South Asia

[15] Muslim armies from Central Asia intermittently overran the plains of northern India,[16] eventually founding the Delhi Sultanate in the 13th century, and drawing the region into the cosmopolitan networks of medieval Islam.

[54][48][75][76][77] The Indian subcontinent is largely a geological term referring to the land mass that drifted northeastwards from ancient Gondwana, colliding with the Eurasian plate nearly 55 million years ago, towards the end of Palaeocene.

[78] Historians Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot state that the term "Indian subcontinent" describes a natural physical landmass in South Asia that has been relatively isolated from the rest of Eurasia.

[82] Identification with a South Asian identity was found to be significantly low among respondents in an older two-year survey across Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

[99] Increasing urbanisation of South Asia between 800 and 400 BCE, and possibly the spread of urban diseases, contributed to the rise of ascetic movements and of new ideas which challenged the orthodox Brahmanism.

[100][failed verification] These ideas led to Sramana movements, of which Mahavira (c. 549–477 BCE), proponent of Jainism, and Buddha (c. 563 – c. 483), founder of Buddhism, was the most prominent icons.

The Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan and the edicts of Aśoka suggest that the Buddhist monks spread Buddhism (Dharma) in eastern provinces of the Seleucid Empire, and possibly even farther into West Asia.

[115][116][117] Islam came as a political power in the fringe of South Asia in 8th century CE when the Arab general Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh, and Multan in southern Punjab, in modern-day Pakistan.

[146][147][148][149] The death of Aurangzeb and the collapse of the Mughal Empire, which marks the beginning of modern India, in the early 18th century, provided opportunities for the Marathas, Sikhs, Mysoreans, and Nawabs of Bengal to exercise control over large regions of the Indian subcontinent.

[153][154] After the defeat of the Nawab of Bengal and Tipu Sultan and his French allies, British traders went on to dominate much of South Asia through divide-and-rule tactics by the early 19th century.

In 1947, the newly independent India and Pakistan had to decide how to deal with the hundreds of princely states that controlled much of the subcontinent, as well as what to do with the remaining European (non-British) colonies.

[166] A combination of referendums, military action, and negotiated accessions took place in rapid succession, leading to the political integration of the vast majority of India and Pakistan within a few years.

[174] Pakistan has been beset with terrorism, economic issues, and military dominance of its government since Independence,[175] with none of its Prime Ministers having completed a full 5-year term in office.

[176] India has grown significantly,[177] having slashed its rate of extreme poverty to below 20%[178] and surpassed Pakistan's GDP per capita in the 2010s due to economic liberalisation from the 1980s onward.

[179] Bangladesh, having struggled greatly for decades due to conflict with and economic exploitation by Pakistan,[180][181] is now one of the fastest-growing countries in the region, beating India in terms of GDP per capita.

[182][183] Afghanistan has gone through several invasions and Islamist regimes, with many of its refugees having gone to Pakistan and other parts of South Asia and bringing back cultural influences such as cricket.

[199] The Indian subcontinent formerly formed part of the supercontinent Gondwana, before rifting away during the Cretaceous period and colliding with the Eurasian Plate about 50–55 million years ago and giving birth to the Himalayan range and the Tibetan plateau.

It is the peninsular region south of the Himalayas and Kuen Lun mountain ranges and east of the Indus River and the Iranian Plateau, extending southward into the Indian Ocean between the Arabian Sea (to the southwest) and the Bay of Bengal (to the southeast).

But, at the beginning of June, the jetstreams vanish above the Tibetan Plateau, low pressure over the Indus Valley deepens and the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) moves in.

[206][207][208] Around 2050, people living in the Ganges and Indus river basins (where up to 60% of non-monsoon irrigation comes from the glaciers[209]) may be faced with severe water scarcity due to both climate and socioeconomic reasons.

)[220][221][222] This tension in the region has contributed to difficulties in sharing river waters among Northern South Asian countries;[223] climate change is projected to exacerbate the issue.

Major Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms and empires of the region include Kikata, Videha, Vṛji, Magadha, Nanda, Gangaridai, Mauryan, Anga, Kalinga, Kamarupa, Samatata, Kanva, Gupta, Pala, Gauda, Sena, Khadga, Candra, and Deva.

[321] One of the key challenges in assessing the quality of education in South Asia is the vast range of contextual difference across the region, complicating any attempt to compare between countries.

[326][325] This poor quality of education in turn has contributed to some of the highest drop-out rates in the world, while over half of the students complete secondary school with acquiring requisite skills.

[327] The larger and poorer countries in the region, like India and Bangladesh, struggle financially to get sufficient resources to sustain an education system required for their vast populations, with an added challenge of getting large numbers of out-of-school children enrolled into schools.

The prevalence of underweight children in India is among the highest in the world and is nearly double that of sub-Saharan Africa with dire consequences for mobility, mortality, productivity, and economic growth.

[311][341] The 2006 report stated, "the low status of women in South Asian countries and their lack of nutritional knowledge are important determinants of high prevalence of underweight children in the region."

Since the formation of its republic abolishing British law, it has remained a democracy with civil liberties, an active Supreme Court, and a largely independent press.

"It is a moderate and generally secular and tolerant — though sometimes this is getting stretched at the moment — alternative to violent extremism in a very troubled part of the world", said Dan Mozena, the US ambassador to Bangladesh.

[366][367] Sometimes referred as a great power or emerging superpower primarily attributed to its large and expanding economic and military abilities, India acts as fulcrum of South Asia.

Various definitions of South Asia, including the definition by the United Nations geoscheme which was created for "statistical convenience and does not imply any assumption regarding political or other affiliation of countries or territories." [ 38 ]
United Nations map of South Asia. [ 63 ] However, the United Nations does not endorse any definitions or area boundaries. [ note 2 ]
The region as described in a 1992 work about the geography of Asia: "This greater India is well defined in terms of topography; it is the Indian peninsula, hemmed in by the Himalayas on the north, the Hindu Khush in the west and the Arakanese in the east." [ 61 ] [ 47 ]
Indus Valley civilisation during 2600–1900 BCE, the mature phase
Maurya Empire in 250 BCE
Outreach of influence of early medieval Chola dynasty
Timur defeats the Sultan of Delhi , Nasir-u Din Mehmud, in the winter of 1397–1398
Emperor Shah Jahan and his son Prince Aurangzeb in Mughal Court, 1650
British Indian Empire in 1909. British India is shaded pink, the princely states yellow.
South Asia on the eve of the de jure commencement of the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war , which concluded with East Pakistan becoming the independent nation of Bangladesh .
South Asia's Köppen climate classification map [ 200 ] is based on native vegetation, temperature, precipitation, and their seasonality.
Greater warming increases the amount of moisture in the atmosphere over Asia, which directly leads to extreme precipitation. Probability of 20-year, 50-year and 100-year extremes consistently increases with warming across Asia. In the most affected parts of South Asia, up to a 15-fold average increase for 100-year extremes is possible under 3 °C (5.4 °F) of warming. [ 204 ]
Observed glacier mass loss in the Hindu Kush Himalayas region since the 20th century [ 207 ]
Ethno-linguistic distribution map of South Asia
Provinces of Afghanistan#UN Regions Pashtunistan Sindh Gujarat Balochistan, Pakistan Punjab Hindi belt Hindi belt Kashmir Bhutan Nepal Bengal Northeast India Telugu states Maharashtra Odisha Karnataka Kerala Tamil Nadu Sri Lankan Tamils Sinhalese people
A clickable map of the official language or lingua franca spoken in each state/province of South Asia excluding the Maldives. Indo-Aryan languages are in green, Iranic languages in dark green, Dravidian languages in purple, Tibeto-Burman languages in red, and Turkic languages in orange.
Religious Diversity in South Asia by National Subdivision
An Afghan soldier playing cricket. Afghan refugees who lived in Pakistan and India brought the sport back to Afghanistan, and it is now one of the most popular sports in the country. [ 185 ]
Mumbai is the financial capital of India with GDP of $400 billion [ 288 ]
GDP per capita development in South Asia
Durbar High School , oldest secondary school of Nepal , established in 1854 CE
Lower class school in Sri Lanka
College of Natural Resources, Royal University of Bhutan
Child getting vaccine in Bangladesh under the Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI)
A weekly child examination performed at a hospital in Farah, Afghanistan
Border disputes involving India against Pakistan and China have created complex geopolitical dynamics in South Asia. [ 360 ]
A 1959 map showing how most of Asia was communist (in red), with Pakistan (blue) being more aligned with capitalist powers than India. [ 179 ] The resulting Cold War dynamics impacted South Asian geopolitics in the late 20th century. [ 372 ]