India Interviews

India is the world’s most populous nation and the seventh-largest by area. From the seventeenth century, the region’s Moghul rulers had to deal with increasingly influential European trading interests. The English (later British) East India Company established in 1600 expanded its territorial control aggressively in the eighteenth century, acting to exclude French interests and entrench its own political and economic hegemony. A revolt in 1857 was brutally repressed and in place of the Company the British imposed direct rule over much of the subcontinent, while exercising indirect control in the so-called Princely States. British India was partitioned in 1947 between the newly-independent states of India and Pakistan. In 1950 India became the first Commonwealth country to replace the Crown with a republican constitution. Large numbers of people of Indian heritage migrated to the UK in the post-war period either directly, or indirectly following the expulsion of Asians from Kenya in 1968 and Uganda in 1978. According to Home Office figures, by November 2023, 2456 Indian nationals had successfully applied to the Windrush scheme created in 2018 to provide them with proof of their right to remain in the UK. Current population c. 1,430,000,000.