| History of India |
By the twentieth century, most such tribal 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. |
