India has less of a tradition of political unity than
China or Japan. Indeed, most of the names for India (such as "India,"
"Hindustan") are not even Indian.
It is not easy to
find a truly native (ie. Hindu) name for the whole country which is called India, but the
conception certainly existed from an early date. Bharatavarsha is used apparently in the
Puranas with something like this conception. Bharatavarsa meant the "division of the
world" (varsa) of the Bharatas - the heroes of the great Mahabharata epic.
An independent India in 1947 decided to officially become Bharat (the short final
"a" not being pronounced in Hindi). When a unified state has occurred in Indian
history, it has had varying religious, political, and even linguistic bases: eg. Hindu,
Buddhist, Islamic, and foreign. The rule of the sultans of Delhi and the Moghul emperors was at once Islamic
and foreign, since most of them were Turkish or Afghan, and the Moghul dynasty was founded
directly by incursion from Afghanistan.
The supremely foreign unification of India, of course, was
by the British, under whom
India achieved its greatest unity, although lost upon independence to the religious
division between India and Pakistan. The Moghuls and British called India by
its name in their own languages (ie. "Hindustan" and "India"
In addition to these complications, Indian history is also less well known and dated than
that of China or Japan. Classical Indian literature displays little interest in history
proper, which must be reconstructed from monumental inscriptions and foreign references.
The dating of both the Mauryas and the Guptas displays small
uncertainties (the rulers and dates for them are taken from Stanley Wolpert's A New
History of India, Oxford University Press, 1989). The "Saka Era," as the
Indian historical era, significantly starts rather late (AD 79) in relation to the
antiquity of Indian civilisation.
Indeed, like Greece (circa 1200-800 BC) and Britain (circa
AD 400-800), India experienced a "Dark Ages" period, circa 1500-800 BC, in which
literacy was lost and the Harappan
civilisation vanished from history altogether.