India is intriguing to me. When I was 15 I was fortunate enough to take a vacation to England. (Yes, I know England is not India but stay with me folks.) It was the first time I tasted Indian food. (See there's the connection.) It was the night before I flew back home to Texas. We were staying in London with relatives of the family I had stayed with in East Anglia. For a celebratory dinner, we all walked down to a little Indian restaurant. I didn't know what anything was on the menu but settled on Chicken Madras. It was absolutely the yummiest thing I ate while in England. My friend's parents didn't believe I had eaten the spicy dish but I grew up on spicy Mexican food so it was just delicious.
Then in my twenties I remember watching The Peacock Spring on Masterpiece. I don't remember much about the story but I do remember it was visually stunning. It was an adaptation of a story by Rumer Godden. The actors who play the young couple are now well-known: Naveen Andrews (better known for his run on Lost) and Hattie Morahan (who has been Jane in Outnumbered and Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility).
There was also that doctoral student in college. He was doing his PhD work on agriculture in India. He was intriguing and therefore whatever he talked about was also intriguing. But I digress.
India is a very interesting country. It is the second most populous country in the world. It is religiously diverse. Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism all originated there. Zoroastrianism, Islam, Christianity, and even Judaism all have been present in the country. It is linguistically complex with over 21 languages spoken by the population. It has a long and varied history. Its history starts as far back as 3400 BC. The Vedic period in India is contemporaneous with the Mycenaean period in Greece. The 8th century AD witnessed the spread of Islam and set the stage for the development of the Mughal and Rajput Empires in the 10th to 15th centuries. The architecture from this period is still evident today. Beginning in the 1750s the British East India Company began acquiring land in the country. By the mid 1800s the British Crown was forced to take control of the country from the British East India Company. In another hundred years, India would gain independence from Britain.
Want to go more in depth into the history? Here are some places to start:
In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce
The Last Mughal: Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi 1857 by William Dalrymple
Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire by Alex Von Tunzelmann
The East India Company: A History by Brian Gardner
Maybe you prefer to watch your history.
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