Why has India not been able to fully unify since ancient times?
India, a country with a long history and high cultural diversity, has never been able to form a unified majority nation, despite its rich cultural and religious heritage. The reasons for this phenomenon can be traced back to a number of ways.
First of all, the Indian subcontinent is located in the center of the Eurasian continent and has long been a hub for the migration of various ethnic groups. Surrounded by the majestic Himalayas in the north and the vast Indian Ocean in the south, it is often difficult for the people who come here to leave. Historically, countless peoples, from Aryans, Persians, Macedonians, Cypriots to Huns, etc., have poured into the Indian subcontinent, many of which have inadvertently settled here due to wars and migrations in Central or West Asia.
Second, India's ethnic composition is extremely complex. According to incomplete statistics, India is currently home to more than 100 ethnic groups and 1,652 different languages spoken, forming a huge ethnic mixture. Despite the long-term coexistence of these peoples, they have never been able to achieve effective national integration. It takes a long time and history to form a Juche nation, and India is clearly slow to make progress in this process.
The caste system is key to understanding India's history and social structure, and it has largely shaped the face of Indian society and had a profound impact on efforts to unify the country. The caste system has perpetuated a pattern in which a minority dominates the majority, which poses a great challenge to the unity and unity of the country as a whole.
After the Aryans invaded India around 1500 BC, they devised and implemented the caste system as a strategy to prevent indigenous rebellion. This system has made it difficult for India to form a unified national consciousness and collective resistance, and historians point out that it is because of this that only about 30 years of India's thousands of years of history have achieved a brief period of political unity.
Over time, there have been constant invasions of the Indian subcontinent by foreign powers. Each new wave of conquerors adopted the caste system in order to consolidate their rule. As a result, India is trapped in an endless cycle of invasion by foreign powers, prevention of resistance through the caste system, weakening of the state, and subjugation by new foreign powers. Such cycles have made India's dream of reunification unrealizable.
India's geographical diversity is also an important factor in its historical difficulty in achieving unity. India's geography is extremely complex, with arid deserts in the northwest, vast grasslands in the middle, and humid rainforests in the southeast. This diverse geography has led to a diversity of production methods.
In different parts of India, a variety of production modes can be observed: the north-west region is predominantly nomadic, the central region has mixed production methods, and the south-east is dominated by rice farming. Despite the coexistence of these modes of production, none of them has been able to become the dominant mode of production for the entire subcontinent.
This difference in the mode of production has further exacerbated the national and cultural differences. Even in areas where there are no natural barriers, ethnic boundaries can remain stable and exist for a long time due to differences in the mode of production. Historically, the high degree of unification of the mode of production has promoted the unity of political power in China and other places, while India has made it difficult to achieve true political unity because of the fragmentation and diversification of the mode of production.