The earliest civilization on the Indian subcontinent次大陆（地理意义上的次大陆一般由山脉、沙漠、高原以及海洋等难以通过的交通障碍同大陆的主体部分相隔离） is the Indus Valley印度河流域 Civilization (mature phase: 2600 to 1900 BC) that flourished繁荣、昌盛 in the Indus river basin. Their cities were laid out with geometric regularity, but no known mathematical documents survive from this civilization.
The oldest extant mathematical records from India are the Sulba Sutras苏尔巴经 (dated variously between the 8th century BC and the 2nd century AD), appendices附录 to religious texts which give simple rules for constructing altars祭坛 of various shapes, such as squares, rectangles, parallelograms平行四边形, and others. As with Egypt, the preoccupation关注、盘算、思虑 with temple functions points to an origin of mathematics in religious ritual程序、礼节. The Sulba Sutras give methods for constructing a circle with approximately the same area as a given square, which imply several different approximations of the value of π. In addition, they compute the square root of 2 to several decimal places, list Pythagorean triples, and give a statement of the Pythagorean theorem. All of these results are present in Babylonian mathematics, indicating Mesopotamian influence. It is not known to what extent the Sulba Sutras influenced later Indian mathematicians. As in China, there is a lack of continuity in Indian mathematics; significant advances are separated by long periods of inactivity.
Pāṇini (c. 5th century BC) formulated the rules for Sanskrit梵语 grammar. His notation was similar to modern mathematical notation, and used metarules元规则（原本的规则，规则的规则，如“暴力最强者说了算”）, transformations, and recursion递归. Pingala (roughly 3rd–1st centuries BC) in his treatise论文 of prosody韵律 uses a device corresponding to a binary numeral system二进制. His discussion of the combinatorics组合学 of meters仪表 corresponds to an elementary最初的 version of the binomial theorem二项式定理. Pingala's work also contains the basic ideas of Fibonacci numbers斐波那契数列 (called mātrāmeru).