The Penguin History of the World

5 India

The history of India in the thousand years between the fall of the Guptas in 550 and the advent of the Mughal empire in 1526 has neither the clear direction and unity of concurrent Chinese history, nor the chaotic breaks of the history of Europe in the Middle Ages. Instead it shows a plasticity of plural traditions, of cultural exploits based on great learning and great wealth, and a concentration on refinement and self-improvement. The political history of the era may seem chaotic – there were at all times several kingdoms in the region competing for power, as well as several outside empires trying to break in. But – with one major exception – Indian history in this period is neither about outward expansion nor about foreign conquest; it is about contention – peaceful and warlike – among Indians who lived in territories which in most parts were much richer and more fertile than those of any other region of the planet.

The big break in this period of Indian history happens in 1192, when Muslims from Afghanistan broke into the north Indian plain and eventually established the sultanate of Delhi. But one should be very careful with believing that the introduction of Islam, in this case through conquest, provided the only dividing line that dominated later Indian history. On the contrary, the relationships between north and south, between coast and inland and between castes and social groups remained at least as important as the interaction between Hinduism and Islam. Religion is one important determinant of Indian history, but even this aspect was much richer, or more complicated, than the simple Muslim–Hindu divide that nationalist historians have later tried to impose.

Up to about AD 500 Indian history had mostly been about north India, with the south as a kind of appendix where we only see shadows of what is happening. The concentration had to be on the great empires of the north – the Mauryas and the Guptas – and the cultures and identities they created. But after the first half of the first millennium AD this changed, not because the predominance of the north fell away, but because the south gradually developed states and interactions of its own. The first significant southern state was Chola, based on a dynasty that would survive for almost a thousand years on the south-eastern coast.

Before the development of significant regional states began, there was one last attempt at setting up an empire to cover almost all that the Guptas had ruled. In his long reign from 606 to 649, Harsha constructed a state that ruled from the Himalayas to Orissa. It centred on the capital city of Kanauj, where Harsha brought together scholars who developed Sanskrit learning, both in its Hindu and Buddhist forms, and which was to remain the centre of northern Indian culture for centuries after Harsha’s empire collapsed at his death.

Even Harsha had not been able to include south-central India, the Deccan, into his empire – the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang who spent time at his court remembered the king’s frustrations in not being able to overcome the resistance of the southern kingdoms. After Harsha’s death Indian politics gradually settled into a pattern of regional powers that competed for influence, a system that would last up to the twelfth century. In the ninth century, the most powerful of these was the Rashtrakuta state based in the Deccan – the first southern kingdom that aspired (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to control all of India. The other poles of the system were in the north-west (the Gurjara kingdom) and the east (the Buddhist Pala state in and around Bengal). But even if each of these tried to overcome the others, none was strong enough to do so, at least not for long.

The most important aspect of these political rivalries was the unstated implication that one culture, originating from the north, now dominated in all of India. Regional kingdoms might rise and fall, but in each new incarnation they included more of the philosophy, statecraft and science that came out of Sanskrit learning. The building of great temple cities – from Chidambaram in the south to Varanasi in the north – symbolized a common devotion to religion, although with different regional emphases. It was not so much the distinction between Buddhist and Hindu that was the dividing line here as different practices in worship and the personal relationship to gods or saints.

It is likely that it was its attempts at finding popular compromises with Hinduism that led to a reduction in the influence of Indian Buddhism from the end of the Gupta dynasty on. Some scholars argue that the teachings of the Buddha, like other philosophies and religions in India – home-grown or imported – became submerged in the traditions of Hinduism as the prevalent faith and the Hindu gods as the prevalent gods. But, if so, Hinduism’s ability to reinvent itself played an equally significant role, as did pure tradition. From the eighth century on Hinduism, in various forms, took up many of the challenges posed by the followers of the Buddha and presented Hindu answers to them. The great philosopher Shankara (788–820) – typically for the age a southerner, born in Kerala – brought together the rites of different groups of brahmans, arguing that only right knowledge could save the soul from the cycle of death and rebirth. By the tenth century it was clear that the pluralism of Hindu faith had stolen the Buddhists’ thunder. By the twelfth century Buddhism was a thing of the past in its influence on the Indian mainland.

Changes in society also played an important role during this period, especially in the south. From the seventh century the great Deccan cities became increasingly commercialized. Two centuries later merchants in reality ran many of these cities through their great guilds. These guilds, and some companies too, were almost states within the state; they had their own armies, and ships with heavy weapons. They traded north and south in India, well outside their own states, but also abroad, to Persia, Arabia and in African ports. But the main focus of their foreign trade increasingly became South-East Asia. It is likely that this commercial contact stimulated already existing ties, which made this era, up to the thirteenth century, the Indian age in the South-East Asian region.

South-East Asia – the vast region covering the lands from Burma to the Philippines – gradually became a core area of human civilization from the ninth century AD, when large empires such as that of the Khmer and the Srivijaya (in present-day Indonesia) arose and dominated the region. The South-East Asian states developed under the influence of Chinese and Indian empires with which they were in close touch, and in their formative phase the Indian religious and cultural influence was particularly strong. While these contacts almost certainly started through trade, brahman and Buddhist scholars and monks soon followed, in line with their spread (and that of their knowledge) throughout southern India. They became key advisers at South-East Asian courts, playing a similar role in promoting specific forms of spiritual and material development as western missionaries were to do later, and they made a great harvest: by the time the South-East Asian empires developed, they were thoroughly Indianized in culture and religion, with Buddhism and Hinduism the dominant faiths.

In India itself, new social systems developed at the same time as Indian culture spread to large parts of the South-East Asian region. The most important of these was the institution of samanta, ‘neighbour’, which became the nucleus of an Indian form of feudalism. Originally meaning dominant families who had submitted to a king or lord, the term came to signify vassals, whose hereditary rule was supported by a central monarchy and who, in return, had certain obligations to the monarch and to each other. Among these obligations was support in time of war, but also participation in rituals that furthered the legitimacy of the established order. This feudal system existed beside the castes, and a rise to samanta status could also mean a change in caste status, according to what would make a samanta fit in with the preferences of his lord.

Towards the end of the first millennium AD some members of the warrior caste, the kshatriyas, had come to redefine themselves as rajputs – sons of kings – in order to conform to the new social systems (some historians think that the growth of the Rajput clans was also, in part, a reaction against social change). As the competition between Indian empires ebbed and flowed in the ninth and tenth centuries, Rajput clans in northern India were able to carve out territories for themselves as feudatories within one (or sometimes more) of the competing states. Some of these Rajput territories had become semi-independent by the end of the ninth century, and their capital cities became great centres of culture – Jaisalmer, in Rajastan, founded by the Rajput Bhatti clan in the early twelfth century and ruled by them for 800 years, even today gives a glimpse of their grandeur.

Meanwhile, Islam had come to India. It did so first through Arab traders on the western coasts. Then, in 712 or thereabouts, Arab armies conquered Sind. They got no further, gradually settled down and ceased to trouble the Indian peoples. A period of calm followed which lasted until a Ghaznavid ruler, Mahmud, broke deep into India early in the eleventh century with raids which were destructive but again did not produce radical change. Indian religious life for another two centuries moved still to its own rhythms, the most striking changes being the decline of Buddhism and the rise of Tantrism, a semi-magical and superstitious growth of practices promising access to holiness by charms and ritual. Cults centred on popular festivals at temples also prospered, no doubt in the absence of a permanent political focus in post-Gupta times. Then came a new invasion of Central Asians.

These invaders were Muslims and were drawn from the complex of Turkic peoples. Theirs was a different sort of Islamic onslaught from earlier ones, for they came to stay, not just to raid. They first established themselves in the Punjab in the eleventh century and then launched a second wave of invasions at the end of the twelfth, which led within a few decades to the establishment of Turkic sultans at Delhi who ruled the whole of the Ganges valley. Their empire was not monolithic. Hindu kingdoms survived within it on a tributary basis, as Christian kingdoms survived to be tributaries of Mongols in the Middle East. The Muslim rulers, perhaps careful of their material interests, did not always support their co-religionists of the ulema who sought to proselytize, and were willing to persecute (as the destruction of Hindu temples shows).

The heartland of the first Muslim empire in India was the Ganges valley. The invaders rapidly overran Bengal and later established themselves on the west coast of India and the tableland of the Deccan. Further south they did not penetrate, and Hindu society survived there largely unchanged. From the thirteenth century on it is even likely that the spread of Islam in northern India strengthened the role of the south as a self-conscious protector of traditional Indian culture, especially among the Tamils, who themselves only recently had become fully drawn into the Indian cultural circle.

The sultanate of Delhi was established in 1206 and was at its peak until the end of the fourteenth century. It set a pattern of Muslim rule over the Indian heartland that was to last for 700 years. Its first rulers were Turks, originating from Afghanistan, who ruled over an empire that included what is today Pakistan and northern India, as well as the Afghan lands. The sultanate opened India up to influences from the west and, perhaps even more importantly, linked Persia, the Middle East and parts of Central Eurasia to India in a manner of closeness that had never existed before. Art, science and philosophical ideas flowed in both directions. Not unexpectedly, perhaps, mystical versions of Islam – Sufism, especially – took root in India and became dominant at court.

Under the three sultans of the Khalji dynasty, who ruled in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the sultanate reached its apogee. Ala-ud-din, who ruled for twenty years from 1296, was a redoubtable military leader who twice defeated large Mongol armies in the north. In the south he extended Muslim rule to the edges of the Deccan, setting off a strong wave of Islamic cultural influence in the southern parts of India. Unlike in the north, most southern converts to Islam did not take up the new religion because they had been conquered by Muslims. Like elsewhere in the world, some Indians embraced Islam because of its revolutionary qualities: in a highly stratified society, the message that all men were equal in their direct and personal relationship to God could have great appeal.

When Muslim political power came to the south it was in the form of a Tajik general in the sultanate’s army, who in 1346 broke with his Delhi overlords and set up his own regime centred on what is today Maharashtra, but with extensions further south into Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. The Bahmani sultanate, as this kingdom became known, was almost entirely Persianized at court; its rulers composed verse in Persian and attempted to maintain close links with the great Persian cities of Shiraz, Isfahan and Qum. Together with their Iranian patrons, the Bahmanis were drawn towards Shia Islam, becoming the first great Shia-ruled state in India.

The fragmentation of Muslim India made defence against northern invaders more difficult. In 1398 Timur Lenk’s army sacked the Ganges valley after a devastating approach march which was made all the speedier, said one chronicler, because of the Mongols’ desire to escape from the stench of decay arising from the piles of corpses they left in their wake. In the troubled waters after this disaster, generals and local potentates struck out for themselves and Islamic India fragmented. None the less, Islam was by now established in the subcontinent, the greatest challenge yet seen to India’s assimilative powers, for its active, prophetic, revelatory style was wholly antithetical both to Hinduism and to Buddhism (though Islam, too, was to be subtly changed by them).

But not all of India was Muslim-ruled. In the south a powerful Hindu empire arose which ruled all of the southern parts of Deccan and the far south of India from the mid-fourteenth century. Named after its magnificent capital city of Vijayanagara, now in upland Karnataka state, this was a trading empire which kept up the close connections with South-East Asia, and profited greatly through that. It was militarily strong, being the first Indian state to use imported military technology, both from Europe (through the Middle East) and from China (through South-East Asia). But Vijayanagara was first and foremost admired because of its efficient administration and its eclectic religion, in which many strands of Hinduism from the previous centuries were integrated. It symbolized the continuing manifold nature of India, and pointed towards a future in which neither Hindus nor Muslims would be entirely predominant.