We have achieved a milestone today!
Historians consider India’s modern age to have begun sometime between 1848 and 1885. The appointment in 1848 of Lord Dalhousie as Governor General of the East India Company set the stage for changes essential to a modern state. These included the consolidation princes, the rebellion rocked many regions of northern and central India and shook the foundations of Company rule.[130][131] Although the rebellion was suppressed by 1858, it led to the dissolution of the East India Company and the direct administration of India by the British government. Proclaiming a unitary state and a gradual but limited British-style parliamentary system, the new rulers also protected princes and landed gentry as a feudal safeguard against future unrest.[132][133] In the decades following, public life gradually emerged all over India, leading eventually to the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885.[134][135][136][137]
The rush of technology and the commercialisation of agriculture in the second half of the 19th century was marked by economic setbacks and many small farmers became dependent on the whims of far-away markets.[138] 141]
India accounts for the bulk of the Indian subcontinent, lying atop the Indian tectonic plate, a part of the Indo-Australian Plate.[156] India’s defining geological processes began 75 million years ago when the Indian the emerging Himalayas, plate movement created a vast trough that rapidly filled with river-borne sediment[157] and now constitutes the Indo-Gangetic Plain.[158] Cut off from the plain by the ancient Aravalli Range lies the Thar Desert.[159]
The original Indian Plate survives as peninsular India, the oldest and geologically most stable part of India. It extends as far north as the Satpura and Vindhya ranges in central India.
These parallel chains run from the Arabian Sea coast in Gujarat in the west to the coal-rich Chota Nagpur Plateau in Jharkhand in the east.[160] To the south, the remaining peninsular landmass, the Deccan Plateau, is flanked on the west and east by coastal ranges known as the Western and Eastern Ghats;[161] the plateau contains the country’s oldest rock formations, some over one billion years old. Constituted in such fashion, India lies to the north of the equator between 6° 44′ and 35° 30′ north latitude[h] and 68° 7′ and 97° 25′ east longitude.
