That's fair, and I suppose I am looking at it more from the outside looking in, rather than playing as an Indian power. I just feel that, as India gets stretched out, you get further and further disconnected from the central axis of the game, which largely revolves around the Mediterranean powers and their connections. As mentioned in my post (and I'll admit, I can be wrong here!), southern and eastern India seemed to have little connection to the powers of the Middle East and beyond, more focused upon Southeast Asia. I suppose including the entire subcontinent, however, does give Indian powers the possibility of recreating a state on level with the Guptas of old. I just feel that including it begins to stretch the game a little thin, especially with little to simulate southern and eastern India's connections to Southeast Asia (which I guess could awkwardly be covered by CK2's off-map China mechanic, but eh).
Even if you're not playing an Indian ruler specifically, there's a substantial amount of interaction between them and powers with which we're more familiar that most people are probably unaware of. There's a gigantic map concealed by the spoiler tag below which will go a long way toward clarifying the point. The Delhi Sultanate is the principal example that I'll open with, a vast state that at its height stretched from norther Pakistan nearly all the way to Sri Lanka. The founder of the Mamluks of Delhi was a Turkic slave-general named Qutb al-Din Aibak, who started his career in the service of Muhammad of Ghor, an Afghan Ghurid warlord who expanded his territory well into India before pulling an Alexander and falling back to deal with more westerly concerns, leaving Aibak as satrap in his place. And like all good Hellenistic satraps, Aibak ultimately founded a realm to surpass that of his former master.
Second point: one of the great battles of the age of which you'll almost certainly have heard not a word is the battle of Amroha, in 1305. Now, Amroha is fairly northern in India, in fact not all that far from the western limits of today's Nepal. This most unlikely of locations served as the battlefield for two armies: one, in service to the self-proclaimed Second Alexander, Alauddin Khalji, a powerful conquering sultan of Delhi. The opposing army, in this instance, was
Mongol, of all things, a legion of 40,000 cavalry belonging to the Chagatai khanate, led by warlords Ali Beg and Tartak. The Mongol generals were defeated and executed by a Hindu-turned-Muslim eunuch slave-general named Malik Kafur (famed for his beauty - really).
Even as far back as the early 11th century, the empire of Mahmud of Ghazni (so named after his Afghan capital), first of the Ghaznavids, stretched from the southern limits of the Caspian Sea well into north-western India. Southern and eastern India may very well not have been integrated into his realm, but you can be absolutely certain that they were well aware of it. Much of the history of India consists of invaders from the north and west trying to seize its rich bounty for themselves: Mongols, Turks, Afghans, Persians, Greeks, and more. Their isolation from the western powers has more to do with the land between them existing in a hostile state of turmoil, chaos, and strife more often than not. India exists in its entirety not just for the sake of a segment of the playerbase that wishes to unite it, but also for players and the AI to make extremely historical attempts at conquering and ruling it.
