India Travel Guide

India is the largest country in the Indian Subcontinent and shares borders with Pakistan to the west, China and Nepal to the north, Bhutan to the north-east, and Bangladesh and Myanmar to the east.

Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Indonesia lie to the south-east in the Indian Ocean. It is the seventh largest country in the world by area and, with over a billion people, is second only to China in population. It's an extremely diverse country, with vast differences in geography, climate, culture, language and ethnicity across its expanse, and prides itself on being the largest democracy on Earth.

Befitting its size and population, India's culture and heritage are a rich amalgam of the past and the present: From the civilizations, fascinating religions, variety of languages and monuments that have been present for thousands of years to the modern technology, economy, and media that arises as it opens... (more)

Befitting its size and population, India's culture and heritage are a rich amalgam of the past and the present: From the civilizations, fascinating religions, variety of languages and monuments that have been present for thousands of years to the modern technology, economy, and media that arises as it opens up to a globalised world, India will never cease to awe and fascinate the visitor.

Indians date their history from the Vedic Period which scholars place in the second and first millennia BCE continuing up to the 6th century BCE, based on literary evidence. This is the period when the Vedas, the oldest and holiest books of Hinduism, were compiled. The earliest archaeological traces are from 7000 BC in Mehrgarh, which grew to be the "Indus Valley Civilization", which, in 3300 BC had well-planned towns and well-laid roads, but gave no evidence of weapons or fortifications. This declined and disintegrated around 1900 BC, possibly due to drought & geological disturbances. There is a major dispute over whether the textual descriptions in Vedic literature match with the archaeological evidence found in the Indus Valley. The majority of the historians claim that they do not match, which means that Vedic people were not the same as the Indus Valley people. The theory is that the Vedic people were later migrants, who encountered a civilization in decline and perhaps hastened that decline. The minority view challenges this Aryan Migration theory, claiming that the Indus Valley people were in fact the ones who compiled the Vedas.

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