Well yes, it also takes a lot of previous economic development and advances in metalworking, among other things. Wasn't India pretty close to industrializing IOTL before the British Raj swooped in?
Well, India certainly maintained
quality and quantity of production, and Indian textiles in particular were a star performer due to efficiency-raising innovations (and discussions of "deindustralization" in British India tend to center around decline in the textile industry caused by attempts to centralize production in new colonial cities or outright deny India the right to produce certain products). But industrialization isn't just about efficiency, it's about power-- using diverse sources of energy/work. Europe had the edge in quantity of windmills/waterwheels even before the steam engine hit. But more than that, Europe had worked out an understanding of vacuums, and accordingly of air pressure. Succeeding studies built on that by looking at the impact of temperature and volume, and
all that went into the successive designs that finally yielded the steam engine. So while India had very sophisticated craft production, I really don't know about "close to industrialization".
But while there's arguments over whether Europe or the northeast US was blessed by geography to have to lots of rivers for waterwheels/timber for windmills, 1) efficiency-saving inventions relevant to a particular field can pop up anywhere with sustained craft production and 2) theories about physics can exist and spread in any climate. Torricelli's experiment to prove that
air pressure can even push mercury against gravity to fill a vacuum is simple to conceptualize, but to arrive at it you need people to ask questions about how a suction pump works (and interpreting the result takes a certain amount of prior theorizing about mass and weight too). And even if we
don't know how exactly Europe got piston-pumps, we know the Islamic world arrived at them-- but
animal-power remained in vogue in the Middle East and India, for... some reason. But just because it isn't used at a societal level doesn't mean a bright spark can't mess with it and find something even more useful (mercury itself kinda falls into that category too-- who'd have thought the alchemist's plaything/deadly poison would be so good at measuring temperature and pressure?).
And with India trying to break into Persia, that bright spark can come from anywhere: the Middle East is probably a terrible place for science now, but India and its universities could still play host to Buddhists from East and Central Asia, and could even be a wonderful second home for Greek texts and Syrian scholars (and evangelists? Christianity needs a future somewhere...)
I do think there's a way out. The wildest (and simplest) way of printed type currently known,
by far, was simply to bake clay moulds of alphabets/letters in a kiln and
Voilà!
It'll be a shoddy job and the individual alphabets may differ in size and shape - hope the Magadhis aren't fussy on letter standardization - but it gets the job done in a hilariously simple way.
An interesting option, but
you could make them out of wood too. Might be less durable, but a handy scholar could probably make a new one himself. And India might see immigration of paper-millers from the former Hephthalite Empire.
Also, I had no idea that Pataliputra would suffer from natural disasters like that in the future. Isn't modern Patna (Pataliputra's successor) a fairly large city? Not as big as Delhi, of course, but what happened in the meantime (other than the floods that you mentioned)?
I even made a thread about that last year, and was honestly pretty optimistic about it.
Of course, if this issue is unavoidable, I can always handwave a big flood in Pataliputra, combined with uprisings elsewhere, as the main reason why the Guptas finally fell at a later date than OTL.
The evidence is spotty (a Chinese reference to a flood here, silt layers there) but the overall picture is coherent even if it's
really weird: for a thousand years (roughly 600-1600) Pataliputra just dropped off the map. No artistic finds can be attributed to it, the archaeological record at dig-sites like Kumrahar pretty much
stops with the end of the Guptas, Nalanda and Rajagriha both eclipse it in importance
as cultural centers, and no prominent political centers are found in Magadha at all. Not even the Muslim accounts of conquering the region talk about it (but they do talk about the sack of Nalanda), and the Delhi Sultanate's authorites used the temple-city of
Odantapuri (later known as Bihar Sharif) as their local HQ. It was the former viharas/temples that defined "important parts" of the landscape (and also gave Magadha its new name of Bihar) by that time, which may also say something about the priorities of the Pala dynasty when they governed Bihar from about 700-1000.
The Ganges then appears to have moved back roughly to where it was before, right around the time that Sher Shah Suri temporarily evicted the Mughals from India, and then he decided to found modern Patna. Irony of ironies, it was the Afghans of Bihar who briefly made Magadha a pan-Indian power for the first time in a thousand years. But the Tarikh-e-Daudi, which talks about the refounding of Patna, acts like Sher Shah Suri was the first guy to ever found a city there.
Based on what vague things we know about the period Pataliputra may not survive, but the rest of Bihar should be culturally and economically vibrant enough (and the Ganges, no matter how its course shifts, will always be an excellent conduit for trade and travel). Still, it'll be a shock the Guptas probably won't overcome.
