From the drained streets of Mohenjo-daro to the world’s most populous democracy — five thousand years of a civilization that absorbed every conqueror and outlasted every empire.
They have been farming the same plains for five thousand years, arguing about the same gods for three thousand, and voting — all one billion of them, together — for less than eighty. The Indians are not one people but a civilization of peoples, and their story is the longest continuous experiment in human diversity.
