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Jul 6, 2023 · Outline Map. Key Facts. Flag. India, located in Southern Asia, covers a total land area of about 3,287,263 sq. km (1,269,219 sq. mi). It is the 7th largest country by area and the 2nd most populated country in the world. To the north, India borders Afghanistan and Pakistan, while China, Nepal, and Bhutan sit to its north and northeast.
Mar 27, 2024 · Administrative map of India. 1200x1325px / 353 Kb Go to Map. Large detailed map of India. 2584x3025px / 3.4 Mb Go to Map. India physical map. 1185x1233px / 499 Kb Go to Map. India political map. 1163x1397px / 879 Kb Go to Map. India tourist map.
India India, the largest country in South Asia, has many of the world's highest mountains, most populated cities, and longest rivers.India's heritage and culture is a rich amalgam of the past and present.
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Indian subcontinent, subregion of Asia, consisting at least of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Afghanistan, Bhutan, Nepal, and other areas may also be included in some uses of the term, which is frequently, but not always, interchangeable with the term South Asia.
The region was called simply “India” in many historical sources, which used the term to refer broadly to the regions surrounding and southeast of the Indus River. Many historians continue to use the term India to refer to the whole of the Indian subcontinent in discussions of history up until the era of the British raj (1858–1947), when “India” came to refer to a distinct political entity that later became a nation-state in its own right. The term “Indian subcontinent” thus provides a distinction between the geographic region once broadly called India and the modern country named India. The Indian subcontinent is among the most densely populated areas on Earth; it is home to some 1.8 billion people.
The Indian subcontinent is geologically bounded by the Himalayas to the north and by the Indian Ocean to the south. It is characterized by a north-south divide between the Indo-Gangetic Plain in the north, which includes the Indus, Ganges (Ganga), and Brahmaputra river systems, and the Deccan plateau in the south, whose major river systems include the Mahanadi, Godavari, Krishna, and Kaveri rivers.
The subcontinent’s geography gives it the world’s most pronounced monsoon climate (see Indian monsoon). The seasonal change in wind direction leads to high atmospheric instability with the onset of the summer monsoon, typically in June, when warm moist air from the Indian Ocean blows in from the southwest. By October the wind direction reverses and brings cooler air from the northeast, but both the intensity and moisture of the winter monsoon are deflected by the Himalayas. The result is a mostly dry season.
The subcontinent enjoys a rich history as one of the earliest and most extensive centres of civilization (see Indus civilization). With the spread of new military technologies in the Central Asian Steppe, the language and culture of Indo-European tribes spread southward in the 2nd millennium bce and began to overtake the earlier customs of the subcontinent. Vedic literature, composed in Sanskrit, was one of the early products of the incoming culture. Its influence persists today in Hinduism, and the northern populations of the subcontinent continue to speak some variety of Indo-European languages, including Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, and Marathi.
The subcontinent first became a political unit under the rule of the Mauryan dynasty (321–185 bce), whose empire, at its peak, stretched from the southern portions of modern Afghanistan to much of Karnataka state. During this period, the extensive cultural exchange throughout the subcontinent allowed it to be inundated with some of the common symbols and ideas that continue to characterize the subcontinent into the modern age.
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That the Mauryan dynasty later disintegrated reflects the difficulty of bridging such a vast and diverse territory, however, and the subcontinent did not again achieve any semblance of unity until the rise of the Guptas in the 4th century ce. Many of the cultural and intellectual achievements of classical South Asian art developed under Gupta patronage, but the empire’s reach remained confined to the northern parts of the subcontinent.
Until the Mauryans, South India remained largely untouched by Indo-European cultures and has remained a bastion of Dravidian peoples into the present day. Tamilakam, the abode of the Tamils, consisted of the Pandya dynasty (in Madurai), the Chera dynasty (on the Malabar Coast), and the Chola dynasty (in Thanjavur and the Kaveri valley). The sangam literature of the early Common Era attests to a strong academic milieu and a flourishing production of culture in southern India.
The region of South Asia, or Southern Asia, includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. South Asia is among the world's most populated regions; 1.8 billion people live in an area of more than 5 million km². The country with the largest population is India, with nearly 1.4 billion people. East Asia.
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India on the Map. India is a country occupying much of the continent of Southern Asia. It covers 2,973,193 square kilometers of land and 314,070 square kilometers of water, making it the 7th largest nation in the world. India shares borders with 6 other countries. It is nicely surrounded by Pakistan to the northwest, Nepal, Bhutan, and China to ...
1 day ago · Further information on the geology of India is found in the article Asia. India is a country that occupies the greater part of South Asia. It is a constitutional republic that represents a highly diverse population consisting of thousands of ethnic groups. It is made up of eight union territories and 28 states, and its capital is New Delhi.
