravans laden with spices, silk, opium and other goods passed through here, and the merchants who ran them built the sumptuous havelis —mansions with façades carved like filigree— that still survive. The city thrived as a customs post and resting place in the middle of nowhere.
That splendour faded when maritime trade displaced the old overland routes and, above all, when the Partition of 1947 closed the border with Pakistan, cutting off caravan traffic overnight. Jaisalmer was left like a jewel stranded in the desert. Today it lives again from tourism and camel safaris among the Sam dunes, but it keeps intact that air of a city from another time, the last great stop before the immensity of the Thar.
During the British Raj, much of Rajasthan was not under London's direct administration but organised into a good twenty-odd princely states —Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Bikaner, Jaisalmer and many more— grouped under the name of Rajputana. Their maharajas kept their thrones and considerable internal autonomy in exchange for recognising British supremacy and accepting a colonial resident. It was the golden age of the image of the lavish maharaja, with his palaces, his bejewelled elephants and his tiger hunts.
When independence came in 1947, one of the great challenges for the new Indian state was integrating these hundreds of princely states —scattered across the whole country— into the Union. The task fell mainly to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the 'iron man' of independence, who through a mix of persuasion, pressure and financial guarantees (the so-called 'privy purses', or pensions for the princes) got the vast majority to agree to join. The kingdoms of Rajputana merged step by step between 1948 and 1949 until, in 1956, they formed the present-day state of Rajasthan.
The maharajas lost their political power, and in 1971 Indira Gandhi's government even abolished their official privileges and pensions. Many families turned their fortresses and palaces into luxury hotels, which are now part of the region's appeal. So the old land of warrior kings ended up fully integrated into the democratic republic, although the prestige of the old Rajput houses is still very present in Rajasthan's social and political life.
Amritsar is the spiritual centre of Sikhism, the religion founded in the Punjab at the end of the 15th century by Guru Nanak (1469-1539), who preached strict monotheism, the equality of all human beings —men and women, of any caste— and the rejection of both Hindu ritualism and hierarchies. Nanak was succeeded by nine more gurus; the fourth, Ram Das, founded the city and had the sacred pool dug (amrit sarovar, 'pool of nectar') that gives it its name.
In the middle of that pool, the fifth guru, Arjan, had the Harmandir Sahib built, the 'Golden Temple', and in 1604 placed the Sikh holy book, the Adi Granth, inside it. The temple, with its gold-leaf dome reflected in the water, is the holiest site in Sikhism and one of the most striking religious spaces in the world: open on all four sides as a symbol of welcome to everyone, it feeds tens of thousands of pilgrims for free every day in its langar, the community kitchen. The gold covering that gave it its popular name came from Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who in the early 19th century unified the Punjab under the powerful Sikh Empire.
Sikhism was born as a peaceful faith, but the persecution of several of its gurus by the Mughal emperors led it to take up arms. The tenth and last guru, Gobind Singh, founded the Khalsa, the community of the initiated, in 1699, with its five outward symbols —among them uncut hair and beard and the turban— and established that, after him, the role of guru would be held forever by the holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib. From that small movement in the Punjab arose one of the world's great religions.
Amritsar also holds the memory of two of the most painful episodes in recent Indian history, which are worth telling with precision and restraint. The first is the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, which took place on 13 April 1919. That day, an unarmed crowd —men, women and children— had gathered in an enclosed garden in the city, partly to celebrate the Baisakhi festival and partly to protest against repressive colonial laws. The British general Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to block the only exit and open fire without warning. Official British figures put the dead at 379; Indian sources put the number far higher, close to a thousand. The massacre shocked the country and radicalised the independence movement.
The second episode is much more recent and still painful: Operation Blue Star in June 1984. An armed group demanding an independent Sikh state, Khalistan, led by the preacher Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, had entrenched itself inside the Golden Temple complex. The Indian army, on the orders of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, stormed the sacred compound. The operation ended the occupation, but caused many casualties —soldiers, militants and civilian pilgrims— and damaged the Akal Takht, one of the holiest buildings in Sikhism.
The consequences were tragic. The assault on the temple deeply wounded the Sikh community, and a few months later, in October 1984, two Sikh bodyguards assassinated Indira Gandhi in retaliation. Her death in turn unleashed anti-Sikh massacres in Delhi and other cities that left thousands dead. These events, still recent and sensitive, show how closely religion, politics and identity are intertwined in this region, and why their memory remains alive and contested.
Where the Ganges leaves the Himalayan mountains and enters the plain, at the foot of the hills, lies Rishikesh, an ancient Hindu pilgrimage site that has become the self-proclaimed 'yoga capital of the world'. Its name refers to the rishis, the sages and ascetics who, according to tradition, have meditated on these banks since time immemorial, drawn by the purity of the newborn river and the nearness of the sacred peaks.
Rishikesh is the gateway to the great Himalayan shrines of Hinduism —the Char Dham circuit: Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath— and for centuries it has been home to ashrams, temples and communities of sadhus. Its two suspension bridges over the Ganges, Lakshman Jhula and Ram Jhula, and the aarti ceremonies at sunset, with fire lamps offered to the river, sum up its spiritual atmosphere. It is also a starting point for rafting and trekking in the mountains.
International fame arrived all at once in 1968, when the Beatles spent several weeks at the ashram of the teacher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi practising Transcendental Meditation; there they wrote a large part of the songs on the 'White Album'. That episode, at the height of the hippie era, turned Rishikesh into a magnet for Western spiritual seekers and cemented the image of India as a destination for inner pilgrimage, an image that, for better and for worse, still draws crowds of travellers every year.
In the far north of India, wedged between the Karakoram and Himalayan ranges, lies Ladakh, a region of very high mountains —much of it above 3,000 metres— and desert landscapes that look like another planet. Culturally and geographically, Ladakh belongs more to the Tibetan world than to the Indian one: it is known as 'little Tibet' for its Tibetan Buddhism, its monasteries (gompas) perched on the cliffs, its prayer flags and its population of Tibetan origin and language.
For centuries, Ladakh was an independent kingdom that controlled a key stretch of the caravan routes between India, Tibet and Central Asia: part of the trade in pashmina wool, salt and tea passed through here. Its capital, Leh, with its old nine-storey royal palace inspired by the Potala in Lhasa, was a trading crossroads. In the 19th century the kingdom was conquered and absorbed into the Dogra state of Jammu and Kashmir, which in turn joined independent India in 1947.
That border position makes Ladakh a highly sensitive area geopolitically today. It borders territories disputed with Pakistan to the west and with China to the east: the Aksai Chin plateau, administered by China and claimed by India, and the Line of Actual Control where the two countries fought the 1962 war and where there have been recent clashes. Centuries-old monasteries, turquoise lakes such as Pangong and a living Buddhist culture thus coexist with a heavy military presence, on one of the highest and most tense borders in the world.
This region brings together two different worlds —the fertile plain of the Punjab and the heights of the Himalayas— which nevertheless share the same condition as a frontier. The Punjab, the 'land of the five rivers', was always one of the richest and most contested areas of the subcontinent, the gateway for almost every invader who came from the northwest, from the Aryans and Alexander's Greeks to the Muslim armies. Its generous soil later made it India's breadbasket and the heart of the Green Revolution which, from the 1960s onwards, multiplied the country's agricultural output.
But the border also brought deep wounds. The Partition of 1947 split the Punjab in two, between India and Pakistan, and it was precisely here that the violence reached its most atrocious point: millions of Sikhs and Hindus fled east and millions of Muslims fled west, amid massacres that left hundreds of thousands dead. Amritsar ended up a few kilometres from the new border. Even today, every evening at the Wagah border post, Indian and Pakistani soldiers stage a showy, thunderous flag-lowering ceremony that draws crowds: a ritual that channels, somewhere between patriotism and spectacle, the old rivalry born of that division.
In the mountains, the border is just as present: the conflicts with Pakistan over Kashmir and with China over Ladakh and Aksai Chin keep this whole northern strip under heavy geopolitical tension. So the spiritual north —the north of the Sikh temples, the ashrams of the Ganges and the Buddhist monasteries of the Himalayas— is also the north of hot borders, where faith and geopolitics live side by side every day.
Few cities in the world have been a capital as many times as Delhi. It is said that over the course of history 'seven cities' were raised here —some count more—, built and destroyed by successive dynasties on the strategic plain where the Yamuna river opens the way between the Rajasthan desert and the fertile Ganges basin. Whoever wanted to rule northern India needed to rule Delhi.
From medieval Delhi survives the Qutb Minar, the towering sandstone minaret begun around 1199 by the first sultans, a symbol of Islam's arrival in power. The Mughal period left dazzling monuments: Humayun's Tomb, forerunner of the Taj Mahal, and above all Old Delhi, built by Shah Jahan in the 17th century as his new capital, Shahjahanabad, with the imposing sandstone Red Fort and the Jama Masjid, the largest mosque in India, around which the commercial maze of Chandni Chowk still bustles.
The British added the final layer: in 1911 they moved the capital of the Raj from Calcutta to Delhi and commissioned the architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker to build a new city, New Delhi, with broad avenues, imperial buildings and the viceroy's palace, now the seat of the Presidency. So, within a few kilometres, Delhi sums up the whole arc of power in India: the sultanate, the Mughal empire, British rule and, since 1947, the capital of the world's largest democracy.
For more than a century Agra was the centre of the Mughal empire, the city Akbar made his capital and his successors filled with monuments. Its most famous building is, of course, the Taj Mahal, commissioned by the emperor Shah Jahan between 1630 and 1653 as a mausoleum for his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to their fourteenth child. It is estimated that more than twenty thousand workers and craftsmen laboured on it, and that the white marble was brought from Rajasthan on the backs of elephants.
The Taj Mahal is the pinnacle of Indo-Islamic architecture: its perfect symmetry, bulbous dome, four minarets and semi-precious stones inlaid in the marble turned it into a universal symbol. It changes colour with the daylight and is reflected in the garden's channels, laid out on the model of the Persian paradise. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1983, and today it is the most recognisable image of India in the world.
But Agra is more than the Taj. Agra Fort, another red sandstone marvel built by Akbar, was the imperial residence and also, according to tradition, the gilded prison where Shah Jahan spent his last years, deposed by his son Aurangzeb, gazing at his wife's mausoleum in the distance. A few kilometres away lies Fatehpur Sikri, the splendid capital Akbar built from scratch and abandoned a few years later for lack of water: a perfectly preserved Mughal city, frozen in the 16th century.
Jaipur, capital of the state of Rajasthan, is the youngest of the three points of the Golden Triangle and one of the first planned cities of modern India. It was founded in 1727 by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, a Rajput ruler and vassal of the Mughals who was also passionate about astronomy and mathematics. Tired of the old fortified capital of Amber, up in the hills, he laid out a new city on the plain following a regular grid inspired by Hindu treatises on town planning.
Its nickname, 'the pink city', dates from 1876, when the whole old city was painted a pinkish terracotta to welcome the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII; the colour, associated with hospitality, stuck. At its heart stands the Hawa Mahal, the 'Palace of the Winds', a pink sandstone façade with hundreds of small latticed windows through which the women of the court could watch the street without being seen. And the Jantar Mantar bears witness to Jai Singh II's astronomical genius: an extraordinary open-air observatory with stone instruments on a monumental scale —including the world's largest sundial—, also a World Heritage Site.
On the hills surrounding the city rises Amber Fort, the former capital of the rulers of the House of Kachwaha, with its courtyards, halls of mirrors and walls that climb over the ridges. Jaipur thus distils what makes this region unique: the meeting between the Rajput warrior culture and the refinement of the Mughal court, to which the local princes were at once rivals and allies.
This region is not just any tourist destination: it is the geographic and historical axis from which India was ruled for more than a millennium. The Indo-Gangetic plain, watered by the Yamuna and the Ganges, was always the richest and most populous land on the subcontinent, and whoever controlled it controlled India. That is why Delhi and Agra took turns as capitals of sultans and emperors, and why invading armies from the northwest always set their sights here.
The so-called Golden Triangle —Delhi, Agra and Jaipur— is an invention of modern tourism, but it reflects a historical reality: the three points are bound together by the web of Mughal and Rajput power. Delhi and Agra were the imperial capitals; Jaipur, the court of the Rajput princes who orbited the Mughals, serving them as generals and marrying into their family. Travelling the triangle means following the trail of that ambiguous relationship between Muslim conquerors and Hindu nobility.
During the British Raj, this plain remained the nerve centre of the country, and some of the most dramatic episodes of the 1857 rebellion were fought here. After independence, Delhi went back to being what it had been so many times: the centre of political power in India. No other region of the country packs so many layers of imperial history into so little space.
Northern India was the main stage of the great rebellion of 1857, the uprising that marked a turning point in colonial rule. It all began in May of that year, when the sepoys —the Indian soldiers serving the East India Company— mutinied in Meerut, near Delhi, outraged, among other things, by the rumour that the cartridges for their new rifles were greased with cow and pig fat, offensive to Hindus and Muslims alike.
The mutineers marched on Delhi and proclaimed as emperor the elderly Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal ruler, who by then reigned in name only. The rebellion spread across much of the north —Delhi, Lucknow, Kanpur, Jhansi—, with episodes of enormous violence on both sides and figures who passed into national legend, such as Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, who died fighting the British on horseback. The repression was ruthless: Delhi was retaken and sacked, and Bahadur Shah Zafar was deposed and exiled to Burma, where he died; with him, after three centuries, the Mughal dynasty came to an end.
The consequences were decisive. In 1858 the British government abolished the East India Company and took direct control of the country: the Raj was born. For the British it was 'the Mutiny'; for later Indian nationalism, the 'First War of Independence'. That double name sums up a historiographical debate that is still alive. What is beyond doubt is that in the cities of this region —Delhi first among them— one of the founding chapters of modern India was played out.
Varanasi —also called Benares or, by its ancient name, Kashi, 'the city of light'— is the holiest place in Hinduism and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world: tradition dates it back more than three thousand years, and some sources consider it even older. Dedicated to the god Shiva, for Hindus it is the spiritual centre of the universe, the point where life and death meet.
The city unfolds along the west bank of the Ganges in a succession of ghats, the stone steps that lead down to the water. Every dawn, thousands of pilgrims immerse themselves in the river to purify themselves; every evening the Ganga Aarti ceremony is held, with priests offering fire to the river amid chanting. And at two ghats in particular, such as Manikarnika, funeral pyres burn day and night: dying in Varanasi and being cremated on the banks of the Ganges is considered a release from the cycle of reincarnation (moksha), which is why many Hindus travel here at the end of their lives. Death is lived in broad daylight, without being hidden, as a natural part of the sacred order.
Varanasi was also a great centre of learning and art over the centuries, the cradle of classical music, Sanskrit and philosophy, and a place where Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism crossed paths: very close by, at Sarnath, the Buddha gave his first sermon after his enlightenment. No city concentrates India's religious intensity like Varanasi: chaotic, dense, overwhelming for the visitor, for the believer it is the very heart of the sacred.
No river in the world is as revered as the Ganges. It rises from a Himalayan glacier at Gangotri, flows down past Rishikesh and Haridwar towards the great plain, crosses Varanasi and then joins other great rivers until it empties, through a vast delta shared with Bangladesh, into the Bay of Bengal. For Hindus it is a goddess, Ganga, whose waters cleanse all sin; bathing in it, drinking from it or scattering the ashes of the dead in it are acts of deep devotion.
Beyond religion, the Ganges is the lifeline of northern India. Its basin, the Indo-Gangetic Plain, is one of the most fertile and densely populated regions on the planet: hundreds of millions of people depend on its waters for farming, fishing and daily life. Along its banks flourished the Vedic kingdoms, the Maurya Empire with its capital Pataliputra and much of ancient Indian history. The river is, quite literally, the cradle of the subcontinent's civilisation.
That intense human presence also comes at a cost. The Ganges is today one of the most polluted rivers in the world, loaded with industrial discharge, sewage and waste from the cities it passes through. Successive governments have launched clean-up plans —the most recent being the Namami Gange programme— with mixed results. The paradox of a river that is both sacred and degraded sums up the dilemmas of contemporary India, caught between reverence for its ancient heritage and the pressures of development and overpopulation.
Eastern India, and Bengal in particular, was where British rule over the subcontinent began. Calcutta, founded by the East India Company at the end of the 17th century, became its great trading base and, after the decisive Battle of Plassey in 1757 —when the Company defeated the Nawab of Bengal and took control of India's richest province—, the capital of a power that would gradually spread across the whole country. Calcutta would remain the capital of British India until 1911.
Bengal paid a very high price for that central role. The first great catastrophe came early: the Bengal famine of 1770, worsened by the Company's fiscal greed, killed millions of people, perhaps a third of the region's population. Almost two centuries later, under the Raj and in the middle of the Second World War, the Bengal famine of 1943 claimed between two and three million lives; historians such as Amartya Sen have argued that it was caused less by a shortage of food than by failures of distribution, speculation and the colonial government's wartime priorities, a historiographical debate that remains open.
But Bengal was also a hotbed of resistance and renewal. Much of Indian nationalism and the anti-colonial struggle came from here, and this is where the so-called Bengal Renaissance took place. The Partition of 1947 split the region in two once again, between India and East Pakistan, which in 1971, after a bloody war of independence, would become Bangladesh. The history of eastern India is, to a large extent, the history of the encounter —and the clash— between India and European power.
Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, Bengal went through an extraordinary cultural, intellectual and social flowering known as the Bengal Renaissance. Born from the contact between Indian tradition and the European ideas arriving through Calcutta, this movement produced a generation of reformers, writers, scientists and thinkers who transformed the country's cultural life and laid many of the foundations of modern India.
Its first great name was Ram Mohan Roy, considered the 'father of modern India', who in the early 19th century campaigned against practices such as sati —the burning of widows on their husband's pyre, which the British banned in 1829—, promoted education and founded a reformist religious movement, the Brahmo Samaj. After him came figures such as the mystic Ramakrishna and his disciple Vivekananda, who took Hindu thought to the West.
The high point of the Bengal Renaissance was Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941): poet, novelist, musician and painter, author of the poetry collection 'Gitanjali', in 1913 he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore, who founded the university at Santiniketan and composed the national anthems used today by both India and Bangladesh, embodied like no one else the dialogue between cultures. This intellectual ferment explains why eastern India, beyond the faith of the Ganges, was for generations the country's great cultural and political laboratory.
In the Himalayan foothills, north of Bengal, Darjeeling is the very image of the colonial hill station. When the British took the area in the mid-19th century, they were won over by its cool climate and its views of the snowy peaks —among them Kangchenjunga, the third-highest mountain in the world— and turned it into a retreat where Raj officials escaped the stifling heat of the plains during the summer. Hence its architecture, its churches and its English-style boarding schools.
But what made Darjeeling famous all over the world was tea. From the 1850s, the British planted tea varieties on these slopes that, adapted to the altitude and the mist, produced a leaf with a delicate, highly prized aroma: Darjeeling tea, known as 'the champagne of teas', is still one of the most sought-after on the planet. The plantations carpet the hills and have employed generations of workers, many of Nepali origin.
To reach the station from the plains, the British built a feat of engineering in 1881: the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, a narrow-gauge line —the famous 'toy train'— that climbs the mountain in loops and tight curves, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Behind the postcard, however, lies a complex social reality: the Gorkha-Nepali population of these hills has for decades demanded its own autonomous region, Gorkhaland, in an identity conflict that is still alive and a reminder that here too, in tea paradise, history left behind borders and tensions.
Mumbai —formerly Bombay— is today India's financial capital and one of the largest megacities in the world, but it began as an archipelago of seven swampy islands inhabited by Koli fishing communities. Its modern history begins with the Europeans: the Portuguese controlled it in the 16th century and called it 'Bom Bahia', the 'good bay'. In 1661, the islands passed to the English crown as part of the dowry of the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza on her marriage to King Charles II of England, who in turn leased them to the East India Company.
The Company saw the potential of its magnificent natural harbour and began filling in and joining the islands until they formed a single large city. The real take-off came in the 19th century: the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 shortened the route to Europe, and the American Civil War sent demand soaring for the Indian cotton shipped out through Bombay. The city filled with textile mills, railways and monumental Victorian architecture —Victoria Terminus (now Chhatrapati Shivaji), the Gateway of India— that still defines its skyline.
In the 20th century, Bombay became India's economic engine and the capital of cinema: 'Bollywood', the world's largest film industry by number of films, was born here. Renamed Mumbai in 1995, the city is a magnet that draws millions of people from all over the country in search of opportunity, and it embodies all the contrasts of modern India: skyscrapers next to Dharavi, one of the largest slums in Asia; colossal fortunes alongside extreme poverty; an energy and diversity that make it the most cosmopolitan city in the country.
Goa is the deepest mark Europe left on India. In 1510, the Portuguese governor Afonso de Albuquerque took the city from the Bijapur Sultanate and made it the capital of Portugal's empire in the East, the 'Estado da Índia', which stretched from Africa to Macau. 'Goa Dourada' ('Golden Goa') grew so rich and populous that it was compared to Lisbon. Its port handled the spice trade that had brought the Portuguese to India in the first place.
Unlike other Europeans, the Portuguese did more than trade: they settled the land thoroughly and, above all, they evangelised. Goa became a major centre of Catholicism in Asia, the seat of an archbishopric and a base for Jesuit missionaries, among them St Francis Xavier, whose body is still venerated in the Basilica of Bom Jesus. But Christianisation also had a dark side. The Goa Inquisition, set up in 1560 and active for more than two centuries, harshly persecuted suspect converts and anyone who kept up Hindu practices, in one of the most repressive episodes of the colonial era. That period left behind the great Baroque churches of Old Goa, now a World Heritage Site, and a unique cultural legacy: Portuguese surnames, a mixed cuisine, music and a strong Catholic community.
Goa stayed Portuguese even after Indian independence in 1947, because Lisbon refused to hand it over. Finally, in December 1961, the Indian army took the territory in what was called Operation Vijay, and after 451 years the Portuguese presence in India came to an end. Goa became part of India and is now its smallest state. It's famous for its beaches, but it keeps an Indo-Portuguese identity you won't find anywhere else in the country.
For thousands of years, the narrow strip of Kerala, between the mountains of the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, was one of the most coveted places in the world for one reason: spices, especially black pepper, known as 'black gold'. The ancient Romans already traded with this coast, and their coins have been found in the region. Arabs, Chinese and Jews traded here long before any European arrived. It was in search of these very spices that Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in 1498, opening the era of European expansion in India.
Thousands of years of open maritime trade made Kerala unusually diverse in religion. One of the oldest Jewish communities outside the Middle East settled here, in Cochin, with its own synagogue and its own quarter. Tradition holds that the apostle Thomas himself reached these shores in the 1st century, founding the St Thomas Christians, or Syrian Christians, one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Islam also arrived early, brought peacefully by Arab merchants. The Portuguese, Dutch and British later fought over control of this hugely wealthy coast.
In modern times, Kerala stood out for another reason: in 1957 it democratically elected one of the world's first communist governments, and the left has shaped its politics ever since. The result is the so-called 'Kerala model'. It is the state with the highest literacy rate in India, close to one hundred per cent, as well as high life expectancy and good social indicators, even though it isn't the richest state. Green, literate, diverse and facing the sea, Kerala shows a side of India that is very different from the north.
Kerala's most famous landscape is the backwaters, a network of lagoons, canals and rivers that runs parallel to the coast and links up with the sea and with large inland lakes such as Vembanad. For centuries this web of water was the region's main transport route. Barges carrying rice, coconut and spices travelled along it, linking inland villages with the ports. Today the same traditional barges, the kettuvallam, now converted into houseboats, travel the canals from Alleppey (Alappuzha), taking travellers past palm groves and rice paddies on one of the most peaceful journeys in India.
Further inland, where the Western Ghats rise abruptly, the climate changes completely. In these mountains the British found ideal ground for a new crop, and in the late 19th century they founded the tea plantations of Munnar. Today the plantations cover the slopes in deep green as far as the eye can see. As in Darjeeling, the hill station also offered a cool escape from the heat of the coast. Today Munnar combines plantations, waterfalls and nature reserves such as Eravikulam.
The Western Ghats that run through Kerala are more than scenery. They are one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet, recognised by UNESCO, and a refuge for species found nowhere else. This mountain range is also what stops the monsoon clouds, which explains the lush greenery of the whole coast. Together, the backwaters, plantations and mountain forest make up the natural flip side of the south: a humid, tropical, leafy India, very different from the deserts of the northwest.
In the interior of the south, amid a surreal landscape of granite boulder hills and rice paddies, lie the ruins of Hampi, the former capital of the Vijayanagara Empire. Founded in 1336 by the brothers Harihara and Bukka, this Hindu empire came to rule the whole of southern India. At its height, in the 15th and early 16th centuries, it was one of the most powerful and wealthy states in the world. According to travellers of the time, its capital, Vijayanagara ('the city of victory'), was one of the largest cities on the planet. It had markets that traded in diamonds and horses, monumental temples and a remarkable system of reservoirs and canals.
Vijayanagara was born partly as a stronghold of Hindu resistance against the advancing Muslim sultanates of the Deccan, its constant rivals. Under kings such as Krishnadevaraya in the 16th century, the empire reached its cultural peak. Literature in Telugu and Kannada flourished, along with temple architecture, such as the Virupaksha temple and the Vittala temple with its famous stone chariot, and the arts. Portuguese merchants from Goa traded with this fabulous court.
The end came suddenly. In 1565, an alliance of the Deccan sultanates defeated Vijayanagara at the Battle of Talikota (or Rakshasi-Tangadi). The imperial army was wiped out and its leader, Rama Raya, was executed. The victors entered the capital and spent months looting and burning it, leaving it in the ruins we see today, now a World Heritage Site. The fall of Vijayanagara marked the end of the last great Hindu empire of the south. It also shows another side of Indian history: the Dravidian south, with its own languages, dynasties and conflicts, often left out of the Delhi-centred accounts.
Hardly anything that happened to India happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
