India's place in Asia
In 1984 Rakesh Sharma became the first Indian to travel into space. When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi asked him how India looked from up there, he answered with the words Sāre jahān se achchha, meaning better than the whole world. Imagine what India's mountains, plains, desert and coasts look like from that height. Making sense of so much variety starts with knowing where India sits.
India lies in the south-central part of Asia. Its mainland runs from Kashmir in the north to Kanyakumari in the south, and from Arunachal Pradesh in the east to Gujarat in the west. The exact latitudes and longitudes are worked out in the lesson on latitudes and longitudes. India's territory also reaches out to sea, covering the water up to 12 nautical miles (about 22.2 km) from the coast.
India covers about 3.28 million sq km, which is 2.4 per cent of all the land on Earth. That makes it the seventh-largest country in the world. A country this big has room for very different landscapes, and this size is one reason India is so physically diverse.
The large region of south Asia made up of India and neighbouring countries such as Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. It is called a subcontinent because it forms a distinct part of the bigger continent of Asia.
India's land neighbours are Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Myanmar. Two more neighbours are island countries in the Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka and Maldives. Sri Lanka sits just off India's southern tip, separated from it by a narrow stretch of sea made up of the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait.
The peninsula pushes out into the Indian Ocean between two of its arms, the Arabian Sea to the west and the Bay of Bengal to the east. This position by the sea has linked India through sea routes and air routes with West Asia, East Africa, South-East Asia, Japan and Australia.
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