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Examples are dance-dramas based on the ancient Indian animal fables, Panchatantra, and Nehru’s mid-century meditation on Indian history, The Discovery of India. Whether or not a dance is classical is determined by the Sangeet Natak Academi, the Indian government’s organisation for performing arts.ab Although more dances could perhaps meet the criteria for classical, the Akademi has chosen eight.ac Indian classical music has Vedic origins, and split in the 13th century into the two main traditions of Hindustani and Carnatic music. A later landmark in Indian mathematics was the development of the series expansions for trigonometric functions (sine, cosine, and arc tangent) by mathematicians of the Kerala school in the 15th century CE. In the 19th century, cheap Kalighat paintings of gods and everyday life, done on paper, were urban folk art from Calcutta, which later saw the Bengal School of Art, reflecting the art colleges founded by the British, the first movement in modern Indian painting.

To the west lies the Thar Desert, the eastern spread of which is checked by the Aravallis. Immediately south of the emerging Himalayas, plate movement created a vast crescent-shaped trough that rapidly filled with river-borne sediment and now constitutes the Indo-Gangetic Plain. The Indian continental crust, however, was obstructed and was sheared horizontally.

Increasing access to electricity and clean cooking with liquefied petroleum gas have been priorities for energy in India. India’s capacity to generate electrical power is 300 gigawatts, of which 42 gigawatts is renewable. The Indian biotech industry grew by 15.1% in 2012–2013, increasing its revenues from ₹204.4 billion (Indian rupees) to ₹235.24 billion (US$3.94 billion at June 2013 exchange rates). At the end of 2011, the Indian IT industry employed 2.8 million professionals, generated revenues close to US$100 billion equalling 7.5% of Indian GDP, and contributed 26% of India’s merchandise exports. The Indian automotive industry, the world’s second-fastest growing, increased domestic sales by 26% during 2009–2010, and exports by 36% during 2008–2009.

India

Standing as the highest waterfall in Mizoram and the 13th highest in India, Vantawng Waterfalls captivates visitors with its magnificence. The Neermahal is one of the only two water palaces in India. The Kachari Ruins are mysterious mushroom-domed pillars built by the Dimasa Kachari Kingdoms before the Ahom invasion in the 13th century. The Cochin International Airport is the first in the world to operate solely on solar energy. Hampi Bazar was a street market that served as a ‘mall’ for the Vijayanagar empire.

There are many different languages and cultures in India. Altogether, 1,625 languages are spoken in India. Hindi and English are official languages of India. In the west is the Arabian Sea, in the south is the Indian Ocean, and in the east is the Bay of Bengal. One of the oldest languages in the world, Tamil, developed in South India more than 3000 years ago.

There are six recognised national parties in the country, including the Indian National Congress (generally, “the Congress”) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP); there and over 50 regional parties. It predominates in the temperate coniferous forest of the Himalayas, the moist deciduous sal forest of eastern India, and the dry deciduous teak forest of central and southern India. Constituted in such fashion, India lies to the north of the equator between 6° 44′ and 35° 30′ north latitudes and 68° 7′ and 97° 25′ east longitude. To the south, the remaining peninsular landmass, the Deccan Plateau, is flanked on the west and east by coastal ranges known as the Western and Eastern Ghats; the plateau contains the country’s oldest rock formations, some over one billion years old. Simultaneously, the vast Tethyan oceanic crust, to its northeast, began to subduct under the Eurasian Plate. Expanding commerce during Mughal rule gave rise to new Indian commercial and political elites along the coasts of southern and eastern India.

The subcontinent was then partitioned along religious lines into two separate countries—India, with a majority of Hindus, and Pakistan, with a majority of Muslims; the eastern portion of Pakistan later split off to form Bangladesh. India’s territory is made up of 28 states and 8 union territories, and its national capital is New Delhi. India shares borders with Pakistan to the northwest; with Nepal, China, and Bhutan to the north; and with Myanmar and Bangladesh to the east.

However, volcanism and climatic changes later caused the extinction of many endemic Indian forms. Moderately dense forest, whose canopy density is between 40% and 70%, occupies 9.39% of India’s land area. India also contains four of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots, or regions that display significant habitat loss in the presence of high endemism.t

By 1200 BCE, an archaic form of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, had diffused into India from the northwest. On a day when the Supreme Court of India sought a progress report on the probe into an Air India plane’s June 2025 crash in Ahmedabad — 260 people were killed — an Italian newspaper came out with new claims citing sources in aviation agencies. The Indian national football team has won the South Asian Football Federation Cup many times. India has the largest movie industry in the world. In the north, many people speak Punjabi, Bengali, Gujarati, and Marathi, Odia, and Maithili. Native speakers of Hindi represented about 41% of the Indian population in the 2001 Indian census.

India is the habitat for 8.6% of all mammals, 13.7% of bird species, 7.9% of reptile species, 6% of amphibian species, 12.2% of fish species, and 6.0% of all flowering plant species. Temperatures in India have risen by 0.7 °C (1.3 °F) between 1901 and 2018. India’s coastline measures 7,517 kilometres (4,700 mi) in length; of this distance, 5,423 kilometres (3,400 mi) belong to peninsular India and 2,094 kilometres (1,300 mi) to the Andaman, Nicobar, and Lakshadweep island chains. Major Himalayan-origin rivers that substantially flow through India include the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, both of which drain into the Bay of Bengal. These parallel chains run from the Arabian Sea coast in Gujarat in the west to the coal-rich Chota Nagpur Plateau in Jharkhand in the east. The remaining Indian Plate survives as peninsular India, the oldest and geologically most stable part of India.

It keeps the most of the subcontinent warmer than most places at same latitudes. The northern part, though, has a cooler climate, called subtropical. In South India, the climate is mainly tropical, which means it can get very hot in summer and cool in winter.

Hindi & English

India has signed neither the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty nor the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, considering both to be flawed and discriminatory. India conducted its first nuclear weapons test in 1974 and carried out additional underground testing in Bet365 1998. China’s nuclear test of 1964 and threats to intervene in support of Pakistan in the 1965 war caused India to produce nuclear weapons. By 1967, however, India was able to fend off Chinese excursions into Sikkim. After cordial relations with China during the greater part of the 1950s, India and China went to war in 1962; India was widely thought to have been decisively defeated.

• India has the largest movie industry in the world.
• The Mughal Empire ushered in two centuries of economic expansion and relative peace, and left a rich architectural legacy.
• During this period Buddhist art spread with Indian religions to Central, East and Southeast Asia, the last also greatly influenced by Hindu art.
• As a market developed among European residents, it was supplied by Company painting by Indian artists with considerable Western influence.

Chess is commonly held to have originated in India as chaturaṅga; There has been a rise in the number of Indian grandmasters. The diversity of Indian food served worldwide has been partially concealed by the dominance of Punjabi cuisine. Rice was partially cooked and layered alternately with sauteed meat, the pot sealed tightly, and slow cooked according to another Persian cooking technique, to produce biryani, a feature of festive dining in many parts of India.

India became the first nation in the world to have launched over a hundred satellites in one mission. That made it the fourth country and first Asian country to do so, successfully. India sent a spacecraft to Mars for the first time in 2014. Several modern religions are linked to India, namely modern Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism. Cave paintings from the Stone Age are found across India. There may be as many as 1,652 different dialects in India.

India accounts for the bulk of the Indian subcontinent, lying atop the Indian tectonic plate, and a part of the Indo-Australian Plate. The rush of technology and the commercialisation of agriculture in the second half of the 19th century was marked by economic setbacks, and many small farmers became dependent on the whims of faraway markets. After the rebellion was suppressed in 1858, the East India Company was disbanded, and the British government began to directly administer India. Fed by diverse resentments and perceptions, including invasive British-style social reforms, harsh land taxes, and summary treatment of some wealthy landowners and princes, the rebellion rocked many regions of northern and central India and shook the foundations of Company rule. By this time, with its economic power severely curtailed by the British parliament and having effectively been made an arm of British administration, the East India Company began more consciously to enter non-economic arenas, including education, social reform, and culture. By the early 18th century, with the lines between commercial and political dominance being increasingly blurred, several European trading companies, including the English East India Company, had established coastal outposts.

The Eighth Schedule of India’s Constitution also recognises 22 languages, including Hindi but not English, which the government is obligated to develop. India’s defining geologic processes began approximately 70 million years ago, when the Indian Plate, then part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, began a north-eastward drift caused by seafloor spreading to its south-west, and later, south and south-east. The relative peace maintained by the empire during much of the 17th century was a factor in India’s economic expansion, resulting in greater patronage of painting, literary forms, textiles, and architecture. Indian merchants, scholars, and sometimes armies were involved in this transmission; Southeast Asians took the initiative as well, with many sojourning in Indian seminaries and translating Buddhist and Hindu texts into their languages. They were imitated all over India and led to both the resurgence of Hinduism and the development of all modern languages of the subcontinent.

After the India–Pakistan war of 1965, Shastri died in January 1966, soon after signing the Tashkent Peace Declaration. After Nehru died in office in May 1964, Lal Bahadur Shastri was unanimously chosen by the Congress to be parliamentary leader, and thus prime minister. The Congress is considered the ideological centre in Indian political culture; the BJP is right-wing. India hosts more than five hundred wildlife sanctuaries and eighteen biosphere reserves, four of which are part of the World Network of Biosphere Reserves; its eighty-nine wetlands are registered under the Ramsar Convention.