Indian Subcontinent

Indian subcontinent, subregion of Asia, consisting at least of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Afghanistan, Bhutan, Nepal, and other areas may also be included in some uses of the term, which is frequently, but not always, interchangeable with the term South Asia.

The region was called simply “India” in many historical sources, which used the term to refer broadly to the regions surrounding and southeast of the Indus River. Many historians continue to use the term India to refer to the whole of the Indian subcontinent in discussions of history up until the era of the British raj (1858–1947), when “India” came to refer to a distinct political entity that later became a nation-state in its own right. The term “Indian subcontinent” thus provides a distinction between the geographic region once broadly called India and the modern country named India. The Indian subcontinent is among the most densely populated areas on Earth; it is home to some 1.8 billion people.