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Was ancient India a united country or a just collection of princely states?
Saying that India is an ancient country is like saying Europe is an ancient country. The British for their administrative reasons united the princely states and created what is Modern India, other than that India was never a united country. So it is the British who actually created a united India. Without British there could never have been a united India, isn’t it?
300 years before British came to India, Columbus left Spain to find a sea route to which place? Was it to a place called India or to some small princely state?
Why did Columbus when he mistook America to be India called its native people ‘Red Indians’?
What Europe is trying to achieve TODAY in the form of establishing European Union was already established in India more than a millennium back under “Chakravarti” rule and the establishment of “Mahajanapadas”. Infact Ashoka’s Mauryan Empire and Vikramaditya’s empire were much much larger than the geography of India today.
Seleucus who came to Mauryan Empire as a Greek ambassador wrote a book called “Indica”.
When we say India, it is not just a mere political landscape. It is a culturally united vast geographical area extending from Himalayas in the North to all the way down till the Indian Ocean in the south. In fact it is the only country after which an entire Ocean is named. The cultural continuity of this land has remained intact ever since the dawn of history ie vedic period.
Its internal political boundaries might have been redrawn time and again, but the cultural nation remains the same.
So to say that India was never India before British came here is a statement ignorant of history. For that matter Britain was never today’s Britain till three centuries back, and the English and Scottish territories will always fighting with each other. Only in 1707 which is almost a 100 years after British came to India did Scotland and England unite! So Britain itself got much of its current geographical dimensions almost a century after Britishers came to India.
Even today a lot of people in Northern Ireland call themselves Irish, and people in Scotland call themselves Scottish!
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LikeDislikethat is all correct gurudev, but we must agree the fact that because of British today we are one united country. The culture, the traditions, the religion etc… are same from Himalaya to Kanyakumari but had British did not ruled us for over century, we would be smaller independent states in this modern world. Who knows my state would be under Muslim rule might be?
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LikeDislikeWho knows? That is the real answer.
Isnt it also possible, if British hadnt ruled us, then probably Gandhi or Bose or Tilak or another Shivaji would have been on a mission to unite all independent small states into a larger India which would have never given rise to Pakistan or Bangladesh, but this entire larger India inclusive of these two countries would have emerged as a single great nation, and we would never had to face this neighborhood menace that we have today.
Remember Britishers ruled us for nearly three centuries, ANYTHING could have happened in those three centuries. Three centuries is a very long time for consolidation to take place. Any other form of consolidation movement could have been started. India was already united many a times in the earlier History. If you study about Mahajanapadas, you will see that the concept of Republics was not a new idea for India. India was already a democratic republic much before the era of Christ!
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajji
These ancient republics also covered almost entire modern India (including current Pakistan and Bangladesh), remember much of southern India were dense forests then – and these ancient republics ruled for a period much much longer than the time passed since our modern independence in 1947.
Even the ancient mega empires ranging from Vikramaditya’s Empire to Mauryan Empire – they all ruled over a geography which was much much larger than what is India today.
So, the answer is, its not that as if Britishers did a favor to India by uniting smaller kingdoms. They merely looted us left and right. The land of riches which it was once before the Britishers came, which was the only source of diamonds to the whole world till recently, the prosperous ancient kingdoms and cities about which all ancient travelers to India wrote – all that prosperity, richness, heritage were all lost after Britishers plundered this land for centuries and left a devastated country divided once they had no more will to rule India after the end of the second world war when they had realized that there was little to loot in India after that.
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LikeDislike@gurudev
i read somewhere that the mauryans were from a different era than those of the greeks. the greeks/alexander invaded india during the time of chandragupta (of the gupta empire), and the mauryas were invaded by yavanas from present day uzbekistan. is this true? or a misinterpretation of history??
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LikeDislikeYes that is true history. History as we read it today in the school textbooks was written under British colonial influence and for most historians today, they blindly follow those colonial era texts as their bible, without even analysing the basic facts.
What those colonial historians did was to write history which fits with the Biblical creation theory dates, and the time period of Buddha becomes too early to fit into this colonialized version of the history. So what they did was replace the time period of Chandragupta of Gupta dynasty with that of Chandragupta Maurya and Buddha and moved Gupta dynasty into AD! And this is the history taught in the schools today! Just a simple astronomical dating of all the events mentioned during the times of Buddha, Chandraupta Maurya, Bindusara and Ashoka – combined with the fact that the Nandas (preceding Mauryans) nor the Mauryan dynasty related texts, nor any texts by Chanakya ever mention “Alexander” – would unravel the real history.
In fact the only authentic texts on ancient Indian history are the Puranas – the very reason for maintaining the Puranas was the continuous documentation of the Indian history. Most modern historians say that Indians never documented history – there is no bigger lie than this – any person who reads the different Puranas understands that they were documentation of different lineages of different times and the kingdoms spread all across the Bharathvarsha. We have texts like Ramayana and Mahabharatha – which document from the very beginning of the vedic period – and there is continuous documentation of all the rulers and the happenings of their times of both the Surya vamsha and Chandra Vamshas and related lineages throughout history from the very ancient times till the times are recent as Mauryan, Magadha, kingdoms etc.
There is one very good research book I had read once on these things, cant remember the name. Will find it out and post the link here.
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LikeDislikeyes. please do post any good site/book on the history, puranas of india.
also why was alexander mentioned in the TV series by chandraprakash dwivedi? that always puzzled me(i have to rewatch the whole series though becasue i thought it was pretty good).
because the yavanas were basically the tribes from present day afghanistan/turkmenistan/uzbekistan. why does alexander come into the picture?
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LikeDislikeNOTE: the TV series was Chanakya by Chandraprakash Dwivedi
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LikeDislikefor having a look at true datelines type ‘aryan invasion page’ on google and jump to http://www.salagram.net
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