Hot answers tagged india
12
Personally, I don't think anything ever went particularly "wrong" with India. They only fell behind the civilizations of Western Europe, not the rest of the world. So the proper question to ask here is what suddenly went right with heretofore backward Europe.
To my mind the answer to this question is clear: The printing press. Nearly overnight Europeans had ...
11
First of all, Hong Kong is now China (from 1997), based off your question, I wasn't sure if you knew.
India and Hong Kong were very different stories. India was most definitely hurt by Great Britain. For example, Great Britain had a total monopoly on Indian salt. That meant that the Indians produced salt, and then, the British took it and sold it back to ...
9
According to Freedom at Midnight by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins (I have a link to Wikipedia but have read the book multiple times), the idea for Pakistan came from a British Raj (wasn't sure whether to write India or Pakistan here) student studying in England who pitched the idea to Mohammed Ali Jinnah at a dinner. Jinnah wasn't receptive to the ...
9
The British East India Company did not set out to conquer and rule India, nor did that situation manifest itself overnight, nor by any single battle or treaty.
The British
built ties with stable commercial interests in India, leaving the freedom to
act opportunistically in Indian politics as the Mughal Empire crumbled
outmaneuvered European rivals in ...
9
Madras was bombarded by a German warship during World War I. That's the only instance I could find in either war of an Indian city coming under that kind of fire from German regular armed forces.
Germany had no aircraft carriers, and their only real long-range bomber in WWII, the Heinkel HE 177, appears to have only been used in the Eastern and Western ...
9
Yes, Bose was welcome in Germany. The Germans could have denied him entry if they wanted to, and so there are no doubts that they were happy to see him in their country. However, Hitler repeatedly refused to issue a declaration supporting India's independence, and this suggests that he personally did not support Bose's cause. It also has to be remembered ...
7
One thing that might be a factor is the culture of each country going in.
During the colonial period the British got a great deal of their military manpower from India. However, it wasn't evenly distributed. In fact, the native colonial Indian military units were heavily Muslim. The result of this is that Muslim Indians grew to view the military very ...
7
There are a good number of reasons why the British were able to do so, and in fact rule over India effectively for over a century.
Disunity among Indian princely states. India was more a collection of warring princely states, at loggerheads with each
other. The British sucessfully used this to play off one state
against another. Add to it there was no ...
7
I strongly suggest you read the celebrated and widely read and revered books on Ancient India by:
Romila Thapar (Marxist in views)
A. L. Basham (Non-partisan)
You can also refer to the bibliography of the Wikipedia page Indian campaign of Alexander the Great.
In earlier times, India ran from the Hindukush mountains(Afghanistan) to the Himalayas, and ...
6
These two separated in 1960. In 1956, under the States Reorganisation act, most states were reorganized along linguistic lines. However, this act actually consolidated Gujarati and Marathi speaking areas together. This led to agitation in both these regions, and they were separated in 1960.
6
There's no real way to definitivately answer this. It would be a good subject for speculative fiction.
I think what can be said is that it almost certianly would not have been one united country covering the whole subcontinent, as it (mostly) is now. I can say this because it was not one when the British arrived. Short of external conqest, it never really ...
6
Cannabis is just one of the candidates for soma, other candidates including fungi, namely Amanita Muscaria which seems to be the best candidate according wikipedia wisdom, and Papaver. A synonym for soma is Amrita, which is a also a synonym for the ellenic Ambrosia. There is an entire book dedicated to the topic.
There is also a free accessible online ...
6
Given that both are thought to date back to the 4th or 5th centuries BCE, and the poetic verse structure strongly implies a long history as an oral tradition before it was committed to writing, this would be very much like asking how true the Iliad is.
The purpose of epic poems is not really to act as a historical document like we think of them today. The ...
5
Of the three answers Jayaraj's answer is the most appropriate. Other answers are purely technical. Those answers are akin to saying the US President is elected by the state electors ignoring the fact that the election by state electors is mostly a formality after the people of the United States have voted.
Jinnah didn't stop with just threatening violence. ...
5
While the size of India and the presence of multi cultural society makes it hard for an armed force to take control of the entire country I think the structure of the Indian army makes it even harder.
India's military is not independent of the democratic structure. The President of the Republic of India is the supreme commander of the armed forces and the ...
5
Well, as a matter of fact yes. It seems a little odd today, but during the period of European supremacy (aka: The colonial era), it was quite common for companies to band together to exploit European military superiority for financial gain when, for whatever reason, the country they were operating in had scruples against doing so itself.
In fact, Wikipedia ...
5
Probably the more appropriate answer is strike actions in general, as also Gandhi did a long hunger strikes himself. Labour strikes date back at least to the strikes of Deir el-Medina:
In about the 25th year the reign of Ramses III (c. 1170 BCE) the
laborers were so exasperated by delays in supplies they threw down
their tools and walked off the job ...
5
Going out on a limb here, and feel free to disagree, but what about the growth of the early Church?
The growth of the Church in early centuries was a form of independence movement, inasmuch as early Christians simply wanted to practice their faith without fear of persecution. Also, the growth of the church (emphasis on the small "c"), meaning the local ...
5
A quick search of Google netted this entry from Wikipedia. The page says that conflict started in 711 CE with Islamic expansion, specifically by the Umayyad Caliphate. While this doesn't qualify as a riot, this marks the start of violent relationships between the two groups. This is reiterated here and here, although the time frames differ slightly from each ...
5
That particular helmet is of 20th century design - 19th century pith helmets were initially modelled on the Pickelhaube. No hellenic connection as far as I can see.
5
No, it wasn't possible to take a plane.
As I mentioned in the (currently accepted) answer to Which city was attacked by Nazi-German war flights in India during WW2? , the Nazis did not possess any plane capable of making a flight from German-controlled territory to India, much less Japan, without stopping for refueling, and they did not have any aircraft ...
5
In 1943, some 3 million indian subjects of the British Raj died due to bengal famine.
I think the most authentic and rich source for examining and finding evidences against Churchill in this incident is Madhusree Mukerjee's book, 'Churchill's Secret War', which reveals a side of Churchill's largely ignored in the West and considerably tarnishes his heroic ...
4
Hmmm, in my point of view,
Our ancestors never taught those technologies in written form.
The people who learned some technology don't want to teach that outside their family.
From British period we just started to read Europe's history as our indian history. For example "Vasco da gama discovered india".
We people started to thought US and Euro only ...
4
First of all, reading history depends strongly on what glasses you put on when you do so. The level of satisfaction regarding the answer to your question will therefore depend very strongly on what you think of when you say "democracy". This is true when you look at a polity in the past as well as the present: in order to compare before with after, you need ...
4
This question raises a lot of passion among Indians and others alike for obvious reasons.
Aryan Invasion theory is not an Indian concept per se. This has been brought in by the so-called Etymologist from Europe.
Many of the latest studies which includes cellular biology and genetics have revealed that there were never separate Aryans and Dravidians. To ...
4
In Indian political thought there were two basic competing organizing theories, rather simply called The Two Nation Theory and the single Indian nation theory (or Greater India).
The basic idea behind the single nation theory is that Muslims and Hindus and many other religous communities as well are all intertwined alongside various languages and religous ...
4
How does Carvaka count as Hinduistic? There are atheist-but-not-rationalist nastik schools of Hinduism which deny gods but accept the Vedas as uncreated, which can be called Hinduistic atheism, but I don't see how Carvaka can be pushed into the Hindu fold.
As for what Indian religions consider valid -- "religions" cannot consider, only people can ...
4
I think this is a valid question. But the answer is a rather resounding no. For one thing, we have no shred of evidence for such a conjecture. For another, this conjecture cannot be squared at all with the fact that Columbus to his dying day insisted on having actually landed in India - had he been dissimulating about his knowledge of the existence of ...
3
Different views are expressed in the world of research on Indus Valley Civilization. Some say it is of the Aryans while others opine that it is of the Dravidians.
On the basis of the four Vedas, the theory that the Indus Valley Civilization is of the Aryans was built up. Hence, the analysation of the Vedas throws much light on this line.
If Indus Valley ...
3
I believe a number of reasons have contributed to this:
Percieved threat from India leading to an over-powerful military organization, with the nascent nationalist perspective of the general public finding an identity and sense of pride in the powerful military their country possessed. In other words, the people of the country thought in the following way: ...
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