India: Where All Lines Converge

Traveling for me is like falling in love. When I go to a foreign place, I am often swept away by its charms and fall under a spell of infatuation. That was certainly the case with India. What an enchanting country! It is a place that can overwhelm you with an endless outpouring of fascinating impressions.

India seems essential for those who aspire to be world travelers. It’s the source of many of the primary elements of world culture. It’s mysterious, vast. Its history is deep and impenetrable. India is more than just a country, it’s a world, or many worlds. You can’t expect to take in India in a single trip.

I took an introductory tour of Northern India built around the Golden Triangle of the cities of Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur, with a few other places thrown in, including the incomparable Taj Mahal.

India is a giant mosaic of multitudes of things. It’s physically huge, but also culturally and historically dense. It’s about a third the size of the continental United States. The subcontinent is larger than Western Europe.

India compares in diversity to Europe. During most of its history, land transportation was no faster than a horse, which only the richest could afford. Before railroads, the vast majority of India’s rural population spent their entire lives within a few dozen miles of home.

If two villages were 50 miles apart, few villagers would ever travel from one to the other. So, while they may look close on the map to the modern eye, they have evolved independently for thousands of years and can be quite distinct from one another. If you apply that concept to the entire subcontinent, you can begin to get an idea of the tremendous variety within India.

There is evidence of human life in India going back hundreds of thousands of years. Some Madrasian tools found at Attirampakkam have been dated to 1.5 million years. These timespans sound more like geological ages than periods of human history. But when looking at the overall dimensions of Indian life, this is what we are looking at.

Artifacts of organized civilization have been found as early as 7570 BCE. The ancient land of India has seen many empires come and go. The British Crown ruled India from 1858 to 1947, but although Britain headed the colonial government, India’s culture may have had more of an effect on Britain than the other way around. It’s a tendency that plays out repeatedly in history, such as when Rome conquered Greece,…