How Modern India Came to Be

India did not always have its present political form

The land now governed by the Republic of India has never been politically unchanged. Across thousands of years, the subcontinent has contained kingdoms, empires, republics, princely states, trading ports, regional powers and territories ruled from beyond the region. Cultural connections across South Asia are ancient, but the borders and institutions of the present Indian state are modern. Understanding that distinction helps prevent the common mistake of projecting today’s political map backward into every earlier period.

Long histories before the Mughals

The Indus or Harappan civilization flourished in parts of the northwestern subcontinent in the third and second millennia BCE. Later centuries saw the development of Vedic traditions, new cities and states, the emergence of Buddhism and Jainism, the Mauryan Empire, the Gupta period and many powerful regional kingdoms. Southern India developed major political and cultural traditions of its own. No single dynasty ruled all of what is now India continuously.

Mughal power and regional power

The Mughal dynasty established a major empire in northern India after Babur’s victory in 1526. Under rulers including Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, Mughal authority expanded across much of the subcontinent, while important regions and kingdoms retained distinct political identities. Mughal political institutions, architecture, language, cuisine, painting and court culture left deep legacies, but the empire was never identical with modern India.

Company rule and the British Raj

From the seventeenth century, European trading companies competed for commercial influence. The English East India Company gradually became a territorial and military power, especially after the mid-eighteenth century. Following the uprising and wars of 1857, rule transferred from the Company to the British Crown in 1858. British India existed alongside hundreds of princely states whose rulers retained varying degrees of authority under British paramountcy.

Independence, Partition and republic

British rule ended in August 1947 with the creation of two independent dominions, India and Pakistan, accompanied by Partition, mass migration and terrible communal violence. India initially remained a dominion within the Commonwealth. Its Constitution was adopted on 26 November 1949 and most provisions came into force on 26 January 1950, when India became a sovereign democratic republic. The modern state is therefore the result of both very old histories and relatively recent political formation.

A documentary reason for telling this story

Everyday Lives uses modern place names because they help viewers locate photographs, but the archive should not imply that present-day borders, states or identities are timeless. Historical articles therefore distinguish the geography visible in a photograph from the changing political worlds that preceded it.