Why is India's history, like China's, and its contributions to mankind so downplayed?

There is something else that many have failed to mention - the fact that while the Chinese, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Egyptians, Jews, etc. assiduously recorded their history (often on non-perishable or well-preserved media), much of Indian history was either unrecorded or poorly-recorded until the Muslim period. Most of what we know about the pre-Islamic period came from external observers (Greeks, Chinese, etc.). We were certainly a highly literate civilisation, but most of our literature was entirely concerned with religion, philosophy, science and mathematics. In addition, many of our oldest works, written on perishable materials, did not survive to the modern day (even the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Vedas are only from the 12th century, and are currently housed in Nepal). Thus, the study of our history was largely ignored by the world (unlike Chinese history) due to a lack of primary historical sources, and Indian history in the West was often picked up by mostly-discredited quacks (who called themselves "Indologists") who wrote Indian history according to their own (often racialist) agendas. Unfortunately, these "histories", although controversial, often came to be regarded as truths in the field of history, since religious texts filled with supernaturalism, like the Mahabharata and Ramayana, cannot be considered to be primary sources in secular academia (however much the Hindutva crowd might argue otherwise).

Secondly, many Indian nationalist historians are not taken seriously because of statements like:

"Sanskrit is the core of all Indo-European languages, we wouldn't be speaking English or French without Sanskrit. It is the mother of most prominent languages."

That's just ridiculous. Vedic Sanskrit is one of the oldest Indo-European languages, but it developed from the older Proto-Indo-European, just like the European branches. Sanskrit is the root of all the Indo-Aryan languages of Northern India, but nothing more than that. When you combine the general lack of primary sources with outlandish statements like this, it's no wonder many foreigners will not even dignify Indian nationalist historians with any sort of acknowledgement.

India has given the world mathematics

India made massively important advances in mathematics, no one denies that. But to say that we gave the world mathematics would be unfair to the even earlier great mathematical civilisation - the Mesopotamians. In any case, the problem is not that India did not contribute to the early development of mathematics - the problem is that we stopped contributing to it thousands of years ago. And no one claims that the Chinese were great mathematicians at all - history very much recognises it as an achievement of the Mesopotamians, Greeks, Indians and Arabs.

Religion wise, people bang on about Jerusalem when India is the birth of Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism and hosts the 2nd/3rd largest Muslim population and the 2nd greatest population of atheists or irreligious people too.

Immense contribution to philosophy.

I have never heard anyone claim that India is not one of the centres of world religion and philosophy. Even in East Asia, they still honour India as the birthplace of Buddhism. Westerners associate India with religion and philosophy more that almost any other nation, and at least on par with Jerusalem and Ancient Greece... I don't understand why you seem to think otherwise?

Great civilisations started off in India, i.e. Indus Valley.

All the Westerners I know who've heard about the Indus Valley Civilisation are fascinated by it. In fact, when I took a history paper in University in a Western country, I was often asked about it by other students. People do know about it, and it is often mentioned in world history courses in foreign countries, even at the high school level. The fact that we cannot decipher the script, however, means that we know very little about it in reality... That tends to make people lose interest quickly, whereas we can fill volumes of history books with our knowledge of other ancient civilisations. As an Indian, I am absolutely enthralled by the IVC, but there is so little information available...

/r/india Thread