In the 1880s, John Robert Seeley pompously announced that “India is... only a geographical expression and does not make the territory of a nation” while John Strachey declared with equal contempt that “there never was an India… no Indian nation, no people of India”. Like other British imperialist commentators, they were both obviously underestimating the inner strength of a civilisation that had arisen over millennia of coexistence, compromise and consensus.
