Around the middle of the eighteenth century, traders from the islands of Britain were attracted to the land they were to call "India", named after the Indus River. The river originated in Tibet and then flowed through Kashmir into Pakistan. In a vast delta south of Karachi, now Pakistan's largest city and once its capital, the river emptied itself into the sea. The British did not come to India to conquer but to trade. They came to India to buy handicrafts from the skilled workers who produced delicate fabrics from the locally grown cotton.

As they established their businesses, the areas' weak rulers offered some resistance which the British traders were able to overcome, sometimes with the help of local chiefs. Over time the British merchants were able to establish themselves as the rulers, laying the foundation of the British imperial raj. Their dominion over the vast land lasted for a couple of centuries. It was finally challenged by local politicians who took advantage of the way Britain had been weakened by its participation in the two world wars, the first fought from 1914 to 1919 and the second from 1939 to 1945.

The Indian independence movement was led by Mohandas Gandhi, a London-trained lawyer who launched a non-violent campaign against British rule after having tried the approach in South Africa. Gandhi's life as an ascetic and his pursuit of nonviolence as a weapon against the British colonisation of the country to which he originally belonged, became the model that other activists like Martin Luther King were to........

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