A timeline of the Indian Empires

The Empires through the ages.

Link to larger version as Blogspot doesn't let me link the image.

So, over the last few weekends, I went over the various wikipedia articles to figure out the various kingdoms that were , which lead to the mordern day India. Part of this research was instigated due to the fake rehtoric nowadays about how our glorious past has been lost due to the Mughals / British etc.

As I started researching, the timelines kept reaching back. All the way to the time before Christ - the colloquial 0 AD date. We are so much caught up in the hate agendas focusing over the last couple of years that we forget that this land was always very diverse.

Much before the British. Much before the Mughals. Much before the Ashokas and the Akbars. Much before Chandragupta Maurya. Thats when the recorded history starts. Most of this is about the Mahajanapadas - and we owe it to the Buddhist and Jain texts which recorded it for posterity. Before that, most of the history is suspect as it is based on word of mouth. the long lines reaching back to 1500 BC are part of that - we really do not know when those empires started, and so these are best guess dates. More research is needed into them before we can for sure say that these are the actual timelines of these kingdoms.

Before the mahajanapas was the Vedic age. Since there are too many conflicting estimates of that age, I have left it out. Also it does not give any inkling to the various kingdoms that were there.

As you move forwards in time, you see that India was actually very fractured. Mutliple kingdoms existed. Backstabbing each other. Fighting for land. Having various treaties and marriage arrangements.

Fast forward a whole lot of years and you start seeing the first of the Islamic kingdoms - the sultanates. The ones in Green. At the same time, there were healthy and long lived other non-islamic kingdoms. No idea why most of the people forget to mention that, but if you look at the graph, you can see the interleaving of the black and green lines.

Forward a few hundred years more and the red lines - the British start to appear. And yet the black lines do not go away. They exist in different parts of present day India.

Finally, everything merges and we get India ( well, also Pakistan and eventually Bangladesh). The blue blip - that puts into perspective the small amount of time that the Republic of India has existed. Kinda insignificant in the grand scale of things so far.

PS : A lot of time went into preparing this chart. If you do share this - please do with proper attribution.

Link to google drive in case you want to download this https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6LzAV0_xl_2MnIyNUVoV2FTcDQ/view?usp=sharing

Hindustan - how the name came about to be

There is a recent push to rename India as Hindustan. I wonder if people who want India to be renamed as "Hindustan" even know the origins and the extent of it ?

I initially started searching for the roots because anything <>stan does not seem to be indigenous to the Hindu religious wording - its more Islamic. And true to it, the region on the other side of the Indus was called Hindustan by the Persians.

In 4 BC, when Megasthenes visited India, he wrote Indika - his book on India. Its interesting that in 4th BC, the name used was Indika and not Hindustan - which is closer to the term India that the Brits used. It could be that the term Indika was still being used in Europe at the time that they started to trade with this region.

By the 13th century, the region on the other side of the Indus were called Al Hind, and the "stan" started creeping in and was called Hindustan - to denote the region - not a particular country or state. This I would attribute to the standard Arab terminology. We usually put a "pur" or a "halli" or something similar in the local dialect, and the Arabs just gave their own name to it.

The British and other European merchants in the 18th Century then started trying to figure out the name for the religion. There was not one unified religion - everyone had their own ways of worship. This concept of polytheism was alien to these guys, so they clubbed together everything and started denoting the pagan worshipers as Hindus. Essentially, if you were not a follower of monotheist religion ( Christian or Islam ) you by default were a Hindu.

One more interesting thing is the extent of Hindustan. It did not cover the entire Indian peninusla. The extent was till the Vindyas in the mid of current day India - essentially, the lands of the Indo gangetic plains, demarcated by the seas of the mountains on the sides. Made a lot of sense I suppose in the earlier centuries for people traveling, and also percolation of the same customs throughout due to ease of traveling ( apart from the jungles at that time).