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I don't think British India can be described as a Golden Age, when it was arguably the biggest transfer of wealth in history. When the British started colonizing India, its share of the World GDP was approximately between 1/5 and 1/4. So it was a major player. When they left, GDP share was a mere 4/100. Under British rule, India experienced massive de-industrialization. For example, the UK disassembled most of the handloom industry.

> I don't think British India can be described as a Golden Age, when it was arguably the biggest transfer of wealth in history.

It _was_ the Golden Age ... for the Brits! :-D

By golden age I only focus on top of the line Science, Art, Architecture etc which is a what a lot of people intuitively focus on since that is what we remember a period by. What rule was best for the common population is unclear.

It might have been the Mauryas but we don’t have enough details of how the common man lived in the Mauryan empire. The arthashastra seems like our best source. Both the Mughals and the British had their share of evils against the common population but my sense is that if you were Hindu you were better off in the British empire than the Mughal Empire except for the rare tolerant Mughal ruler (eg ; Akbar).

> if you were Hindu you were better off in the British empire than the Mughal Empire except for the rare tolerant Mughal ruler

Unless you were Bengali Hindu, I guess?

An undeniable difference between the British Raj and the Mughals is, the British were colonizers; the country as a whole suffered due to imperialism. One other user points out in this thread about the upending of socio-economic fabric under the Raj. Not really a "Golden Age" by any measure.

The Mauryans and Mughals settled and did not rule with the goal of extracting / plundering. The British EIC did the latter. Arts and culture can prosper sustainably only when basic needs are well met, otherwise it is only the privileged that can dream of arts.

You forgot the Gupta Empire from mid 3rd century CE to mid 6th century CE. Aryabhatta - the famous mathematician was a product of this age.

The empire unfortunately promulgated the extensive spread of Buddhism, became pacifist and passive and was easily invaded and looted by invaders from Central Asia. The late Gupta empire's army was a joke - only existed on paper.

The fall of Indian civilization from the 7th century on-wards is very painful to read. No military of any note - Islamic invaders would regularly invade and loot and burn great temples and libraries every few years with little to no trouble. Foundational records and knowledge of ancient India was utterly annihilated. So much critical informational on Aryuveda, astronomy, mathematics and the physical sciences was lost forever. Some libraries were so huge, they burned for days.

Islam was at the height of its military era at the time and easily destroyed and annexed other passive cultures. Lots of journals of invaders from that time that documented their utter contempt for peoples who couldn't defend themselves.

The West had learned this lesson early and well from the Roman era: Si vis pacem, para bellum.

> CV Raman won the Nobel prize in science, Tagore won the Nobel prize in literature, Ramanujan etc, the names are numerous.

So golden age of India was when the country with a seventh of the world's population won 2 nobel prizes over 5 decades ?

> The British rule also was the largest and most stable unification of India till the modern times. After 1850s there were almost no pockets of military resistance against the British rule.

Mughal and Gupta empires lasted over 3 centuries, Mauryan empire a little under 1.5 centuries. By comparison, east india company rule lasted a century and the British crown's rule less than that. So again completely incorrect.

> The third golden age which no one wants to admit (left or right) is the British Golden age.

There's your hint: if people on both sides of the aisle don't "want to admit" something, maybe it doesn't make sense. Not to mention a slap in the face of billions of Indians.

> The British age declined with WW1 and WW2, and ended with Indian independence.

Thank god for that decline, otherwise Indian taxpayers would have been funding Brexit and the crumbling British economy right now.

> My oversimplified summary has been

This is not a summary, it's a lazy opinion backed by little research.

>Mauryan empire a little under 1.5 centuries. By comparison, east india company rule lasted a century and the British crown's rule less than that This is a very dishonest way to obscure the actual facts.

Direct rule from Britain lasted for almost 90 years: 1858 to 1947. Even by your numbers then, that's 190 years: longer than the Mauryan empire's whole lifespan, and much closer to that of the Mughals. From there the question remains whether it's the longest "unification", and this mostly comes down to exactly when each of the aforementioned empires could be considered to have "unified" India.

By any definition the Mughals united the subcontinent by 1707AD at the latest: but by 1751, less than fifty years on, their effective domain had declined to a few pockets in Rajputana and Bengal.

The Guptan Empire on the other hand, while certainly a key predecessor to later Indian states and a major unifying force in the northern half of the subcontinent, never conquered the southern half -- what is today Karnakata, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu never entered their control. The closest they got was ~420AD after the south-eastern conquests of Chandragupta II, but again within fifty years they again lost control of today's Orissa, and even lost large swathes of north+western India to invasions from the steppe.

You call GP's post "a lazy opinion backed by little research", but when you dig into the facts I can't see how you could argue that his claim is incorrect. The British Raj alone seems to qualify as the longest-lasting unification of India before the modern Indian state, and if you include any part of the EIC's rule then it's indisputably so.

Mughals did not unite the subcontinent at any time. Even at its peak, Kerala, parts of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka was out of its influence. Parts of Kerala became British territories after 1804.

https://frontline.thehindu.com/arts-and-culture/literature/i...

The man was a card-carrying Marxist member of CPI with his own agenda and hence all of his "scholarship" is highly suspect.

https://koenraadelst.blogspot.com/2014/08/an-eminent-histori... - Read the conclusion first and then follow the tear down from the beginning of the article.

https://hindupost.in/history/how-leftist-historian-d-n-jha-d...

“In fact, Buddhism, which had flourished in Bharat for 1600 years, suddenly vanished almost completely as soon as Muslims became masters of Delhi and started raiding the plains of Ganga.” Citation needed?

Buddhism was the tranquilizing death of India. You can argue that Islamic invaders would have conquered India anyways - but with Buddhism they rarely even had to fight!

Their puzzlement is even captured in several journals where they could range for hundreds of miles and loot/burn with little to no resistance. And do it once again a few years later!

There is a stronger argument to be made that it was because of the establishment of Buddhism as the de-facto state philosophy/religion/practice in North/Northwest part of India that the Islamic invaders could conquer India. Buddhism for all its intellectual/ethical/moral strengths was not a pragmatic religion. It ignored the realities of Life in favour of higher ideals in a context ill-suited to its survival and hence paid the price at the hands of barbaric muslim invaders. This happened through the elevation of Ahimsa into an all-encompassing tenet of state policy which severely sapped the Martial Spirit of the population and thus could offer no resistance to invaders bent on genocide. Prior to Buddhism (and Jainism) while Ahimsa was considered one of the central pillars of Hinduism its limitations in the practical world were acknowledged and Kings were expected to protect by force if necessary, those practicing Ahimsa as a way of life. With this gone, North/Northwest India was easy prey to barbaric muslim invaders who did not play by the same rules.

In Sindh Buddhist regions yielded peacefully to Muslims as opposed to Hindus/Raja Dahir

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41537302

Plenty of citations/articles/books/links here;

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_Buddhism_in_the_Ind... - From 986 CE, the Turks started raiding northwest India from Afghanistan, plundering western India early in the eleventh century. Forced conversions to Islam were made, and Buddhist images smashed, due to the Islamic dislike of idolatry. Indeed in India, the Islamic term for an 'idol' became 'budd'. — Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism ... According to William Johnston, hundreds of Buddhist monasteries and shrines were destroyed, Buddhist texts were burnt by the armies, monks and nuns killed during the 12th and 13th centuries in the Gangetic plains region. The Islamic invasions plundered wealth and destroyed Buddhist images ... The decline of Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent coincides with the spread of Islam in that part of the world, especially due to the Islamic invasions that occurred in the late 12th century. See sections "Turkic Invasions" and "Decline under Islamic Rule".

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Buddhists - See sections "Persecution by Muslim Empires" and "Persecution by Muslims".

3) And for good measure also read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Hindus

Have you read any books at all by Indians who lived through the British empire. Maybe start with “My Experiments with Truth” by Gandhi. The caricature that some modern Indians have made of the British empire would make even Gandhi turn in his grave.

But if you want to read something really heretic, maybe try reading An autobiography of an unknown Indian by Niraj Choudhary. Choudhary was a British raj supporter, as in an Indian who opposed Indian independence. Does that shock you? There were actually quite a lot of them, more than you’d expect.

Then if you want to get really metal, read in his own words, by Subedar Sitaram Pande. Sitaram Pande, was a soldier for the bengal army, for the British empire from 1812 to 1860, it’s one of the rare first author accounts we get of an Indian in that era. It will give you a glimpse of how an Indian at that time thought generally (hint: it was far more dominated by caste than you’d expect), how he viewed the empire and his relation to it. At that point I would say you are ready to try to understand Indian history that is not an avengers movie plot.

I would follow it with CK Majumdars history of modern India, one of the best historians so committed to the truth that Nehru had to throw him out of the government and try to prevent him from writing his book. Don’t worry, he’s not an heretic, he was an Indian freedom fighter, but you will find that he was far more honest about his life under Britain, under Indian national Congress and the state of the country in different periods of time (he also has a 12 volume set covering India for over 2000 years that I never had a chance to complete).

Sitaram Pande's book - https://archive.org/details/fromsepoytosubed0000sita

Choudhary's Autobiography of an unknown Indian

https://archive.org/details/autobiographyofu0000nira

As an Indian, it is extremely naive and childish to dismiss any consideration of the British rule as a "slap in the face". The British introduced electricity, railways, capitalism and a thousand other things we take for granted behind those saffron-tinted glasses.

Hell, the British Raj was what unified India into a single national identity. It was more fractured than the European continent otherwise.

> The British introduced electricity, railways, capitalism and a thousand other things we take for granted behind those saffron-tinted glasses.

Some people love being a slave, but that is not a requirement for having electricity, railways or capitalism. Just look at any other country.

> naive, childish, saffron-tinted glasses.

A brain with less self-righteousness has more space for common sense and logic.

Good summary, even if I disagree with the 3rd piece being called a golden age. But my question is why ignore the cholas, pallavas and pandyas? Only because they didn’t capture the whole subcontinent? Our schools history books were Delhi centric but we don’t have to be going forward. Those 3 empires had a lot of arts and culture too - and in terms of impact, they spread to parts of SE Asia too.

That's the specialty of a centralized state. There is a heavy push towards homogenizing Indian culture often at the cost of regional subcultures since almost 1947.

> you could argue independence had been a disaster with everything getting worse post independence

There hasn't been a single famine in india since independence. The last one was the bengal famine of 1943. India became independent in 1947.

And, it should be on track to become the world’s largest economy by 2075 - which historically it and China always have been.

I hear what you’re saying, but this idea of a golden age under rule by some outside force is often the positive take about many historical periods where someone who committed significant crimes (invasions, genocides, etc) is then praised hundreds of years later because of the positive effect they had for the economy or whatever. Julius Caesar is one such example that comes to mind.

But I feel that approach sometimes discounts what the country and its people could have achieved on their own if they were not invaded. For example, the Taj Mahal is just one building in India. There are lots of other structures that exist that were not built under rule from outside invaders, but they never get attention (at least I’ve not heard of them). With Britain - you mentioned that they unified India and brought stability but how true is that if you compare it to the period of India much earlier? India was rocked by Islamic invasions (which led to the Mughal period) and colonized by those Islamic rulers for hundreds of years. That’s what the European colonizers took over. Is that really a fair period to compare against? India basically spent a millennium ruled by one outside genocidal invader or the other. I am guessing the period before that was more peaceful and not in need of some outside unifying force to feel ‘stable’.

Taj Mahal is nothing compared to ajanta and elloracaves. Whoever elected Taj Mahal as one of the 7 wonders was an idiot in my view

Even more grandiose is the temple at Tanjavur built by the Chola king. Its dome is taller than Qutub Minar and is wider than the Taj Mahal.

What do you think about Gupta india

They never reached the highs reached by the Mauryan Empire, but were still a period of relatively prosperity and stability compared to what immediately followed (until the Mughals came)

I don't think anything about it (due to not having enough info about it), but Wikipedia does:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gupta_Empire

You missed Gupta.. but I too consider Islamic/Mighal as well as British time too Golden period from world progress perspective.

If Invasions and colonization were golden age we should continue that tradition throughout the world. /s