http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/India

Albert Einstein "We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made."

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A really long story made short - India, officially known as Republic of India (Hindi: भारतीय गणराज्य, Bhartiya Gaṇrajya), is a South Asian country and the world's largest and most complex democracy. The country's modern English name is derived from its Arabic name "Al-Hind" (الهند), combined with the Latin suffix "-ia", which denotes a place name. It's particularly notable for being the birthplace of Indus, one of the five earliest civilizations in the world which together formed the foundation of human culture, along with Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia, Egypt and China.

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Ancient India

Arguably, the concept of India, i.e. a geographical entity as a whole begins in the 4th century BCE, when most of the subcontinent came under the Maurya Empire, ruled by King Chandragupta Maurya with his adviser, Chanakya. The empire was formed, uniting the many fragments of the subcontinent, presumably as a defense against the Greek/Macedonian invasion led by Alexander the Great. This theory is given credence because Chanakya, the purported architect of Chandragupta's rise to power, viewed the Greek conquest as an attack on Indus culture. Chanakya is today regarded as one of the greatest war strategists of all time, and the tale of his cunning tactics and ploys against the Greeks (both Alexander and his successors) have grown into legend, at least in India where the Arthashastra, attributed to him, is regarded as a proto-Machiavellian work of Realpolitik. Some commentators consider it even more cynical than The Princenote The key reason being that Machiavelli was genuinely a Republican while the author of Arthashastra was advocating for The Empire in a Hobbesian fashion. Greek and Roman histories however hold that Chandragupta's imperial ambitions was spurred by the Succession Crisis in the wake of Alexander's death, and Greek and Indian scholars often interacted with each other during this period. A key facet is the development of Buddhist and Jain sculpture which was inspired by Greek aristans. The recovery of Mauryan era artifacts likewise shows inscriptions in Pali (the ancient Indian script) alongside Greek, suggesting a level of diplomatic contact and exchange between the Mauryans and the Hellenistic Kingdoms. The Mauryan Empire lasted a few more generations, reaching the height of its territorial extent, military power, and cultural achievement under Chandragupta's grandson, Ashoka the Great. Ashoka is perhaps most famous for being (we think) a Buddhist and (possibly) a pacifist (after having done a lot of killing and conquering...), but he made more lasting contributions in the form of the usual good-monarch business (lawgiving, fair dispensation of justice, efficient administration, etc.) Of course, no empire can last long, and the Mauryan Empire soon broke up into what would later be termed the Middle Kingdoms of India; most of the kingdoms co-existed in peace, and trade routes started by Maurya flourished over the next 1,500 years. Ashoka also played a major role in proseltyzing Buddhism and in the course of the eventual rise of Hindu (or rather Vedic) kingdoms, Buddhism would decline in India but spread across China and Japan and generally flourish outside its country of origin. Every now and then, a new empire would rise and run most of the subcontinent for a few generations, but nobody really cared other than the nobles doing the ruling and fighting, as these political distinctions did comparatively little to affect the economic activity on the ground, which is good because during the classical to medieval period, India was considered the wealthiest economy in the world. India was the center of the spice trade and was linked to the Silk Route. Traders from across the world came to India, including the Arab scholars Al-Beruni (who brought Indian mathematics to the Middle East and managed to spread it westwards), Ibn Batuta and of course Marco Polo who came all the way to South India, to Mylapore (present day Chennai) and wrote about the wealth of the Southern Kingdoms. India also held monopoly on the diamond trade until the discovery of diamonds in Brazil in the 1700s, the crown jewels of virtually every European royal family was adorned with diamonds from the mines of India, especially Kollur in Golconda. This is true of the two most famous diamonds in the world, the Hope Diamond and the Koh-I-Noor.

Medieval India

India's wealth did not go unnoticed for long and the northern parts of India were subject to repeated raids from the Arabs and the Mongols. The Arab Sultans started making in-roads into India between 800-1400, starting several small kingdoms often inter-marrying with local rulers and allying with them to carve territory. Some of these rulers were highly notable, including Razia Sultana, the daughter of Alauddin Khilji who became the only female Sultan of India who ruled on her own. There was also Sher Shah Suri, an Afghan warlord who revived the ancient capital of Pataliputra (modern day Bihar) and ruled for five years (between the reigns of Humayun and Akbar) but in that time, extended the Grand Trunk Road, built a Post Office and invented the Rupee, the currency of the Indian subcontinent. Eventually, political unity would come about with the rise of the Mughal Empire, who would at their height grow to unify well over 80% of the subcontinent. Unlike earlier Arab rulers or other foreign rulers before (and after), the Mughals under Akbar started assimilating into Indian culture and traditions. Akbar famously abolished the tax for non-Muslims and promoted Hindus into high positions in the government and started a much admired policy of religious co-existence that would later be cited by nationalists as an inspiration for a plural society that formed part of secular Indian nationalism. This era of the Mughals brought about an architectural and cultural Renaissance comparable to Florence under the Medici, or France under Louis XIV. From this period dates monuments such as Humayun's Tomb, Fatehpur Sikhri, Buland Darwaza and under Akbar's grandson, Shahjahan, the Old Delhi quarter and of course the Taj Mahal, India's most iconic monument. The Mughals also promoted infrastructure, relative order and created a system of vassals and alliances. This was not always peaceful of course because the Mughals, however benign and tolerant they were, were still The Empire. Rebellions sprang against their hegemony and within Punjab, regional rebellion also led to the rise of Sikhism (along with Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, the major religion of the Indian subcontinent) whose Gurus often battled against the Mughal armies. Of course, the Mughals had a tendency to be their own worst enemies what with the Deadly Decadent Court and their fratricidal policy of succession. Much like the Ottomans, princes competed against each other for the right of succession and brothers would often kill their siblings and imprison their fathers when they became old. Jahangir, Shahjahan and Aurangzeb came to power in this manner, and while the first two are still respected, Aurangzeb has a deeply ambivalent reputation across India, since he repudiated his ancestors policy of religious toleration (his brother Dara Shikoh, who he killed, translated the Gita into Persian for instance) and launched a policy of religious persecution and oppression. Under Aurangzeb, the Mughals reached the peak of their military power and territorial expansion. This sparked a strong resistance in the South that would eventually evict the Mughals from large portions of the Deccan Plateau, forming the Maratha Confederacy, a state on the border between The Empire and The Federation internally. The Mughals would also decline in the North under later rulers. Most humiliatingly of all, they would be sacked by the Persian conqueror Nader Shah who came to Delhi and left with the Peacock Throne and the Koh-I-Noor diamond note which would later be recovered by the Sikh Empire before coming into possession of the English, whose Crown Jewels outfit it to this day. Numerous petty wars and kingdoms broke out across the North and the South. All of this occurred to a backdrop of warfare well on par with the Thirty Years' War, which thoroughly wrecked the golden age of before and the emergence of other petty states like Mysore in the vacuum. After well over a century of conflict, both sides still warily eyed each other, looking for the chance to finish the other off.

British Raj

Pre-Independence

India's independence struggle caught global attention after World War I. Several Indian freedom fighters had supported calls for Indian soldiers to enlist in the hopes for Dominion Status and autonomy. Despite the great numbers of Indian soldiers who died for the Crown, the British didn't uphold their side of the bargain. Then after the war, the events of the Jalianwalla Bagh massacre happened, where British General Dyer ordered a contingent to fire on protesters in a crowded area. The resulting violence, brutal crackdown, martial law in Amritsar and grotesque acts of torture earned condemnation across India and the world (even by arch-imperialist Winston Churchill in Parliament). Around this time, a lawyer returning from South Africa, named Mahatma Gandhi (though still called Mohandas Karamchand at the time) was making his voice heard in India. To protest this massacre, he called for the Non-Cooperation Movement, a large scale boycott of Indian goods that electrified public opinion and earned Gandhi worldwide attention. Later events such as the Civil Disobedience movement and the iconic Salt March, and several other agitations exposed the absurdity and arbitrary nature of English rule behind the propaganda of the Empire. Despite his immense importance however, Britain's withdrawal from India was not solely, or mainly, a result of Gandhi's protests, rather a result of a number of diverse factors. This includes: WW2's significant impact on Britain's army and economy, anti-British riots beginning to break out around the country, growing dissent among the Indian Army during WW2 , who were becoming increasing antagonistic towards the Allies (unsurprising, since they were now caught in a situation where they were fighting against an oppressive regime for an oppressive regime — nearly 100,000 Indian soldiers eventually defected over to the INA; the pro-Japanese, anti-British Resistance movement, and some POWs were actually recruited voluntarily by the Japanese; both these forces inevitably went on to fight the Allies in Southeast Asia) plus, having just witnessed the results of a totalitarian government, the world was much less willing to buy the idea of British rule being for "India's own good". Even then, the independence attained in 1947 was as much triumph as it was tragedy. The policies of The Raj, alongside internal party disputes within the Congress, led to a polarization between the two parties of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League. The leader of the Muslim League, and founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah was originally a member of the Congress party. He had once voiced support for Hindu-Muslim unity, and was a committed nationalist. Yet, factional disputes within the Congress, perceived closeness to Hindu religious leaders and fears of a Hindu nationalism rather than a secular one, made him sympathetic to the a two-nation theory , a demand for a separate nation for India's sizable Muslim minority carved out of provinces in the Raj that had sizable Muslim majorities and Hindu-Sikh minorities. This idea of nationalism was inspired by Kemalism, Zionism and Arab nationalism, i.e. it revolved around social identity of Muslims as citizens, rather than building a theocratic state, and Jinnah fully expected a Pakistan that would be democratic and eventually co-exist alongside India. This notion of a separate Muslim nation was opposed by the Congress' leadership who were committed to a secular state and believed that its leadership was representative of all Indians, the majority Hindus and its minorities. It is a fact that despite the purpose of Pakistan as a nation for the Muslim minority, a vast number of Muslims did not wish to live in a separate Muslim nation and identified with Indian nationalism. Indeed, in the 21st Century, India ranks among the top three Muslim populations in the world, with 172 million residing in India and calling it home (greater than the total populations of Russia and Japan). It's only in proportion to the 900+ million Hindu population that Muslims constitute a "minority" in India. Nonetheless, in consequence of a series of factors in the 1940s, Jinnah and the Muslim League won enough support in a 1945 regional electorate that their demands for a separate nation were taken seriously by the English. The Labour government, who came to power in 1945, promised independence and devolution, and the goal was a "dignified exit" and as such Louis Mountbatten agreed to a two-nation division of the former British Raj. There isn't a great deal of consensus for what follows but historians agree that the most contentious issues invole 1) The case of the Princely States, the areas of India governed by nominal Princes who had the right to accede to either India and Pakistan or declare neutrality and idependence. 2) The movement of the date of transfer far earlier than intended. In the case of the former, there were issues of Hindu Kings ruling over regions with Muslim minorities (cf, The Kashmir Question) and vice versa. Whether "neutrality" was the desires of the King over that of their people and if it weren't more democratic to put the issue of national self-determination to a Plebiscite. In the case of the latter, the moving up the date meant that the infrastructure to arrange and police the population exchange had to be erected in haste, and in some cases, not at all. As such people were forced to suddenly leave what they considered their homes, with their belongings and asked to move to an area which they were told was now their country when, in most cases, their true homeland was the world they left behind, whose new residents were... the strangers coming their way to take it. This led to the violence of the Partition, the largest and bloodiest communal violence in South Asia, where more than a million people were killed as Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims clashed in Bengal, Punjab and the Sindh, in addition to leaving millions more displaced. This was the largest population exchange and greatest human migration in history. To say that the parties (India, British, Pakistan) were unprepared and incompetent in handling the crisis is an Understatement. The trauma of these events had a psychological impact on India and Pakistan, and the memories of these events, the loss of land, lives and dignity, and the overall responsibility is an issue of great contention. The former British Raj which governed the whole subcontinent was divided into what is now modern India, Pakistan (a non-contiguous land that included West Pakistan and East Pakistannote Eventually, with Indian military support, East Pakistan, carved out of the Bengal province, became Bangladesh and gained its own independence from Pakistan after a rather bloody revolution.), Portuguese occupied Goa note (which was later conquered and integrated into India—not that most Goans had any problem with it), This led to a rather amusing incident in which the Portugese attempted to invoke the Anglo-Portugese Treaty of 1373 to defend Goa against India; the British basically told them, "You're a puny bunch of quasi-fascist colonialists, India is a powerful and reasonably-friendly and democratic member of The Commonwealth, so...how about no?", Bhutan (which remains independent), and Sikkim (which was an Indian protectorate from independence to 1975, at which point it was admitted as a state). A much-overlooked fact is that because of the structure of the British Raj, India had to fight for considerable swaths of territory. The country at the time was divided into a whopping five hundred plus now-independent Princely States (which Britain had governed and taxed indirectly through traditional Indian monarchs) and, deciding not to expend the vast resources that would be necessary to make a smooth transition, Britain took an attitude of "you guys sort it out among yourselves" and withdrew without establishing the new government.

Post-Independence India

On August 15, 1947, India became an independent nation, which despite its partitions, constituted the 7th largest nation in the world. The Herculean task of gargantuan task of uniting the 560+ princely states fell to Home Minister Vallabhai Patel, his Constitutional Advisor V.P. Menon, and (more controversially) the Britain-appointed Viceroy Louis Mountbatten. While the parts of the subcontinent under direct British rule immediately became part of the Union of India (as it was called before it became a republic in 1950), the Princely States themselves had the option of joining India, Pakistan, or remaining independent. Majority-Muslim states on the border with Pakistan tended to join Pakistan without controversy, while most others chose to join India. However, several princely states refused to follow the obvious patterns, the most notable of which are Kashmir, Junagadh, and Hyderabad, all instances where the ruling elite was a different religion from the majority of the population in the state. Kashmir, where the ruler was Hindu and the people Muslim, is quite possibly one of the biggest political cans of worms in the world today, besides the ArabIsraeli Conflict, Korea, Afghanistan, and The Troubles. The other two major instances involved a Muslim ruler over a majority-Hindu state: Junagadh's Muslim prince decided to join Pakistan despite not bordering it at all, leading India to essentially lay siege to the territory, and eventually the prince bailed out to Pakistan. Hyderabad's Muslim ruler decided he didn't much care to be part of either India or Pakistan, and Hyderabad had to be forcefully integrated . A lot of the problems that nobody cared to fix before independence are still there now, most notably a high rate of illiteracy in the more rural areas, which both the government and private organizations are fighting to change (and have been improving gradually), ethno-religious tensions, the uneven spread of urbanization and since The '90s, massive income inequality, Urban Segregation and the rise of communal violence, and rampant political corruption. On the positive side, sixty years of quick, accelerated development later, India today is the world's largest democracy, maintaining the second largest military in the world , a nuclear superpower, and the only nation that has U.N permission to trade in nuclear fuel without having signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. For a country that has only had six decades of actual modern development, it says a lot about how fast the nation is moving forward, especially when Americans today are concerned that Indians are surpassing them in the IT sector. Poverty is still an issue, with 22% of the nation falling below the poverty line, and the nation containing a large portion of the world's poor. It is trying to deal with these problems, but it remains a slow and steady climb.

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(Note: A lot of the pages below are unfinished, so just go ahead and create/expand them if you think you can.)

The History Of India

Indus Valley Civilization: One of the most ancient civilizations in the world.

The Vedic Age: Indo-Aryan tribes moved into the Indus valley, and then, all of northern India. They brought the Sanskrit language, which is comparable to Latin in Europe in terms of the influence it had on Asia. It also is a distant relative of most European languages such as English, French, Russian etc.

The Mauryan Empire - Macedonian Invasion, The Battle Of Hydaspes, Unity under Mauryan Rule, decline into the Middle Kingdoms

The Middle Kingdoms - Growth of Economy, The Mughal Expansion, Prithviraj Chauhan, Discovery by Vasco Da Gamma, Arrival of the British

Formation of The Raj - Annexation by East India Company, Rule until 1857 The Sepoy Mutiny (India's First War For Independence)

The Raj - The Colonial Rule, Popularization of the "Savage" India through British Media, The JWB Massacre, The World Wars, Bhagath Singh, Mahatma Gandhi

The Largest Democracy - Independence in 1947, the partition into India and Pakistan, important events from 1948 - present

Indian Cities, States, and Union Territories

Indian Culture

Hindu Mythology - The truth about it, not the unresearched crap you see in movies.

Indian Languages - 22 officially recognized languages, 250+ minor languages, 4000+ variations and dialects...

Indian Media Bollywood - The Hindi Film Industry, nicknamed after its U.S counterpart. The Otherwoods - Because not all Indian movies are Bollywood. Filmi Music - Ever wonder why Indian movies have so many songs and musical numbers?

Cricket Rules - Cricket, Cricket, Cricket. What is it?

Type Caste - And just like everywhere else, Indians have their own type of racism. The one particular aspect of the nation's history people want to forget, but can't.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen - India's climate

Misrepresentations of India in International Media

Sim Sim Salabim - What does India looks like? It's full of snake charmers and flying carpets, of course!

Indian Accents - You are to be teaching me very good English, Masterji!

Bollywood Nerd - All Indians are absolute geniuses!

Operator from India - No, wait, all Indians work in Call Centers!

Kali is the Goddess of Death - Apparently, Indians worship death and want to destroy the world.

Indian Food & Cuisine - Contrary to popular belief, it's not all spices and pepper.

South Indian Food - Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and other Southern States

North Indian Food - Punjab, Kashmir, Rajasthan, etc.

Other Cuisines of India - Western, Eastern, Central and Northeastern India

Law Enforcement, Military and Politics

Transport And Communications

Indian Railways - The Railway department of the government holds the Guinness Book distinction of being the world's largest commercial or utility employer.

Indian Roads - Ah, the roadways of India. Or, alternately, your worst nightmare.

The People Of India

Unity in Diversity - Hundreds of religions and languages, how do they coexist?

Indian Accents

Type Caste

It Happens Only In India

The Land of Festivals- India is known as the Land Of Festivals. Read this to find out why.

Indian Culture Shock - A popular trope used in Indian films, which is now spreading to Hollywood.

India in popular culture

Anime and Manga

A good chunk of the earlier parts of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders take place in India, one of the more remembered part is establishing the foreign toilet problem on Jean-Pierre Polnareff while also showcasing how toilets go in India, the one time Polnareff got into a seemingly normal toilet, a pig pops its head out of its hole. And then he was told that toilet like that was rare even for India, the common type of toilets in actual India is actually the one where you crouch instead of sit, and if all else fails, even if not shown in the show... there's still the 'shitting street'/poo in the loo... one of DIO's assassins they encounter there is also quite possibly Indian.

Comics

Eastern Animation

The Return of Hanuman is a 2007 spin-off movie centered around the Hindu god Hanuman.

Roadside Romeo is a 2008 Bollywood animated feature.

Film

Literature

Live-Action TV

Ripping Yarns: The episode "Roger of the Raj" is set in the time of The Raj.

The Office (US) has the episode "Diwali," wherein Kelly invites the gang to a celebration of the Indian holiday.

In SEAL Team season 2, one story arc concerns a massive terrorist attack in the city of Mumbai where Bravo Team is deployed to secure a hotel and rescue an American Foreign Service Officer. The scenario is completely inspired by the 2008 Mumbai siege.

24 (India) is a remake of the American TV show with its story and cast reimagined in India. The lead actor is Anil Kapoor, who guest-starred in the 8th season of the original series.

Music

Video Games

Western Animation

The Indian flag