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>Mauryan empire a little under 1.5 centuries. By comparison, east india company rule lasted a century and the British crown's rule less than that
This is a very dishonest way to obscure the actual facts. Direct rule from Britain lasted for almost 90 years: 1858 to 1947. Even by your numbers then, that's 190 years: longer than the Mauryan empire's whole lifespan, and much closer to that of the Mughals. From there the question remains whether it's the longest "unification", and this mostly comes down to exactly when each of the aforementioned empires could be considered to have "unified" India. By any definition the Mughals united the subcontinent by 1707AD at the latest: but by 1751, less than fifty years on, their effective domain had declined to a few pockets in Rajputana and Bengal. The Guptan Empire on the other hand, while certainly a key predecessor to later Indian states and a major unifying force in the northern half of the subcontinent, never conquered the southern half -- what is today Karnakata, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu never entered their control. The closest they got was ~420AD after the south-eastern conquests of Chandragupta II, but again within fifty years they again lost control of today's Orissa, and even lost large swathes of north+western India to invasions from the steppe. You call GP's post "a lazy opinion backed by little research", but when you dig into the facts I can't see how you could argue that his claim is incorrect. The British Raj alone seems to qualify as the longest-lasting unification of India before the modern Indian state, and if you include any part of the EIC's rule then it's indisputably so. |