complishment of post-Independence India.
Sources of Heterogeneity. In his review of India's history prior to the British conquest, Braudel said "India is an amalgam of areas, and also of disparate experience, which never quite succeeded in forming a single whole" (237). Modern India's pluralistic society composed of many linguistic, ethnic and religious elements was shaped over more than 4,000 years. India's heterogeneity is largely the result of its climate and geography. Across its vast Indo-Gangetic plain, human habitation has been dependent on the level of the water table. The sustenance of large populations depended on the summer and fall monsoons, the rainfall from which could only be effectively stored and utilized along the alluvial banks of India's great rivers, such as the Indus, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra and their many tributaries. As centers of civilization developed in these and other widely separated areas, further diversity resulted from invasions of nomadic peoples from Central and Western Asia drawn by the wealth the Indian subcontinent created. The first great assimilation was the Indo-Aryan fusion of about 1,500-1,000 B.C. from which sprang eventually both Hinduism and Buddhism and which produced the dominant culture which has prevailed in northern India ever since. There were great Hindu Empires, such as the Guptar Dynasty (320-530 A.D.), but India for most of its history up until the time of the Muslim Conquest and the Moghul Empire (13th-18th century) was politically divided. Despite the efforts of enlightened Moghul rulers such as Akbar the Great (r. 1556-1605) to promote the assimilation of Hindus and Muslims, the Hindu-Muslim divide remains a fundamental fact of Indian history.
The successive western powers which came to India after the 15th century in search of fortune and power, took advantage of India's many divisions. The British ultimately prevailed and through various means including a centu...