India Wikipedia

From ancient times until the advent of the modern, the most widely worn traditional dress in India was draped. Dance has been an essential aspect of Indian films from the first talkies of the 1930s. Among 20th-century directions is the modern dance of Uday Shankar in which classical styles were employed but not adhered to rigidly. A devdasi who went on to attain national and international prominence was Thanjavur Balasaraswati.

India has distinctive vegetarian cuisines, each a feature of the geographical and Bet365 cultural histories of its adherents. The foundation of a typical Indian meal is a cereal cooked plainly and complemented with savoury dishes. It is also commonly worn with an Indian blouse, or choli, which serves as the primary upper-body garment, the sari’s end—passing over the shoulder—covering the midriff and obscuring the upper body’s contours. In its modern form, it is combined with an underskirt, or Indian petticoat, and tucked in along the waist band for more secure fastening.

Trump, being Trump, boasted even though India denied any such concrete assurance. The eccentric US President made the remarks on October 15, 2025, as he lavished praise on PM Modi after he claimed that India assured the US on halting oil purchases from Russia. Trump made the bizarre remark jokingly in October last year amid a strain in US-India ties over the trade deal and tariffs linked to Delhi’s Russian oil purchases. It has achieved all-round socio-economic progress since Independence. Traditional sports include kabaddi, kho kho, and gilli-danda, which are played throughout India.

Trump said he doesn’t want to destroy PM’s career. India reacts to old video

Every year, on this day, Indians celebrate Republic Day. India’s constitution was founded on 26 January 1950. On 15 August 1947, India peacefully became free and independent from the British Empire. In the early 1900s, millions of people peacefully started to protest against British rule.

• It is now generally accepted that India’s geographic position, continental outline, and basic geologic structure resulted from a process of plate tectonics—the shifting of enormous, rigid crustal plates over the Earth’s underlying layer of molten material.
• It is the seventh-largest country by area; the most populous country since 2023; and, since its independence in 1947, the world’s most populous democracy.
• This differs with names that outsiders use for the country.
• The rights promised to Indians were granted slowly, but technological changes were introduced, and modern ideas of education and the public life took root.

They are elected directly by the people’s vote. Most members are elected indirectly by the legislatures of state and union territories. The legislature of India is called the Parliament (संसद Sansad). All three parts are in New Delhi, the capital city of India. That means a strong federal government with weak state governments. Its original form said that India would be a “sovereign, democratic republic”.

Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi with Viceroy of India Lord Mountbatten and his wife in 1947 India has the second largest number of internet users in the world, after China. Bharatiya Janata Party leader Narendra Modi was elected for a third term as India’s prime minister in June 2024. As a rising economic powerhouse and nuclear-armed state, India has emerged as an important regional power.

h Republic Day Celebration 26 January, 2026

Newly coherent social groups in northern and western India, such as the Marathas, the Rajputs, and the Sikhs, gained military and governing ambitions during Mughal rule, which, through collaboration or adversity, gave them both recognition and military experience. Embracing a strong Shaivite tradition and building upon the military technology of the sultanate, the empire came to control much of peninsular India, and was to influence South Indian society for long afterwards. Although at first disruptive for the Indian elites, the sultanate largely left its vast non-Muslim subject population to its own laws and customs. After the 10th century, Muslim Central Asian nomadic clans, using swift-horse cavalry and raising vast armies united by ethnicity, repeatedly overran South Asia’s north-western plains,r leading eventually to the establishment of the Islamic Delhi Sultanate in 1206. By the 8th and 9th centuries, the effects were felt in Southeast Asia, as South Indian culture and political systems were exported to lands that became part of modern-day Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Brunei, Cambodia, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

The name Bhārat (भारत; pronounced ˈbʱaːɾət (listenⓘ)) is found in both Indian epic poetry and the Constitution of India. The Old Persian name was used for the eastern province of the Achaemenid Empire. Latin took the name from Hellenistic Greek India (Ἰνδία), from ancient Greek Indos (Ἰνδός) and then from Old Persian Hinduš. The Oxford English Dictionary (third edition ) says that the name “India” comes from the Classical Latin name India.

However, volcanism and climatic changes later caused the extinction of many endemic Indian forms. Moderately dense forest, whose canopy density is between 40% and 70%, occupies 9.39% of India’s land area. India also contains four of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots, or regions that display significant habitat loss in the presence of high endemism.t

Strict health and food safety rules

Because of some of India’s deserts, the entire country gets rain for four months of the year. The Himalayas block cold Central Asian winds from blowing into the Indian subcontinent. There are many mountains in the northern part of India. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a union territory of India, is near Thailand, Indonesia and Myanmar. It is the main part of the Indian subcontinent.