Where it is and what it carries
The Indian Plate holds 91% of India along with all of Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. It also takes in about 46% of Pakistan and western Myanmar, and the southern lowlands of Nepal and Bhutan. At sea it covers the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and much of the central Indian Ocean.
Many textbooks merge it with the Australian Plate into a single Indo-Australian Plate. PB2002 keeps them apart, with a diffuse boundary between them in the central Indian Ocean.
What happens at its edges
The northern edge is the collision zone with the Eurasian Plate. Along about 6,000 km, mostly the Himalaya, the two plates converge at about 4.7 cm/yr, reaching 5.4 cm/yr. On the western side the boundary turns into strike-slip faults such as the Chaman Fault in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
In the east, Indian seafloor sinks beneath the Burma Plate along the Andaman Trench, part of the long Sunda subduction system. Relative motion there averages about 2.5 cm/yr.
To the southwest, the Carlsberg Ridge and the Central Indian Ridge separate India from the Somali Plate at about 3.0 cm/yr. In the Arabian Sea, the Owen Fracture Zone is a slow transform boundary with the Arabian Plate, at about 0.7 cm/yr. The boundary with the Australian Plate is the slowest, about 0.5 cm/yr on average, and mostly convergent: the ocean floor there is being squeezed into broad folds.
How India crossed the ocean
India was part of Gondwana, wedged between Africa, Antarctica and Australia. It broke away in the Cretaceous, separated from Madagascar, and then moved north unusually fast for a continent. Near the end of the Cretaceous it passed over a mantle hotspot, and huge eruptions built the Deccan Traps.
As India moved north, the Tethys Ocean in front of it subducted beneath Asia. The continent itself reached Asia about 50 million years ago. Because continental crust is too buoyant to sink, the collision crumpled and stacked the crust into the Himalaya, where Mount Everest reaches 8,849 m, and raised the Tibetan Plateau behind it.
Earthquakes and volcanoes
The dataset lists 48 earthquakes of magnitude 6.5 or larger on the plate since 1900, and 2 reached magnitude 8. Both struck on the same day in 2012 in the Wharton Basin off Sumatra: a M8.6 main shock and a M8.2 aftershock. The M8.6 is the largest strike-slip earthquake ever recorded, and it happened inside the diffuse zone between the Indian and Australian plates.
On land, the 2001 Bhuj earthquake (M7.7) in Gujarat was the most destructive. Western Myanmar recorded a M7.64 in 1946 and a M7.52 near Pyu in 1930, and the Carlsberg Ridge produced a M7.6 in 2003. The great Himalayan earthquakes of 1934 and 1950 plot on the Eurasian side of the boundary in the dataset.
The plate has only 1 volcano in the dataset, Popa in central Myanmar.