villages are also ancient in origin, beginning in the Indus region as early as 7000 B.C.

Indian cities and urban life appear first in the third millennia B.C. and then again (India s second urbanization) in the sixth to third centuries B.C. The result is a country whose different peoples speak 16 languages along with a host of related dialects; belong to most of the world s major religions, having founded four of them; and live according to so wide a range of cultural and ethnic traditions that scholars have sometimes been tempted to define them village by village. To put this in a different perspective, the modern country of India today is three-quarters as large in landmass as the modern region of Europe (including Russia) but with more than double Europe s population. Yet where modern Europe is made up of 47 different independent countries, India today is a single country, governed centrally by a mixed parliamentary and presidential system and divided internally into 29 regional states (and six union territories). India, like Europe, is held together (culturally speaking) by a shared set of basic religious and cultural assumptions, beliefs, values, and practices. Also like Europe, India is made up of multiple regional and local cultures, religions, languages, and ethnicities. As this brief history will show, the political unification of this vast and diverse South Asian subcontinent has been the goal of Indian rulers from the third century B.C. to the present. Rulers as otherwise diverse as the Buddhist Ashoka, the Mughal Aurangzeb, the British Wellesley, and the first prime minister of modern India, Nehru, have all sought to unite the Indian subcontinent under their various regimes. At the same time, regional rulers and politicians as varied as the ancient kings of Kalinga (Orissa), the Rajputs, the Marathas, the Sikhs, and the political leaders of contemporary Kashmir, the Punjab, and Assam have all struggled equally hard to assert their independence and/or autonomy from central control. The old clich of the interplay of unity and diversity on the subcontinent still has use as a metaphor for understanding the dynamics of power relations throughout Indian history. And if this old metaphor encourages us to read Indian history with a constant awareness of the subcontinent s great size, large population (even in ancient times), and regional, linguistic, and cultural complexity, so