There tends to be a knee-jerk reaction from the Western world anytime South Asians even try to say that they had grand civilisations. I see an onslaught of comments about their current economic conditions and how a call centre agent having a "bad" accent means that South Asians deserve to be criticised for every little thing.

as a ~~south asian~~ (stupid label) Indian, some knee-jerk reaction is justified because people tend to believe in exaggerated time scales (for instance, based on projected dates of astronomical events in the Hindu Epics, which predates the bronze age and the war chariot), whereas the westerners don't have a religious attachment and speak a realistic timeline for Homeric epics.

If we are speaking of the classical times: yes, India was on-par with the greco-roman and chinese world; left a cultural imprint on east and south-east asia and traded with the western world too. But the rise of pacifist religions, being in a nice position to be attacked from central asia, and internal strifes basically rendered it useless in the last millenium. Huge population, uncontrolled urbanization and a corrupt education system is the bane of this century. If we don't solve that, no amount of classical civilization is going to help. Germanic people were considered primitive by the greeks and romans, now look where they are!

I can say as an American I've never really had that impression. My impression of all ancient societies including Greeks and Romans but of course Egyptians, Chinese, Persians, Indian cultures, etc there have been periods of rise and periods of fall.

Americans are most acquainted with the Romans and our system of government was designed to take the best aspects of their republic and to prevent the conditions that led to Roman imperialism. The fall of Rome is ingrained in our culture as something to be wary of, that all great civilizations fall prey to.

But it is generally understood that other parts of the world were more advanced at different times or advanced in certain technology beyond their peers at the time.

Marco Polo trade routes to China and through the silk road were popular because of the goods and products europeans couldn't make or cultivate. Even Christopher Columbus was attempting to sail to India as a more efficient trade route and that is why the natives were called Indians.

The ancient temples in India are impressive and certainly many grand civilizations rose and fell on the subcontinent. We are just less familiar with those stories as their origins didn't shape our own as directly.

> from the Western world

You might be overgeneralising just a little bit here as outside the US and the UK, I think few people in the Western world care about the accent of Indians when they speak English, and are not exposed to their call centers anyway.

I think most people are somewhat aware of the civilisations that occurred there.