|
|
|
home »
india »
geography |
|
|
Size:
Total land area in India - 2,973,190 square kilometers.
Total area, including territorial seas, claimed is
3,287,590 square kilometers.
Topography of India:
Three main geological regions:
Indo-Gangetic Plain and Himalayas, collectively known as
North India; and Peninsula or South India. Ten
physiological regions: Indo-Gangetic Plain, northern
mountains of the Himalayas, Central Highlands, Deccan or
Peninsular Plateau, East Coast (Coromandel Coast in
south), West Coast (Konkan, Kankara, and Malabar
coasts), Great Indian Desert (known as Thar Desert in
Pakistan) and Rann of Kutch, valley of the Brahmaputra
River in Assam, northeastern hill ranges surrounding
Assam Valley, and islands of Arabian Sea and Bay of
Bengal. |
 |
|
____________________________________________________________________________________________ |
History Of India |
By the twentieth century, most such
tribal (see Glossary) groups, although constituting a
substantial minority within India, lived in restricted
areas under severe pressure from the caste-based
agricultural and trading societies pressing from the
plains. Because this evolution took place over more than
forty centuries and encompassed a wide range of
ecological niches and peoples, the resulting social
pattern is extremely complicated and alters constantly.
India had its share of conquerors who moved in from the
northwest and overran the north or central parts of the
country. These migrations began with the Aryan peoples
of the second millennium B.C. and culminated in the
unification of the entire country for the first time in
the seventeenth century under the Mughals. Mostly these
conquerors were nomadic or seminomadic people who
adopted or expanded the agricultural economy and
contributed new cultural forms or religions, such as
Islam.
The Europeans, primarily the English, arrived in force
in the early seventeenth century and by the eighteenth
century had made a profound impact on India. India was
forced, for the first time, into a subordinate role
within a world system based on industrial production
rather than agriculture. Many of the dynamic craft or
cottage industries that had long attracted foreigners to
India suffered extensively under competition with new
modes of mass production fostered by the British. Modern
institutions, such as universities, and technologies,
such as railroads and mass communication, broke with
Indian intellectual traditions and served British,
rather than Indian, economic interests. A country that
in the eighteenth century was a magnet for trade was, by
the twentieth century, an underdeveloped and
overpopulated land groaning under alien domination. Even
at the end of the twentieth century, with the period of
colonialism well in the past, Indians remain sensitive
to foreign domination and are determined to prevent the
country from coming under such domination again. |
|
|
|
|
