 By the twentieth century, most such tribal (see
Glossary) groups, although constituting a
substantial minority within India, lived in
restricted areas under severe pressure from the
caste-based agricultural and trading societies
pressing from the plains. Because this evolution
took place over more than forty centuries and
encompassed a wide range of ecological niches
and peoples, the resulting social pattern is
extremely complicated and alters constantly.
India had its share of conquerors who moved in
from the northwest and overran the north or
central parts of the country. These migrations
began with the Aryan peoples of the second
millennium B.C. and culminated in the
unification of the entire country for the first
time in the seventeenth century under the
Mughals. Mostly these conquerors were nomadic or
seminomadic people who adopted or expanded the
agricultural economy and contributed new
cultural forms or religions, such as Islam.
The Europeans, primarily the English, arrived in
force in the early seventeenth century and by
the eighteenth century had made a profound
impact on India. India was forced, for the first
time, into a subordinate role within a world
system based on industrial production rather
than agriculture. Many of the dynamic craft or
cottage industries that had long attracted
foreigners to India suffered extensively under
competition with new modes of mass production
fostered by the British. Modern institutions,
such as universities, and technologies, such as
railroads and mass communication, broke with
Indian intellectual traditions and served
British, rather than Indian, economic interests.
A country that in the eighteenth century was a
magnet for trade was, by the twentieth century,
an underdeveloped and overpopulated land
groaning under alien domination. Even at the end
of the twentieth century, with the period of
colonialism well in the past, Indians remain
sensitive to foreign domination and are
determined to prevent the country from coming
under such domination again. |
History Of India
