Re: Was India Ever One Country?
"north indian continuum"
Now that does not make it a country.
If its about looks, culture and language then Indians are a lot more different from each other than Pakistanis.
Re: Was India Ever One Country?
exactly. indians are a diverse bunch. most pakistanis fit a subtype of them ethnically and lingusitically. not that it means much, we are different ideologically, and separate nations now and will be so for as far as can be foreseen.
well indo-gangetic plains have almost always been the same bunch of people. so there is no question that most of the arable parts of pakistan were carved out of what is geographically the north indian continuum. there is no natural border between india and pakistan. besides, if i remember right, pakistan was made for muslims of india.
if you want to talk separate nations, the baloch and the pashtuns are iranic people, punjabis and sindhis are indic people. there is a natural geographic isolation between these populations. looks, culture, language - vastly different.
India was a region without doubt, and Pakistan was made for the Muslims of that region.
The issue is whether a unified Indian country ever existed. The nearest was the Mauryan under Ashoka and later the Mughals, but neither of these empires did not include the southern extremities of modern-day India.
Re: Was India Ever One Country?
India never was one country. There was no sense of nationality among the people of subcontinent before Europeans arrived here. This is why Europeans used people from one region to attack other regions. Because each state considered itself a nation in its own right.
Even today, Bharatis are clearly, even mentally, divided in AT LEAST two regions, north and south.
It's not called "sub CONTINENT" for no reason!
Now Bharatis would never agree to it. No need to explain why.
Re: Was India Ever One Country?
lol khoji, forget country.. take any village and you'll still see a divide if you are there to find one. the nehruvian socialist era, even though it almost killed innovation, dispersed the indian middle class all over the country in government jobs and govt educational institutions. and now more than a decade after economic deregulation, the young techie crowd is doing the same. its amazing how much india has shrunk in the last 10 years with all the el cheapo airlines. prejudices and divides are there, but fading, and definitely not significant enough to affect the national identity of the growning middle-class of indians. the other classes are insignificant as far as nation-building goes in indian-style democracy.
No my dear its was the Pakistani areas that decided to form a confederation.
Wrong .There were no Pakistani areas before partition.Pakistan was created based on Religion.
Except for few brief periods of history when powerful rulers occupied the whole of indian subcontinent, it was never one country. Rather had several small states throughout the history. People living in India too are not a homegenous group. They have different languages, different cultures, different religions, differen races.
History is taught in different ways in different countries.
India as a nation state came into existence on 15th August 1947, so is only 62 years old. The Mughal Empire was not India, and never refered itself as such. After its collapse, India was split into several small states, and the Maratha Empire. The Marathas never called their kingdom India, and still have difficulty calling themselves Indians.
Having said that there is loose cultural unity between various groups, linguitic similarities and a common religion, Hinduism followed by two-thirds of the regions population.
The region that became Pakistan can roughly divided by the Indus, the trans Indus regions, NWFP and Baluchistan were never part of this Indic cultural region. The population was never Hindu, and cultutary closer to Central Asia.
But Punjab, Sindh, Mirpur-Poonch, Gilgit-Baltistan and Hazara did and do share many cultural characteristics with North India.
But to say Pakistan seceeded from India is historically incorrect, what happened was the partition of the British Indian Empire into two dominions.
My ancestors were Hindu, and I have no problem with that, but I doubt whether they have considered themselves belonging to an Indian nation.
Re: Was India Ever One Country?
I think our friend Babloos has some interesting views that could refresh the debate in this thread :)
Re: Was India Ever One Country?
If you look at the current map of India, there was no country with the same geographic boundaries before 1947. However, the Mauryan empire stretched right upto Afghanistan but did not include the southern portion of India. Similarly, Mughal empire also did not include some parts.
India under British Raj at the turn of the 20th century was pretty similar to current India with some more parts (Pakistan, Burma, Nepal) thrown in.