It started with a simple observation from a colleague. She mentioned I was only the second Bengali she’d ever met, and we joked about how I looked a bit like a friend of hers from southern Russia. I mentioned that—minus the AASI (Ancient Ancestral South Indian) or the M130 gene that connects all non-African humans in a 10,000-year-old migration out of Africa—we probably did share some ancient, deep-rooted connections.
That brief chat sent me down a rabbit hole. It made me reflect on the history of India, the East, and how often our global narrative is shaped by a very narrow, 20th-century Eurocentric lens.
When people in the West think of countries like India or China, the immediate association is often "poor" or "overpopulated"—a view cemented by 1950s–1980s textbooks. We are taught a version of history where the apex of human civilization is the West, born from the scientific discoveries of the 15th century and the subsequent era of European colonization. But history is much older, and much richer, than the last 300 years.
The Manhattan of the Bronze Age
If you want to understand the true scale of ancient Eastern civilizations, you have to look at the Indus Valley. In 1921, the history of the world changed. Around the same time Howard Carter was uncovering Tutankhamun in Egypt, discoveries were being made in a small village in Punjab that completely rewrote the timeline of human civilization.
When Sir John Marshall, Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, announced the discovery of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro to the world in 1924, he wrote: "Not often has it been given to archaeologists, as it was given to Schliemann at Tiryns and Mycenae... to light upon the remains of a long-forgotten civilization".
While the pyramids were being built in Egypt, vast, highly organized cities existed in India. The mature Harappan civilization (2900 BC – 1900 BC) was a marvel of the ancient world. With a population of up to 5 million people spread across 2,000 towns and villages from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea, it was the largest civilization of its time. These were the Manhattans of the Bronze Age. They were traders who sailed from the Persian Gulf to Iraq, carrying ivory, teak, and lapis lazuli.
The Climate Collapse and New Arrivals
So, why did this massive civilization vanish? It wasn't necessarily wiped out by war; it was likely one of the first major human catastrophes driven by ecological collapse.
Millions of years ago, the Indian tectonic plate, once floating in the Tethys Sea, rammed into Asia to create the Himalayas. The rivers born from these mountains sustained life. However, recent geological and climate studies—such as those by sedimentologist Dr. Sanjeev Gupta of Imperial College London—reveal that the rivers sustaining many of these ancient towns actually dried up or changed course long before the cities peaked. The civilization was heavily dependent on monsoon rainfall, and a steady, centuries-long weakening of the monsoon system and successive extreme droughts forced populations to gradually abandon these massive urban centers.
This same climatic shift that caused the slow demise of the Indus Valley also set the stage for new arrivals. As the climate became more arid in Central Asia, Indo-Aryan speakers migrated into the Indian subcontinent, bringing with them early forms of Sanskrit. Centuries later, when the British founded the Asiatic Society, scholars realized that Sanskrit shared a common root with European languages—all stemming from a shared origin in Central Asia. Meanwhile, the undeciphered language of the Indus Valley is largely believed by scholars to have shared roots with the Dravidian languages still spoken in Southern India today.
The Economic Center of Gravity
We often forget that up until the mid-18th century, the economic center of the world was firmly in Asia. In the 1740s, India alone accounted for over 20% of the world's GDP, and China held around 25%. The largest and most prosperous cities were not in England or the US, but in the East.
Look at naval history: fifty years before Christopher Columbus famously sailed to the Americas in 1492, the Chinese Ming Dynasty admiral Zheng He was commanding massive "treasure fleets." These ships were technological marvels, vastly larger than Columbus’s Santa Maria, and they navigated across the Indian Ocean to Africa and the Middle East. Yet, in a historic pivot, China decided the outside world had nothing to offer, turned inward, and dismantled its great fleets.
Trickery, Betrayal, and the Turning Point
The colonization of India and the subsequent fall of China were not inevitabilities of Western superiority, but rather a mix of internal division, trickery, and historical bad luck.
India's fate changed drastically at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. The British East India Company was no match for the massive army of the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah. But the British didn't win through military might; they won through bribery. Robert Clive paid off the Nawab's commander, Mir Jafar, who stood by with the majority of the troops and refused to fight. That single act of treason gave the British a foothold that would eventually swallow the entire subcontinent.
The economic extraction that followed was devastating. Over 200 years of British rule, India’s share of the global GDP was juiced down from over 20% to just 4%—a point famously argued by Dr. Shashi Tharoor at the Oxford Union. The wealth drained from India financed the British Industrial Revolution. The British then used Indian-grown opium to pry open Chinese markets, leading to the Opium Wars in the 1840s. The British Navy decimated Canton Bay, plunging China into its "Century of Humiliation" and occupation by foreign powers.
Knowing Our Story
To acknowledge this history is not to diminish the profound advancements of the Western Scientific Revolution or the American system. Historian Niall Ferguson correctly identifies the "6 killer apps" (competition, science, property rights, medicine, consumer society, and work ethic) that propelled the West to global dominance over the last 300 years.
But acknowledging Western achievements shouldn't mean erasing the millennia of Eastern brilliance that came before it. We must know our own history. If we don't, we allow others to teach us a version of history designed to make them look like the perpetual heroes. Every person of Eastern heritage should know the vast, rich, and pioneering history of their ancestors. There is so much to be proud of, and as I dig deeper, I realize there is always so much more to learn.
More to Read for Curious Readers
For those who want to dive deeper into the history referenced in this post, here is the research and factual grounding behind the core claims:
- Genetic Connections (M130/AASI): The M130 mutation (Haplogroup C) is an ancient genetic marker tracing the early human coastal migration out of Africa (around 60,000 years ago) across southern Asia, down through India, and eventually to Australia. The AASI (Ancient Ancestral South Indian) lineage represents the deep, indigenous hunter-gatherer ancestry of the Indian subcontinent.
- John Marshall's Announcement: Sir John Marshall announced the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization in The Illustrated London News on September 20, 1924, directly comparing the momentous find to Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of Mycenae and Troy.
- Climate Collapse of the Indus Valley: Recent advanced paleoclimate studies (including those published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment) support the ecological collapse theory. Research shows that between 4,450 and 3,400 years ago, the region suffered successive, prolonged drought episodes (some lasting over 85 years).
- Dr. Sanjeev Gupta's Research: Dr. Gupta at Imperial College London led research showing that the major paleochannel (often associated with the mythical Sarasvati river) adjacent to many Indus settlements had actually lost its glacial water source before the settlements peaked. The cities relied almost entirely on monsoon-fed seasonal rivers, making them incredibly vulnerable to the eventual climate shift.
- The Battle of Plassey (1757): This is universally recognized by historians as the turning point of British rule in India. Robert Clive of the East India Company conspired with Mir Jafar, promising him the throne of Bengal if he betrayed Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah. Mir Jafar's troops stood idle during the battle, securing the British victory.
- Shashi Tharoor's Oxford Debate: In his viral 2015 speech at the Oxford Union, Dr. Shashi Tharoor cited historical economic data (largely based on the work of economic historian Angus Maddison), noting that India's share of the world economy was 23% at the start of the 18th century and dropped to under 4% by the time the British left.
- Zheng He vs. Columbus: Admiral Zheng He led seven epic voyages between 1405 and 1433. Historical records and archaeological findings suggest his Baochuan (treasure ships) were roughly 400 feet long—several times larger than Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria, which was only about 60 to 70 feet long.
- The Asiatic Society & Sanskrit: Sir William Jones founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784. In 1786, he delivered a famous lecture proposing that Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek all sprang from a common, older source, linking the ancient linguistic histories of India and Europe.
