Gradually expanding rule of the British East India Company followed, turning India into a colonial economy, but also consolidating its sovereignty. The Mughal empire, in 1525, ushered in two centuries of relative peace, leaving a legacy of luminous architecture. In the Punjab, Sikhism emerged, rejecting institutionalized religion.

In the 15th century, the Vijayanagara empire created a long-lasting composite Hindu culture in south India. Later, armies from Central Asia intermittently overran India's plains, eventually establishing the Delhi sultanate, and drawing northern India into the cosmopolitan networks of medieval Islam. In the early medieval era, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Islam put down roots on India's southern and western coasts. In south India, the Middle kingdoms exported Dravidian-languages scripts and religious cultures to the kingdoms of southeast Asia.

Political consolidations gave rise to the loose-knit Maurya and Gupta empires based in the Ganges basin of north India, their collective era suffused with wide-ranging creativity, but also marked by the declining status of women, and the incorporation of untouchability into an organized system of belief. By 400 BCE, stratification and exclusion by caste had emerged within Hinduism, and Buddhism and Jainism had arisen, in part as a reaction, proclaiming social orders unlinked to heredity. The Dravidian languages of India were supplanted in the northern regions. By 1200 BCE, an archaic form of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, had diffused into India from the northwest, appearing as the language of the Vedas, and recording the dawning of Hinduism in India. Settled life emerged on the subcontinent in the western margins of the Indus river basin, evolving gradually into the Indus valley civilisation of the third millennium BCE. Human remains on the subcontinent date to about 30,000 years ago. Their long occupation, initially in varying forms of isolation as hunter-gatherers, has made the region highly diverse, second only to Africa in human genetic diversity. Modern humans arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa no later than 55,000 years ago.

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