Thread by @wmhuo168

Modern India wasn’t born. It was manufactured.
Not by civilizational continuity, but by imperial convenience.

🔗 The Idea of India Was Born in the British Library
A thread on how "India" was invented, not inherited. (1/9)

m.thewire.in/article/histor…

Before the British, there was no single polity called "India."
There were Marathas, Mughals, Rajputs, Sikhs, and dozens of kingdoms.
No central flag. No fixed borders. No shared state. (2/9)

The British didn’t unify India. They compressed it.
A civilizational mosaic was reduced to an administrative grid.
Uniformity replaced autonomy. (3/9)

Even the word “India” came from outsiders.
It was a Greek and Persian misnaming of the Indus region.
The British made it official, legal, and permanent. (4/9)

They mapped the land, counted the people, and codified caste.
They didn’t unify society. They froze it in place.
Census replaced culture. (5/9)

What they left behind in 1947 wasn’t a restored civilization.
It was a broken shell of provinces and princely states, held together by colonial wiring.
The “nation” was a bureaucratic artifact. (6/9)

Indians didn’t inherit a country. They had to invent one.
Out of ruins. With borrowed institutions and fractured loyalties. (7/9)

The miracle isn’t that India functions.
It’s that it didn’t collapse.
No other post-colonial state had this much diversity and survived intact. (8/9)

India was never meant to exist.
It was a byproduct of imperial logic.
Its survival is not a British legacy.
It is a civilizational recovery. (9/9)