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Indians — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Notable quotes

“In India I found a race of mortals living upon the Earth, but not adhering to it. Inhabiting cities, but not being fixed to them, possessing everything but possessed by nothing.”
— Apollonius of Tyana, quoted in The Transition to a Global Society (1991) by Kishor Gandhi, p. 17, and in The Age of Elephants (2006) by Peter Moss, p. v
“This also is remarkable in India, that all Indians are free, and no Indian at all is a slave. In this the Indians agree with the Lacedaemonians. Yet the Lacedaemonians have Helots for slaves, who perform the duties of slaves; but the Indians have no slaves at all, much less is any Indian a slave.”
— Arrian, Anabasis Alexandri, Book VII : Indica, as translated by Edgar Iliff Robson (1929), p. 335
“No Indian ever went outside his own country on a warlike expedition, so righteous were they.”
— Arrian, Anabasis Alexandri, Book VII : Indica, as translated by Edgar Iliff Robson (1929), p. 18
“[The Hindus are] a people, who from the earliest times have been an ornament to the creation – if so much can with propriety be said of any known people upon earth.”
— John Zephaniah Holwel . quoted from Jain, M. (editor) (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts. New Delhi: Ocean Books.
“India is like a bride which has got two beautiful and lustrous eyes—Hindus and Mussulmans. If they quarrel against each other that beautiful bride will become ugly and if one destroys the other, she will lose one eye.”
— Syed Ahmed Khan, in a speech at Patna on January 1883, Writings and Speeches of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Nachiketa Publications (1972), p. 160.
“I don't like the Indians. [...] Let the Indians squeal. Let the liberals squeal. I want a public relations program developed to piss on the Indians. I want to piss on them for their responsibility. I want the Indians blamed for this, you know what I mean? We can’t let these goddamn, sanctimonious Indians get away with this. They’ve pissed on us on Vietnam for 5 years, Henry.”
— Richard Nixon to H. Kissinger during Bangladesh Liberation War, quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.

Ancient era

The history of India includes the prehistoric settlements and societies in the Indian subcontinent; the blending of the Indus Valley Civilisation and Indo-Aryan culture into the Vedic period; the development of Hinduism as a synthesis of various Indian cultures and traditions; the rise of sixteen oligarchic republics known as Mahajanapadas; the rise of the Śramaṇa movement; the birth of Jainism and Buddhism in the 6th century BCE, and the onset of a succession of powerful dynasties and empires for more than two millennia throughout various geographic areas of the subcontinent, including the growth of Muslim dynasties during the medieval period intertwined with Hindu powers; the advent of European traders resulting in the establishment of British India; and the subsequent independence movement that led to the Partition of India and the creation of the Republic of India.

The Indian people established during the ancient and medieval periods to the early eighteenth century some of the greatest empires and dynasties in South Asian history like the Maurya Empire, Satavahana dynasty, Gupta Empire, Rashtrakuta dynasty, Chalukya Empire, Chola Empire, Karkota Empire, Pala Empire, Vijayanagara Empire, Delhi Sultanate, Mughal Empire, Maratha Confederacy, and the Sikh Empire. The first great empire of the Indian people was the Maurya Empire having Patliputra (near present-day Patna, Bihar) as its capital. The Empire conquered major parts of South Asia in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC during the reign of Chandragupta Maurya and Ashoka alongside their senior advisor, Acharya Chanakya, the world's pioneer of the fields of political science and economics. The next great ancient empire of the Indian people was the Gupta Empire. This period, witnessing a Hindu religious and intellectual resurgence, is known as the classical or "Golden Age of India". During this period, aspects of Indian civilisation, administration, culture, and Hinduism and Buddhism spread to much of Asia, while the Chola Empire in the south had flourishing maritime trade links with the Roman Empire during this period. The ancient Indian mathematicians Aryabhata, Bhāskara I and Brahmagupta invented the concept of zero and the Hindu–Arabic numeral system during this period. During this period Indian cultural influence spread over many parts of Southeast Asia which led to the establishment of Indianised kingdoms in Southeast Asia.

Religion

India is the birthplace of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, collectively known as Indian religions. Indian religions, also known as Dharmic religions, are a major form of world religions along with Abrahamic ones. Today, Hinduism and Buddhism are the world's third and fourth-largest religions respectively, with over 1 billion followers altogether, and possibly as many as 1.5 or 1.6 billion followers. Throughout India's history, religion has been an important part of the country's culture. Religious diversity and religious tolerance are both established in the country by the law and by custom; the Constitution of India has declared the right to freedom of religion to be a fundamental right.

Atheism and agnosticism have a long history in India and flourished within Śramaṇa movement. The Cārvāka school originated in India around the 6th century BCE and is one of the earliest form of materialistic and atheistic movement in ancient India. Sramana, Buddhism, Jainism, Ājīvika and some schools of Hinduism like Samkhya consider atheism to be valid and reject the concept of creator deity, ritualism and supernaturalism. India has produced some notable atheist politicians and social reformers.

Although approximately 80% of the citizens of India are Hindus, the country has a substantial population of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and adherents of tribal faiths. Zoroastrianism and Judaism each has several thousands of Indian adherents, and also have an ancient history in India. India has the largest population of people adhering to Zoroastrianism and Baháʼí Faith in the world, even though these two religions are not native to India. Many other world religions also have a relationship with Indian spirituality, such as the Baháʼí Faith which recognises Buddha and Krishna as manifestations of the God Almighty. Despite the strong role of religion in Indian life, atheism and agnostics also have visible influence along with a self-ascribed tolerance to other people. According to the 2012 WIN-Gallup Global Index of Religion and Atheism report, 81% of Indians were religious, 13% were not religious, 3% were convinced atheists, and 3% were unsure or did not respond.

Traditionally, Indian society is grouped according to their caste. It is a system in which social stratification within various social sections defined by thousands of endogamous hereditary groups are often termed jāti or castes. Within a jāti, there exists exogamous groups known as gotras, the lineage or clan of an individuals. Caste barriers have mostly broken down in cities but still exists in some form in rural areas.

Most Indian states are majority Hindu. However, Jammu and Kashmir and Lakshadweep are majority Muslim; Nagaland, Mizoram, and Meghalaya are majority Christian, Punjab is majority Sikh, and Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh are majority non-Hindu but do not have a single religious majority group. In most non-Hindu majority Indian states and union territories, Hindus constitute a large minority. Although participants in the Indian census may choose to not declare their religion, there is no mechanism for a person to indicate that he/she does not adhere to any religion. Due to this limitation in the Indian census process, the data for persons not affiliated with any religion may not be accurate. India contains the majority of the world's Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Zoroastrians and Baháʼí. Christianity is widespread in northeast India, parts of southern India, particularly in Kerala and among various populations of Central India. Muslims are the largest religious minority. India is also home to the third-largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia and Pakistan.

Caribbean

After slavery was abolished in the European colonies, Indians were hired under the Indian indenture system to become indentured laborers to fill the need for cheap labor and for their skills in agriculture. In the English-speaking Caribbean and Suriname, Indians primarily came from the Hindi Belt, especially the Awadh region in central and eastern Uttar Pradesh and the Bhojpur region of eastern Uttar Pradesh, western Bihar, and northwestern Jharkhand, along with a significant minority who came from South India, and a smaller minority who came from other parts of India. They arrived from the late 1830s to the early 1920s as indentured laborers to work primarily on sugarcane estates, as well as on cocoa, rice, banana, coconut, and coffee estates after indentureship. After the first wave of migration of indentured laborers, more Indians from Gujarat, Sindh, Kutch, Punjab, Bengal, and South India came to the Caribbean for business and professional occupations from the 1930s till present-day. There are more than a million Indo-Caribbean people. In Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Suriname they are the largest ethnic groups. The Indians from the Bhojpuri and Awadhi-speaking areas of the Hindi Belt made up the majority of Indians in the Anglo-Caribbean and Suriname. Hence, their dialect of Hindustani, known as Caribbean Hindustani collectively, is based mostly on Bhojpuri and Awadhi, and it became the lingua franca of the early Indians. Also, since they formed the largest group of Indians, the traditions and culture from the Bhojpur and Awadh regions became the dominant culture for the Indians in those countries. France sent southern Indians to its colonies in the Caribbean as indentured laborers, hence there are also many residents of Indian descent in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guiana, mostly of southern Indian descent. Many Indo-Caribbean people have migrated to the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, and France, and few of them have even seasonally migrated to the neighboring Latin American and other Caribbean countries as migrant workers. A majority of Indo-Caribbean are Hindus, while there is significant minority of Christians and Muslims, along with smaller numbers of recently arrived Indian Jains, Sikhs, Buddhist, and Baháʼís. Indo-Caribbean people are known as the descendants of the jahajis or girmityas.