India

From the planned cities of the Indus to the world's largest democracy.

India's recorded story stretches back more than four and a half thousand years to the Bronze Age cities of the Indus Valley, making it one of the oldest continuous civilisations on Earth. Across the millennia it gave birth to four world religions, the Sanskrit classics, the decimal numeral system and a succession of empires from the Maurya to the Gupta and the Mughals. After roughly two centuries of British commercial and then Crown rule, India won its independence on 15 August 1947 amid the trauma of Partition, and on 26 January 1950 adopted a constitution that established it as a sovereign democratic republic.