there was never any such thing as India ever. Regrettably this has been dinned into us from our school days. Please read Shashi Tharoor's An Era of Darkness.

"This colonial construct needs to be contested strongly. The idea of the nation actually, has deep roots in India. The Indian civilization is the oldest living civilization on the face of this earth. The threads of continuity can be traced back to the seals of the Indus valley civilization that depict a proto Shiva in a Yogic posture of meditation. Surrounded by animals, he can be recognized as the Pashupatinath- the Lord of animals, or the Shiva of today, who is considered the archetypal Yogi. There are the ancient Vedas, thousands of exquisite hymns that were memorized and passed on orally from generation to generation for over a thousand years. It was the most incredible feat of the preservation of collective memories in any culture. The last of the Vedas- the Athrava Veda, clearly speaks of the Rashtra or nation. There are, in addition, the epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata, that still exercise a powerful hold upon the collective imagination of the Indian people. These epics describe and demarcate the geographic and cultural space of the Indian subcontinent. They have a self-designating name for this nation. It was called “Bharat”, a name has come down to us even today. Till this day , this self designating name is used in all important Hindu rituals. Jambu Dweepe- Bharat Khande is an incantation that situates the performer of the Hindu rituals in the world island of Jambu- Dweep and the territory of a nation called Bharat. The problem in the Indian context is, that this civilizational and cultural unity has very rarely been transformed into political unification. In these 5000 years, the entire territory of India was unified only thrice for three episodes that roughly lasted some two centuries each. These were the unifications effected by the South Asian empires of the Mauryas, the Mughals and the British. The present Indian Republic is the successor entity of the British Empire, albeit a portioned successor. There were problems with the long interludes of breakup and disarray that came in between the unifications of the empires. Despite this, the idea of India (Bharat) and the Indic civilization however have been an undeniable historical fact. The Mahabharta talks of warriors from Assam and Nagaland (Gatokkatch is a Naga warior and Bhagadatta is a king of Assam who is the best Elephant warrior in the whole country), as also from Afghanistan ( Gandhara), Mathura, Maghada ,Kuru, Panchala, Kamboj and Vanga desha ( present day Bengal) and many other provinces of present day India. Thus Kautilya, a Brahmin scholar reputedly from South India, was the National Security Advisor of Chandragupta Maurya, the first emperor, who founded the Mauryan Empire from Patliputra in East India. The Adi Shankaracharya best highlighted this cultural unity in the 7th century AD, when he constructed four monasteries in the four remote corners of India( in all four cardinal directions). Interestingly, to highlight the unity of the idea of India , he appointed abbots to these monasteries from diametrically opposite areas / regions of India. Thus an abbot from North India presided over the monastery in South India ( Kanchipuram), and one from the west in the East coast monastery at Puri . Similarly the abbot at the Badrinath Dham in the North is always chosen from South India. The Adi Shankaracharya himself came from the deep South, from the state of Kerela. These were deliberate attempts to highlight the deep cultural unity of the Indic civilization. India has been a cultural melting pot, a land of synthesis. Countless races and tribes have poured from all over Asia into its fertile plains. Whatever their origins, they came to this vast homeland in wave after wave, and settled down here. India became their “Homeland” and it is the concept of this Homeland that makes India a nation, despite its bewildering diversity of languages, races, religions and tribes. The common pool of memories is spatially shared across the cultural and temporal extent of the Indian sub- continent. What defines the Indiic civilization is its wonderful assimilative ability to synthesise diverse strands into a culture of unity that still manages to preserve the diversity. There was however, one significant departure from this homeland tradition. The British Empire was run by a European race that refused to settle down in India permanently and become a part of this Homeland. To overcome the foreignness and exteriority of their rule, they propagated an insidious ideology that sought to destroy the very idea of India. They claimed that India had never been a nation and that its badly divided people were so much at war with one another, that only a Foreign power could be impartial and objective and provide Imperial justice and fair play to its warring populations. For two centuries, the British Empire expended its tremendous energies, in creating and widening major fault-lines in the Indian body politik. They justified foreign rule in India on the premise that India was never a nation but a huge cauldron of disparate races, castes and ethnicities, forever at war with one another. Such a heterogeneous population was incapable of ruling itself. One or two pernicious practices in some sections of society like child marriage, sati, etc and territorial spats between competing fiefdoms were highlighted to justify this theory that only an external power could provide imperial justice to the warring religions, castes and tribes of India. Only external rule could be impartial and objective and hence just. Thus, was propagated, a concept of Imperial Justice as the corner stone of the colonial empire that was inherently extrinsic, extractive and hugely exploitative. Over a period of almost two centuries, the victims of this colonial narrative completely and thoroughly internalized this pernicious discourse of inferiority and divisiveness. India, a prosperous land of prosperous people and plentitude, was now plagued by famines. Its self sufficient political economy was wilfuly destroyed by the colonizers by plunder, efficient extraction of loot and dumping of its industrialized goods. No other nation state in recent history, has ever been subjected to two centuries of such a concerted cultural assault, designed to destroy its self-consciousness of itself as a nation. No other nation state has ever been subject to such a concerted assault upon the very fundamental idea of its being and had the considerable energies of an empire expended primarily to divide and splinter its population along the fault-lines of religion, caste, tribe and language. The colonial administration did everything in its power to divide and fracture the population; encourage competing groups to fight for British patronage, humiliate the natives and instill in them a deep feeling of inferiority about their own heritage and culture. The British attempt was to effectively destroy the very idea of India and make sure that after the great uprising of 1857, its diverse populations would never again unite to threaten the colonial hold of the British Empire. Despite all their efforts to prevent it, however, this is precisely what happened in the end.