India

15th century BCE – 5th century BCE

The Vedic period, or the Vedic age (c. 1500 – c. 500 BCE), is the period in the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age of the history of India when the Vedic literature, including the Vedas (c. 1500–900 BCE), was composed in the northern Indian subcontinent, between the end of the urban Indus Valley Civilisation and a second urbanisation, which began in the central Indo-Gangetic Plain c. 600 BCE. The Vedas are liturgical texts which formed the basis of the influential Brahmanical ideology, which developed in the Kuru kingdom, a tribal union of several Indo-Aryan tribes. The Vedas contain…

1 May 1526

The First Battle of Panipat, on 21 April 1526 was fought between the invading forces of Babur against Ibrahim Khan Lodi, the Sultan of Delhi, in North India. Babur's forces, employing gunpowder firearms and cannons, defeated Ibrahim.

5 November 1556

The Second Battle of Panipat was fought on 5 November 1556, between the Mughals under Akbar and king Hemu, titularly known as Hemchandra Vikramaditya. Hemchandra had conquered Delhi and Agra a few weeks earlier by defeating Mughal forces under Tardi Beg Khan in the Battle of Delhi.

10 May 1738 – 1740

In May 1738, Nader Shah of Iran, the founder of the Afsharid dynasty, invaded Northern India, eventually sacking Delhi in March 1739. His army easily defeated the crumbling Mughals at the Battle of Karnal and then occupied the Mughal capital.

20 June 1756

The Black Hole of Calcutta was a dungeon in Fort William, Calcutta, measuring 14 by 18 feet (4.3 m × 5.5 m), in which troops of Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, held British prisoners of war on the night of 20 June 1756. John Zephaniah Holwell, one of the British prisoners and an employee of the East India Company said that, after the fall of Fort William, the surviving British soldiers, Indian sepoys, and Indian civilians were imprisoned overnight in conditions so cramped that many people died from suffocation and heat exhaustion, and that 123 of 146 prisoners of war imprisoned there…

22 January 1760

The Battle of Wandiwash was a battle in India between the French and the British in 1760. The battle was part of the Third Carnatic War fought between the French and British colonial empires, which itself was a part of the global Seven Years' War.

1767–1769

The First Anglo-Mysore War (1767–1769) was a conflict in India between the Kingdom of Mysore and the East India Company. The war was instigated in part by the machinations of Asaf Jah II, the Nizam of Hyderabad, who sought to divert the company's resources from attempts to gain control over the Northern Circars.

1799

The siege of Seringapatam (5 April – 4 May 1799) was the final confrontation of the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War between the British East India Company and the Kingdom of Mysore led by Tipu Sultan who ruled after the death of his father. The British, with the allied Nizam Ali Khan, 2nd Nizam of Hyderabad and Maratha Empire, achieved a decisive victory after breaching the walls of the fortress at Seringapatam and storming the citadel.

5 February 1922

The Chauri Chaura Incident took place on 4 February 1922 at Chauri Chaura in the Gorakhpur district of United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) in British India. The police fired upon a large group of protesters participating in the non-cooperation movement.

1944

The Battle of Kohima was the turning point of the Japanese U-Go offensive into British India in 1944 during the Second World War. It took place in three stages from 4 April to 22 June 1944 around the town of Kohima, now the capital city of the state of Nagaland in Northeast India.