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India is a country east of Persia. The people who live there are called Indians. The Indians, of course, are entirely different from Native Americans who were called Indians when early explorers believed they had reached India or the East Indies.
You may remember that India was one of the very early civilizations that grew up along a river valley. Do you remember the name of the river—Here’s a hint. It sounds like India. Did you remember? It’s the Indus River.
India is a very old country. Its modern neighbor, Pakistan, used to be part of India, too. Long, long ago—about 2500 B.C.—the people living along the Indus River, in what is now India and Pakistan, sailed up and down the river to trade with each other. They invented a system of writing to keep their records. They built large cities with wide, straight streets. Their houses even had bathrooms with drains that were connected to a city sewer system. Did you think that modern people were the only ones to have sewer systems? If you did, you were wrong. You can see that ancient Indians thought up this healthy system long before we did.
About a thousand years after the ancient Indians built their first cities along the Indus River, people from the west invaded their land. These people were Indo-Europeans who came from somewhere near Persia. When they first arrived, these newcomers did not know how to write. They were strong warriors though and gradually conquered more and more of India. The original Indians and the newcomers learned from each other and adopted some of each others’ customs.
In the course of time there came to be four chief castes , or classes, of people in India. No one in one caste would have anything to do with a person in another caste. A boy or girl in one caste would never play with a boy or girl in another caste. A man from one class would never marry a woman from another. No one from one class would eat with someone from another class.
The top caste was made up of the priests and scholars. In the next caste were people like rulers and warriors. Then, in the third caste, came farmers and merchants. Fourth, and last, were laborers, men who chopped wood, or dug the soil, or carried water.
But they weren’t the lowest! There were other people so low that they didn’t even belong to a caste, and so they were outcasts and untouchables . Even today, though India is trying to make changes and caste distinctions have been made illegal, these people are the ones who sweep the streets, clean the gutters, collect the garbage, and do the dirty work that no one else will do.
India today is terribly crowded with people. It is about one-third the size of the United States but has more than three times as many people. Think what that means!
Most Indians today follow the Hindu religion, but from about 300 B.C. to 400 A.D.—seven hundred years—Buddhism was very popular. It happened this way.
About 500 B.C. there was born a prince in India by the name of Gautama. Gautama saw so much suffering and trouble in the world that he felt it was not right that he himself, just because he by chance had been born rich, should be happy while others were miserable and unhappy. He gave up the life to which he had been born, a life of ease and luxury with all its good things, and spent his entire time trying to make things better for his people.
Gautama taught the people to be good; he taught them to be honest; and he taught them to help the poor and the unfortunate. After a while people began to call him Buddha, and he was considered so holy and pure that at last they came to think that he must be a god himself, and so they worshiped him as a god.
These people who believed in Buddha were called Buddhists, and many others quickly became Buddhists, too. Buddhism seemed so good that we do not wonder that great numbers of people became Buddhists.
Buddhists thought their religion was so good that they wanted everybody else to become Buddhists. They sent missionaries across land and sea all the way to the island of Japan, and this new religion spread far and wide. Today there are more Buddhists in the world than there are people in the United States.
You can see that India is a very important place. It is the home of one of the world’s oldest civilizations and two of the world’s important religions.