Sir John Strachey, a British Indian civil servant used to address his civil servants-in-training by saying, "The first and most important thing to learn about India is that there is not and never was an India." Historian David Ludden in his book Contesting the Nation: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India writes 'the territory that we use to describe the landscape of Indian civilization was defined politically by the British Empire. India was never what it is today in a geographical, demographic or cultural sense, before 1947.' Many like Winston Churchill had predicted that post independence, India would disintegrate and fall back into the Middle Ages.
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