How many times have we heard that there was no India before the British? 

Whenever I talk anything proud of our Indian History ,there'll be atleast one person commenting, “Which India you're talking about? There was no India before the British! ”

And there were celebrities coming out and saying there was no concept of India before the British happened to us

One of the foremost British authorities John Strachey said:

" The first thing to learn about India is that there is not and never was in India ."

The British administration used this propaganda to justify their colonialism and to make people believe that there was no India before they arrived ,so they can easily divide and rule us. It's very obvious of them to do it because they wanted to suppress the nationalistic spirit that was growing rapidly among the people .

But unfortunately, this thought has been carried forward even after our Independence .But let me tell u this clearly, there was no nation in the world before 300 years . The very concept of nation-state came into existence just 300 years back. Before that ,it was more like kingdoms, just like what we Bharatiyans had.

Much before the Islamic imperialism and the British colonialism entered India ,Bharat always existed as a civilization .

A nation has geographical boundaries, but a civilization doesn't have one.

The people of a civilization are binded  in terms of culture . The worship of Lord Shiva is very common from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.We celebrate almost the same festival around the same time of the year . Ramayana links the north with the south. In Mahabharata, at the coronation ceremony of Yudhishthira,the 4 brothers are sent to 4 directions of Bharat.Arjuna to the north , Bhima to the east ,Sahadeva to the south and Nakula to the west. If there was no feeling of oneness,they could have finished that within their own kingdom. 

And Vedas clearly describes Bharatvarsha as the land between Himalayas and the ocean in the south. 

And why did Adi Shankaracharya walked all over the Bharat? He could have walked within his own kingdom if there was no such thing as Bharat existed . Even if you want to discard all this saying, it's just mythology .The Mauryan Empire looked like this,

and this is the Gupta Empire, 

and even the Mughal Empire looked like this,

The borders of the nation is subject to change over time,but the idea of the nation,the oneness among the people doesn't change.

This is how the map of America looked in 1800,

and this is how it looks now.

That's an enormous change in just a span of 200 years. And ours is a minimum of 5000 years old civilization evidentially. 

And you expect everything to look exactly the same? 

If there was no concept of Bharat,where was the rest of the world heading towards?

Columbus was in search of India ,not in search of any particular kingdom and that's why he named the Native Americans as Red Indians. 

Vasco-da-gama was not in search of the Kozhikode or the kingdom of Zamorin. He wanted to reach the land of Bharat doesn't matter which part of the country it was.

If you want  to go be the same logic British used for India ,2000 years back ,before the Roman invasion,what  we call as British today were just some tribal groups. Does that mean there was no Britain before the Roman invasion?  Only Rome came and United the Britain? Sounds stupid, right ?

Then why does it sound okay  when it comes to India? 

It's not the borders that makes the nation . It's the commonality among the people that makes the nation. We as a civilization have historical unity. It means a nation which goes through ups and downs together , have happy times and bad times together, experiences invasions and rebellions together , it's a nation with historical unity.

If u look at the history of Bharat,when it was at its golden period,every part of this country flourished and when the invasion started all parts of this country were invaded and when the British  colonization happened every part of this nation enslaved. And when we got freedom every single part of this nation got Independence.  This is exactly what we call as historical unity.

The concept of nation-state might not have been existed back then. But we Bharat as a civilization stands strongly for thousands of years . And to everybody who says that the British united  us, how conveniently you are hiding the fact that there where more than 560 princely states when the British left India, except three all those states decided to join with India . 

All the British did was breaking the country part by part and here we are giving credits to them for something they never did ,that is uniting the nation.

After a thousand years of invasions and colonization , it was Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel who united the bits and pieces of what British has left. Even if we have this very idea of British uniting us, it's  a great injustice we do to those people who died for the nation in the hands of Britishers .