Has India ever actually been good at war? Seems like whenever a foreign military power invaded the subcontinent (Macedonians, Mongols, Timurids, Mughals, Portuguese, Afsharids, British) the local Hindus got folded with ease. Even in modern times, their only notable victories were against weaker Indian microstates or Pakis.
no, the region has never been good at war but india didn't exist then. it was created by britain. i am only saying this to anger indians with the truth.
india the country has also never been good at war
I think it's pretty crazy that they have an entire by-birth racial and social hierarchy system, a thousands of years old remnant of when invaders designated the native inhabitants as racially inferior.
Everyone who conquered India at some point realized what garbage people live there and left
Basically the "it's all so tiresome" scenario
>Has India ever actually been good at war?
Yes, but mostly against each other, they simply did not expand "outwardly" in the way that Persians, Greeks and Romans did. They lacked certain elements.
India has rarely been unified enough to really think about expanding outwards and even then there are really only a handful of bottlenecks into or out of the subcontinent. The path out to the West was often occupied by a rival empire and the path to the East lead straight into ridiculously dense jungles and hilly as fuck terrain.
The Mughals were probably one of the high points for the subcontinent, being one of the three Gunpowder Empires but even they struggled to unify India. India has a very long history of a ridiculously strong sense of regionalism, the reason the British were so successful compared to previous foreign conquerors was they actually realized it was significantly easier to play regional princes off of each other than trying to bring them to heel under your boot. This cultural trend towards regional princes and established military caste also kept their approach to warfare fairly conservative for a very long time so you had this dynamic of India being fairly isolated by land, fairly easy to conquer, and then mostly impossible to actually govern by force. This is all really generalized because India has so many cultural groups and such a long history, its like if the pre-unification political structure of Germany existed isolated for thousands of years with dozens of languages and religions (all lumped together into a borderline meaningless Hinduism).
>the three Gunpowder Empires
Kino concept but who?
Mughals, Marathas and EIC. In any case for those interested in how the EIC actually came to dominate a subcontinent, the book “The Anarchy” is a very well researched and written history of the EIC’s expansion into India and its ramifications for both Britain and India.
I read that book it was fucking wicked
Also that sort of 1-Dimensional art style is really nice
My favorite bit was him recounting his visit to a police station supposedly haunted by a prince and the police chief has to talk with the ghost about his job. India is a lovely country full of superstitions and absolute insanity. The sheer amount of wealth the Brit’s managed to steal though boggles the mind honestly.
I struggle with this contradiction between the absolute breadth of experience and knowledge found all over, say, South Asia, and my and most of everyone around me's ignorance of it.
People say that China has no soft power but they're still 100x ahead of India besides the odd restaurant and bollywood film which actually makes it into view.
India has cornered the customer support market, that is soft power. I swear every time I need to call support some guy named Rajesh Singh Patel answers and insists his name is Larry.
True
But that's all a lot more 'under-the-wraps'.
I guess it's all relative at the end of the day, since I too can attest to having my computer saved by a man from Bangalore.
>The sheer amount of wealth the Brit’s managed to steal though boggles the mind honestly
>steal
the wealth wouldn't exist if the British weren't around to properly utilize the resources of the region. You can only steal something if it exists in the first place. Same thing applies to Africa and North America, they had plenty of time to do something with their resources and instead did nothing. It's all just useless shit buried in the ground until people with brainpower use it show up
>If I break into your house and force you to dig a mine in your backyard I'm just helping you out
Yes.
Considering the amount of gemstones and gold stolen by soldiers and sent back to Britain, yeah they stole a lot of wealth from India. Looting entered the English language from an Indian word for theft and pillage.
>stealing the word for theft
[oppressive laughter]
You're assuming they optimised the place and industrialised it. It's the opposite. They actually prohibited, through various laws and financial traps, the industrialisation of India. India under British rule had 0% per capita gdp growth.
Got a source on that claim?
When the british controlled india it had the largest economy in the world, india.. but not anymore.
>1-Dimensional art
"Gunpowder Empires" is a name given to the trio of Muslim states (the Ottomans, the Safavids, and Mughals) who all had similar origins, were all founded in roughly the same time frame, and who became regional powerhouses in a relatively short span of time through strong political institutions and several military innovations. The most signature of these innovations being their extensive use of early firearms like field artillery and arquebuses.
Dude I wanna study all these now wwtf
early modern history is kino as fuck almost everywhere you look on the entire planet, even the centuries leading into it are great to learn about
its the first real age of exploration and gunpowder and saw the rise and fall of so many great powers across the world
I wish somehow india and china at their peak (autism) had managed to have a completely unrestrained no holds barred land war but unfortunately theres a god damn mountain range in the way.
Nope, never ever. They had a handful of competent soldiers under european officers and with european training, such as the tipoo sultan's professional french trained and officered army, or the sepoy regiments of the EIC. But their indigenous commanders were more interested in grandstanding and showing off their elephants, and relied on hordes of innacurate and overly large artillery, and thousands of light cavalrymen, they had no NCOs, generally clueless "officers" afraid to take the initiative and incapable od deciding what to do with it, and pretty poor firelock infantry who could only manage 2 shots a minute and couldnt maneuver or fire by rank. They did very poorly against disciplined european style firelock regiments, although their light cav continued to be useful in skirmishes, at least while they were winning. European willingness to stand and fight it out, or retreat in good order, instead of running away, won a lot of engagements.
they repelled the mongols but back then india was small individual kingdoms that didnt get along it was the british that united it
They didnt really, they were conquered by the Timurids, the mughal empire literally means mongol empire lol. They got basically non stop raided by the afghans too, plus indigenous roving bands of mahrathas who would just ignore the mughals and try and set up their own empire, and thugees just romping around murdering people, then all the prices fighting among themselves, pretty chaotic really, and perfect for a certain trading company to start acquiring land and rights..
India was conquered by the Greeks lmao, they've never been a military threat to anybody at any point in history
someone post that webm of the indian human trebuchet
The Sikh Kalsa army was pretty good.
>Has India ever actually been good at war?
'India' is something invented by the British as an administrative rationalisation. It is not a nation or people and never was.
They're doing pretty good job in thier battle to not use toilets.
"India" didn't exist until the British conquered the sub continent and eventually united it under a single political entity for administrative ease