In a nutshell? Indian history is apparently very contentious, and on the internet, this results in very heated "discussions" between those who hold competing viewpoints. I won't pretend to know much about the intricacies of all of this, but having both seen it in action, and discussed this issue with several users who are more tuned into these debates, it certainly dampens interest in participation in online communities from those best situated to tackle those topics, as few people particularly like finding themselves in heated arguments that often, as I gather, have strong political subtexts.

To be sure, we would LOVE to have better coverage of that region, as we are well aware that it is a huge gap in our panel, but, well, we can't force people to post here unfortunately.

To add to what Zhukov said, the field of Indian history is fairly young and a lot of it is tied up in politics (national myth making is a good way to say it), which is one of the reasons it's super contentious. I echo his desire to get more people on the topic here, but it's tough to do -- the demographic here is fairly similar to the rest of Reddit, and both our questions and our answers definitely skew towards Europe and the Americas.

I'm somewhat well positioned too answer this, given that I have been here a while and have some contact with Indian history. i would also disagree with the people saying that it is because Indian history is politicized which, sure, is true, but is also true of Middle Eastern, Chinese and European history. I mean there are reams of websites about denying the Holocaust, while I don't think there is a single subreddit denying Asoka's massacres in Kalinga or whatever.^1

I would say that the lion's share of the reason has to do with AskHistorians simply not being representative of the historical community. There are, at most, no more than a couple hundred people with flairs in total, and I doubt more than a quarter are actually active, and of those not all are actually part of academic history (I'll get to this in a minute). Given how broad and diverse the total community of historians is, it means that the flaired users never really provide anything like a representative grouping of any given topic. For example, if you look at the collection of people who work in classical fields (like myself) you'll notice that one pretty major topic we don't have a flair for is Greek literature (really our flair list is crazy Rome-centric, for whatever reason), which is a pretty massive part of classical studies as a whole. So that is part of it: AH is emphatically not representative. Not it's fault, but there we go.

But there are some things about Indian history that make it difficult to get flairs here, namely that it is difficult to get into. Indian history is a pretty small field within the academy, and it is quite difficult to get into without the academy's resources. People don't enter university as blank slates, and what somebody decides to study there (and beyond) is going to be shaped pretty heavily by what they were interested in before. When you consider that for somebody who is in middle or high school and interested in history there is simply far more out there about Britain, or Rome, or what have you than India I think we can safely point to real pipeline issues. Compare this to, say, China, which is equally "distant" to India for somebody from the US or Europe (the majority of the site) but is so much in the zeitgeist that there is tons of material on it, and tons of people talking about it.

The other thing I would say is difficult about Indian history is that it is difficult. Before 1000 or so simply constructing basic connected narrative history can be quite challenging. This is because a lot of the basic narrative for Indian history does not come from histories as such but rather the study of inscriptions. For whatever reason, chronological narrative history wasn't a big genre of Indian literature until the Turkic/Muslim conquests and so if you want to write a history of, say, the Gupta you can use bits and pieces of the copious literature of the period, such as biography, state craft, commemorative pieces, inscriptions, etc but you can't use The History of the Gupta by some guy who lived during or near that period. This is by no means unique to Indian history, for example there are similar issues when discussing anything Persian until the Arab/Muslim conquest. But the difference is that, there, we have help from neighboring peoples who did, for whatever reason, like narrative chronological history, and more to the point "Persia" or "Egypt" or what have you is a rather less difficult--and smaller--conceptual category than "India".

^1 Granted there is a pretty real debate about whether the Maurya meaningfully extended south of the Indo-Gangetic plain, but I don't think it is the sort of thing you make poorly produced YouTube videos out of.

I'm an archaeologist rather than a historian, but my field of research is South Asia - primarily focussed on the Early Historic through to the late mediaeval period (c.3rd century BC to 15th century AD).

That said, South Asian archaeology is a very small field acsdemically so your question definitely has merit.

This is something I ask myself almost everyday. I am someone who is very interested in Indian history, having grown up in India. A while back, I set up a IFTTT recipe to get notified when the title of a post had "India" in it - unfortunately, a majority of the questions went unanswered. I would try to answer when possible, if it was something very simple, but I am not a trained historian or one by profession.

I have been reading the comments here. While history is very deeply tied to politics in India (the article by William Dalrymple is definitely very scary, such things scare a lot of moderate Indians, regardless of background), I don't think that should be a problem online. I volunteer to apply for the Indian flair in a few months if I am qualified.

The other thing is that, as Tiako said, Indian history is extremely vast. Even within popular discourse in India we have many distinctions - national level history which is dominated by discussions about Mughals - and regional history which often no outside the region is familiar with. I frequently say that the best comparison to India is modern Europe - if Europe were a country, with more people, languages and religions - you get India. Add poverty and it is a nightmare! Having lived in different parts of India, I frequently ask questions to which I have yet had no satisfactory answers.

Lastly, about bias. Bias is definitely a real problem in Indian history with many Indians harboring the feeling that Muslim invaders are dealt with too softly in high schools, with the result that right-wing historians opt for the other extreme, demonizing all Muslims in an ugly manner. Finding the right balance is very hard and is something I have been attempting for a while now.