Chapter 14: India and Islam

With the end of the Gupta Empire in 535, India fell into the depths of a political chaos that the arrival of Islam in 712 only exacerbated. The fall of the Gupta Dynasty (320–535) caused a return to the internal political divisions so common to Indian history, while the addition of an external nomadic threat created a new sense of cultural isolation that undermined the collective achievements of India’s Classical Age, which coincided with the Gupta. These achievements did not come to a crashing halt, but they were dramatically slowed. The nomads that threatened India had already destroyed the Roman Empire and had captured northern China; now they cut India off from these once friendly civilizations and turned the Indians inward to try to recover the political unity they had enjoyed during the Gupta Dynasty. These efforts, however, failed as the new era in Indian history (535–1526) produced countless rival dynasties and competing kingdoms. As the total number of Indian dynasties multiplied, their competition with one another created a complex political geography with overlapping territories. Within these territories, the authority of Indian kings collided and warfare erupted. From 535 to 1526, political fragmentation and ethnic regionalization are the key descriptive terms in Indian history. This was not a new state of affairs in Indian history; rather, it simply had reached a new level of intensity.

Ironically, as political fragmentation grew, a common experience returned to Indian society. Throughout most of their history, Indians lacked a central government. This general condition of political disunity produced a subtle paradox common to the mosaic of cultures living within the Indian subcontinent. On the one hand, political disunity was so familiar as to constitute continuity, in the sense that it was a regular feature of daily life. On the other hand, the consequences of political fragmentation literally meant that Indians accepted political discontinuity as a universal aspect of their communal existence. Hence, the ingrained contradiction in Indian culture: the continuity of discontinuity. Living with this cultural contradiction shaped expectations. Since politics had failed to structure a unified pan-Indian community, the influence of religion became a substitute for political authority, serving the people living on the subcontinent as the best organizing principle in their lives. It is not surprising, therefore, that India’s religions developed a monistic outlook.

Monism holds that God the Creator is also God the Creation; the former is God awake and aware of His existence, and the latter is God sleeping and dreaming of the world in which humanity lives. Since the world in which humans exist is really God dreaming, no link exists between what people experience and what really exists; dreams are, after all, merely dreams. Reality is God when He is awake and the dream ends. Life in this world is filled with chaos and misery, so Indians concluded that “life is suffering.” Existence in this world is filled with turmoil, so that death is a form of release, an awakening that allows the human soul to return to the transcendental reality of God and offers the possibility of transcending to a new level of existence.

Monism also encourages a detachment from the immediacy of life, with its disappointments and discontinuities, and offers one an emotional detachment that arms the individual with imperviousness to living that allows one to cope with the hardships and ambiguity of daily existence. By extension, monism also disconnects a person from political society in which he or she would place his or her loyalties on one or another politician or leader, placing those loyalties instead on the transcendental plane that exists after death, a place where certainty, fulfillment, and clarity await. Finally, monism insulates the individual from the acute joys and miseries of human existence by creating a middle way that balances the extremes of daily life, allowing one to deal with the expectations of losses, while treasuring what they have in the present.

Hence, the paradox of the continuity of discontinuity in Indian history created a political environment that, in a sense, sustained itself by insulating Indians from political affairs. Political chaos and its consequences, the regularity of internal warfare, drove kings to violence to try to achieve unification, but this very use of violence ensured that India remained divided. The constant warfare, which produced enormous suffering in daily life, and India’s monism that posited that life is suffering, merged to reinforce the emotional detachment that eroded Indian loyalties to existing political systems. Hence, this monistic disengagement created a general lack of commitment to any political society, which seriously undermined the bonds that might hold any political union together. This, in turn, weakened efforts at state formation.

The continuity of political discontinuity already common to Indian history only increased with the threat of nomadic invasion as the state began to fragment after the fall of the Gupta Dynasty. Furthermore, the entry of Islam into India after 712 introduced Indians to a new and dynamic monotheistic religion, one that asserted the existence of only one true God and carried with it an intense intolerance toward those faiths that Muslims considered pagan. Religious intolerance was largely alien to the Indian experience, and it fueled the fragmentation of India’s communal life. Now, religion, the one form of authority that had helped to provide Indians with a sense of unity, joined politics in undermining the possibility of recovering a central government.

Indeed, the new state of affairs in India after the arrival of Islam in 712 went far beyond anything Indians had ever experienced. This is so for three reasons. First, this new level of fragmentation included a sharp sense of geographic isolation imposed on India by the fall of India’s old trading partners, Rome and Han China, which had only recently been overrun by nomadic invasions. This left the Indian subcontinent alone and surrounded by the same pastoral peoples whose military success against Eurasia’s other ancient civilizations encouraged them to keep going, turning their attention to India as a potentially easy target. Second, with the fall of the Gupta Dynasty, India reverted to a system of competing political kingdoms, a normal reaction to the political conditions on the subcontinent but one that ill served the Indian people. Confronting the external pressures the nomads posed required a united resistance, but the absence of a central government precluded this response. Instead, the rulers of India viewed one another with as much suspicion as they did a foreign foe. And third, added to the potential chaos of these nomadic invasions was the rise of Islam as a new religious and military force on Indian’s western frontier. Muslims carried a certainty in their hearts: they were the agents of the one true God. Such a certainty brooked no argument with pagans who believed in other deities, so Muslims stood ready at all times to engage in a holy war against anyone who refused to bend to Allah’s will. The addition of this new, intolerant, monotheistic faith to Indian life between 700 and 1500 increased the intensity of internal divisions by adding a new level, that of religious hostility. India’s native monisms encouraged toleration of all life’s illusions, including rival faiths. The idea that a new religion would deny the existence of any other faith was completely alien to the Indian experience.

The collapse of India into a myriad of rulers and dynasties took place after the fall of the Gupta.

Internal Fragmentation

Almost all other world history textbooks that consider the history of India from 535 to 1000 do not include an account of the fragmentation of the subcontinent into a great many states and dynasties. Instead, most other texts skip ahead to the invasion of the subcontinent by Islamic forces, for that is the central issue that dominates Indian history from that point until the modern era.

To skip this portion of the narrative, however, is a mistake, even if we risk committing the deadly sin that the historian Arnold Toynbee coined when he said that some historical accounts were so detailed as to read like, “one damn thing after another.” That said, if one simply skips over this period, how will she or he get a sense of the degree of fragmentation that India underwent during the period?

The authors of this text have, therefore, chosen to fill the gap by electing to consider twelve major rulers and dynasties of post-Gupta India that tried to reunite the subcontinent after 535. To a degree, Toynbee’s lament about the proliferation of details is not a crime, because the complexity of the narrative makes the case that India was splintering into so many political systems that they literally filled the landscape. In another sense, the complexity of the narrative belies the fact that this account addresses the history of only twelve dynasties out of many hundreds.

The collapse of India into a myriad of rulers and dynasties took place after the fall of the Gupta. The absence of a strong central government signaled weakness, which drew the attention of nomadic groups. The first such group to consider an invasion were already active to the west of India. These were the “White Hun,” or the Hephthalites¹ a branch of nomads called the Juan-juan, dominated Central Asia from 407 to 553. The Hephthalites moved into and occupied Bactria by 425, after which defeat by the Sassanian Persians drove them into Gandhara, in 428. Just north of India, Gandhara became a springboard for invasion of the subcontinent from which the Hephthalites raided the Punjab and Hindustan from 430 to 530, rampaging as far south as Malwa, the district just below the Sutlej River. Once inside Indian territory, the Hephthalites destroyed urban and religious centers alike. These nomads sought plunder, and both types of sites offered rich rewards. The rest of India survived thanks to Yasodharman of Malwa, who defeated these invaders in 530. Thereafter the Hun returned to Kashmir, where they continued to rampage for the next two decades.

Several other Indian rulers claimed victory over the Hephthalites as well, as the division of India into petty kingdoms had begun. Among the more than thirty major dynasties and countless minor ruling families, several stand out. The first is the short-lived empire created by a man named Harsha. In the course of his reign, from 606 to 647, Harsha created a hegemonic state comprised of the entire Ganges River basin, sweeping west to subjugate the rest of northern India. He had planned to reestablish the Gupta Empire, but, as he had no heir, his realm did not outlive him. Although he had planned to create an integrated monarchy, he only managed to establish a realm held together by a loosely organized patchwork of feudal states. Upon his death in 647, these numerous states simply collapsed into petty kingdoms committed to fighting one another until the rise of the Pala Empire (750–1174).

To the south, a complex realm took form under the Chalukyas. Established by Pulakesin II (608–642), the Chalukyas ruled the Deccan district in west, central India until their system broke apart in 1189. The Chalukyas claimed descent from Pulakesin I (reign 543–566), but their true founder, Pulakesin II, built the empire. Pulakesin II conquered all his neighbors and even stopped an invasion from the north when he faced down Harsha in a successful standoff that launched the Chalukya political adventure.

Pulakesin II became the overlord of all the lands south of the Godavari River, elevating southern India onto an equal footing with the north for the first time in Indian history. After Pulakesin II’s death in 642, his realm broke apart: the Badami Chalukyas claimed the center and ruled from Valapi (modern-day Badami). The Eastern Chalukyas ruled the Andhra Pradesh province of eastern India. The Western Chalukyas fell to the Rasktrakutas in 753 who then ruled the western Deccan, and captured Badami territory, to function as a rival of the Eastern Chalukyas until 982. Then the Western Chalukyas reasserted their sovereignty and recovered the western Deccan, which they ruled until 1089.

To the north, the Pala Empire emerged a century after Harsha’s death and conquered his former territories. The name Pala meant “protector” and served as a suffix in all names of this dynasty’s rulers. The founder was Gopala, who reigned from 750 to 770; he established control over Bengal. His successors, Dharmapala (reigned 770–810) and Devapala (reigned 810–850), expanded the empire across northern and eastern India and brought to an end the era of anarchy that followed Harsha’s death. For the next four centuries, an age of Pala prosperity encouraged harmony between Buddhists and Hindus that led to the flowering of both faiths. Hence, the Palas tried to restore the heritage of the Guptas until the Sena Dynasty overthrew the “protectors” of northern and eastern India in 1098.

Prior to the fall of the Palas, another northern regime added complexity to the region. The Gurjara-Pratiharas comprised a political group of principalities that existed in a feudal relationship to a royal Gurjara clan. This political organization rivaled the Palas to the east and the Rasktrakutas to the south, as all three claimed the same territory, the Kanauj triangle. The area took its name from the triangulation of the three claimants, the Palas to the northeast, the Gurjara-Pratiharas to the northwest, and the Rasktrakutas to the south. The triangle itself centered on the city of Kanauj, located on the Ganges River, which served as the capital of Harsha’s old empire and, later, functioned as a Brahmin center after Harsha’s death. All three dynasties disputed this region, with the Rashtrakutas making the greatest headway under Govinda III (ca. 793–814); he overran the triangle during his reign.

Meanwhile, the Sena Dynasty (1098–1225) conquered the Palas after an obscure history as their servants. The Senas originated in Karnata country in Southern India. How they got to Bengal is a mystery. Some sources claim that they migrated under the leadership of an aged ruler, Samantasena (ca. 975–995). Other sources say that the Senas migrated to Bengal after Samantasena’s reign. Yet further sources claim that the Pala recruited the Senas as officials to serve in Bengal. Once they took up residence in the north, the grandson of Samantasena, Vijayasena (reigned 1098–1160), overthrew the Palas and captured Bengal. Once in power, Vijayasena and his heirs established a religious policy that resulted in the formation of orthodox Hinduism, while Buddhists began a migration out of Bengal, which led to their residence in neighboring provinces.

To the south, the Katatiya Empire claimed power as descendents of the Western Chalukyas. Katatiya Gundaya is the first known historical figure of this Katatiya Dynasty. He sacrificed his life in the service of the Rashtrakuta monarch Krishna II (reigned 878–914) while fighting the Eastern Chalukyas. Krishna II acknowledged Kitartya Gundaya’s sacrifice by making his son, Eriya, the ruler of Kurravadi, near modern Warangal. The Katatiya then continued to serve their Rashtrakuta masters for several generations winning further grants of territory. Finally, Prola II (reigned 1076–1108) and his younger brother Beta II broke with the Chalukyas to establish the Katatiya Dynasty. Prola’s heir, Prataparudra I (reigned 1158–1195), vanquished a number of challenges to his throne and built the Katatiya Empire into a significant power occupying much of the old Chalukya territories.

Somnath Hindu temple destroyed by Mahmud. Photograph taken in c. 1869 by D.H. Sykes, from the Archaeological Survey of India.

Dravidian stone temple at Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu, India.

On the southeastern frontier of the Chalukyas were three Tamil dynasties: the Pallavas, the Cholas, and the Pandyas. The Pallava’s ascent to power began under two rulers, Mahendravarman I (571–630) and Narasimhavaraman I (630–668). Both built the Pallava dynasty by capturing the Telugu region (modern Tamil Nadu). The Pallavas dominated this region from the sixth to the ninth centuries, but they found themselves locked in a bitter conflict with the Chalukyas, Cholas, and Pandyas. Also the Pallavas became famous for their patronage of Dravidian architecture and sculpture, for they left a legacy of brilliant temples.

The Cholas rose to power south of the Pallavas. The Cholas overthrew the Pallavas in the ninth century and built an empire that stretched across the Gulf of Mannar to reach Sri Lanka and the Maldives (islands) south-west of India. Vijayalaya (848–871) established Chola control over Tanjore by defeating the Pallavas, and their temporary allies, the Pandyas. By the end of the ninth century, the Cholas spread into the Indian Ocean and opened trade relations with the Middle East, China, and Southeast Asia. The introduction of wealth from this commercial network enriched the cities on the southeast coast of India and stimulated the arts, literature, and architecture.

The Pandyas resided on the southern tip of India to generate a long history during the ancient era. Much later, the Pandyas served as yet another Tamil kingdom that fought constantly with the Cholas and the Pallavas. They suffered defeat and subordination to the Cholas from 848 to 1250, until the reigns of Maravman Sundara Pandiyan and Jatavarman Sundara Pandiyan in the thirteenth century recovered Pandya independence. Like the Cholas, the Pandyas thrived on trade, enriching southern India with commercial contacts via the Indian Ocean.

Finally, the Hoysalas were hill people of the Malnad Karnataka district, an elevated region in the Western Gnat range of India. In the 1100s, the Hoysalas organized a kingdom in the southern Indian district of modern-day Karnataka and the rich flood plain of the Kaveri River delta. They did so by taking advantage of the bitter struggle between the Chalukyas and the Kalachuri, a short-lived dynasty of the Deccan. The Hoysalas annexed a broad area in the central Deccan and built a powerful kingdom that lasted from 1026 to 1343. The Hoysalas are important because they also supported the arts, literature, and religious thought of southern India.

The mention of these prominent northern and southern Indian dynasties merely touches the surface of a few of the thirty or more major kingdoms and countless minor realms that struggled to survive during this era of political fragmentation. Each of the above political systems carved out a space within Indian territory, dominated their empires for a time, and fought one another in countless wars. This condition of internal fragmentation and internecine warfare weakened India and exposed the subcontinent to a far more aggressive power waxing mighty on the western frontier: the warriors of Islam.

The Arrival of Islam

As Islam spread into the Indian subcontinent, the circumstances of life there changed dramatically, the Muslims adding a new dimension to Indian history. Although they adopted Indian ways to increase their holdings by joining in the internecine warfare characteristic of political life on the subcontinent, and they behaved much like the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jaina kings that preceded them to form countless feudal alliances, the Muslims defined themselves in a manner completely alien to India. This difference being that India’s Muslims belonged to the larger Islamic world centered on Mecca.

Islamic and Indian societies originated in two completely different cultural environments. The Muslims in India may have acted like Indian rulers, but these servants of Allah could not escape their sense of belonging to Dar ul-Islam, the abode of Islam. The abode defined all Muslim conduct; it required that India’s Muslims face Mecca when they prayed; that they maintain Mohammed’s five pillars, that they practice Sharia law, and that they occasionally undertake Jihad (see chapter 12). After trying but failing to impose their will on Indians directly, Muslims found themselves surrounded by idol worshippers who they could not convert and who vastly outnumbered them. This forced the Islamic rulers to tolerate those pagan subjects who had survived the initial onslaught of the Islamic invasion; in no other way could Muslims hope to maintain political power. Normally, Islam required the conversion of all worshippers of false gods. In this case, however, Muslim rulers did not have sufficient numbers to impose their will.

The solution was to extend to unconverted Indians the same protection offered elsewhere to People of the Book, the Jews and Christians who had refused to give up their faith and become Muslims. Called dhimmis (protected people), these people lived peaceably within Dar ul-Islam but paid a tax for this privilege. This allowed the continuation of monistic rituals within a community whose overlords believed they were surrounded by disbelievers. Finding this level of tolerance, with its financial benefits of creating a new tax base, however, could only occur after Islam had taken up residence in India. Hence, before the status of dhimmis could be extended to the native monistic faiths of India, jihad had to prevail, which added a major new level of tension to Indian society.

Muslims unleashed in India a series of raids and conquest that set the tone for the political history of the subcontinent from 712 to 1526. As mentioned above, before this time India suffered a sense of cultural isolation and a regular series of internecine wars that created an unprecedented episode of internal division. Then came the foreign assaults carried out by the Muslims who invaded India, destroyed Buddhism on the subcontinent, and established several Muslim overlords who produced a completely new cultural experience for Indians.

The northern half of the Indian subcontinent took the brunt of these Muslim raids because its flat plains, cleared agricultural fields, and large cities made it a likely target. There, Buddhism had become a largely urban religion, highly visible, and vulnerable to the Islamic onslaught. To the south, most Hindus continued their daily existence, doing their best to ignore the raids taking place to the north. Accordingly, they struggled with local political divisions while leading the lives prescribed by their caste system. Thus, southern Indians experienced the two complementary features common to their cultural existence during these middle years: continued political chaos and local Hindu detachment.

In the eighth century, Muslims began to infiltrate India by both peaceful and violent means.

The Muslim invaders in the north belonged to the general expansion of Islam that exploited the land bridge of the Middle East to invade in all directions after the death of Mohammed in 632. These Muslims created a vast new empire in the Middle East, bringing with them the fury and passion of their monotheistic faith. This religious intensity did not brook compromise with pagans and idol worshippers. Treating the Buddhists, Hindus, and Jainists of India as ignorant creatures worshipping false gods, these Muslims unleashed the ferocity of jihad. Ethnically Turk and Afghani, these Muslims had to import Arab and Persian Islamic scribes, administrators, artists, and other educated personnel to carry out the functions of government. These Turko-Afghans practiced the simplest form of jihad, holy war. They did not focus on the refined definition of jihad that dwelt on the personal struggle to submit to Allah and stressed communal harmony and peace. Instead, these Turko-Afghans focused on the simple destruction of all that represented the false deities of the Hindus, Buddhists, and Jainists and the conversion of the survivors to the one true faith. As a result, they maintained a hostility toward monistic religions, something Indians did not understand. For the most part, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism had lived side by side successfully because of the ability of each to claim that all such faiths were manifestations of the same reality. Each group saw reality as the ineffable oneness of existence in which the creator and the creation were the same. Islam, however, could not tolerate such a claim. It proposed the reality of one true, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient God who created this world, which existed apart from Him as the transcendental author of all that is good.

Mahmud of Ghazni receiving a richly decorated robe of honor from the caliph al-Qadir in 1000. Miniature from the Rashid al-Din’s Jami’al-Tawarikh.

In the eighth century, Muslims began to infiltrate India by both peaceful and violent means. By 712, Arab military commanders occupied Bachunistan and Sindh, in modern Pakistan. A century and a half later, Sindh was an independent Muslim kingdom. Meanwhile Persian Muslims took control of the lands between Iran and the Amu Darya River in Uzbekistan. Turkish tribes in this territory then switched from Buddhism to Islam and joined the drive toward India. Also, from 700 to 900 Arab merchants settled in permanent colonies along India’s southwest coastline to inhabit the old Roman trade routes linking India to the Mediterranean. Indian rajas encouraged these newcomers by allowing them to practice their faith and by incorporating them into the existing social structure by granting them jatis (a term that denotes forming a community in India based on birth within a caste, which usually becomes part of a person’s name).

Far less peaceful then these Muslim merchants, a new community of invaders took up residence in Afghanistan during the tenth century. A Turkish slave-soldier named Abu Mansur Sebük Tigin (942–997) established a new dynasty in Afghanistan after serving his master, a local ruler, faithfully. Sebük Tigin married his master’s daughter, served as his general during a rebellion that established the master as an independent ruler, and was elected the new sultan upon the death of his master’s sons. Sebük Tigin proved to be a successful and popular ruler, creating a large kingdom that his own sons could inherit. Succeeding his father, Ismail of Ghazni, Sebük Tigin’s youngest son, by-passed his older brother, Mahmud, and seized the new sultanate. Mahmud rebelled and defeated his younger brother to take over the new Afghani-Turkish realm. After claiming power, Mahmud developed plans to invade India

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) vowing to convert or chastise all non-Muslims within his reach, launched seventeen raids into India. Attacking between 1001 and 1027, Mahmud targeted Hindu and Buddhist temples for destruction, for they were pagan centers of worship and depositories of vast quantities of wealth. He invaded the upper Indus River valley and the Punjab region to loot and to destroy. Winning all his battles, Mahmud carried off vast quantities of wealth and slaves. Beginning with simple pillaging and advancing to the capture of the temple cities of Thanesar (1012), Mathura (1026), Kanauj (1018), and finally Somnath (1026) in northeast India, Malmud killed or converted Hindus and Buddhists alike while stripping their places of worship of all portable wealth. Plunder and slaughter fit well within his definition of religious passion and left him with a clear conscience as he prepared to launch his next set of raids. When he died on April 30, 1030, he had established a Muslim dynasty that continued attacking India for the next century, while the Hindus and Buddhists who met these raiders developed a deep hatred for Islam that did not bode well for the future.

Between 1151 and 1191, Muhammad of Ghur put an end to the Ghaznavids in Afghanistan, established the Ghurid Dynasty, and launched his own invasion of India. He and his heirs, however, came to India with the intent of staying. Raiding the Punjab, the Ghurids took control of northern India by 1206. Adding the cities of Delhi, Kanauj, and Banares to gain control of the Punjab, the Ghurids built a realm that swept across the entire north and conquered the Sena rulers of Bengal. Thus, by the thirteenth century, Islam had taken a firm hold of north India.

As they swept through the north, the Ghurids effectively destroyed Buddhism as an Indian religion. At Nalanda, east of Bengal, the Muslims found a rich target for their religious passions and destroyed a Buddhist monastery that housed 100,000 monks who taught in a great university as the principle intellectual center of this religion. During their assault the Muslims slaughtered everyone in sight, closed the center, and caused the survivors to flee to Nepal and Tibet, where Buddhism continued.

Hinduism did not fare any better. At Baranes, just northeast of Nalanda, a similar Hindu intellectual center suffered the same fate. Yet, Hinduism had a strong rural base in India, while Buddhism had occupied most of northern India’s cities. Being urban, Buddhism was a highly visible target, but Hinduism blended into the Indian countryside, where it could not easily be rooted out. Hence Muslims managed to eliminate one principal Indian faith but not the other.

Meanwhile, India’s political tradition of chronic disunity did not help native efforts to stop the Muslim invaders. Constant rivalry between Hindu rajas reduced India’s military effectiveness, hampering efforts to mount a sufficient resistance to the invaders. Therefore, the Muslims faced tough local opposition, but only a feeble general defense against their onslaught as they toppled one Indian ruler after another. Only disease functioned as a natural barrier to Islam’s advance, but it could only slow, not stop, the onslaught. Furthermore, many of the native Indian pathogens had already been shared with the Eurasian world during the brisk trade conducted at the end of the ancient era.

At Nalanda, east of Bengal, the Muslims found a rich target for their religious passions and destroyed a Buddhist monastery that housed 100,000 monks who taught in a great university as the principle intellectual center of this religion.

Attempting to extend their conquests into southern India, however, Muslims ran into unexpected barriers. Unlike the north, where cities, an infrastructure, open agricultural fields, and broad, flat plains invited conquest, southern India offered a far different landscape. The broken geography of rugged hills, mountains, and plateaus supported native Indian strongholds, where local rajas continued to rule in relative isolation while the warring dynasties of the region, the Chalukyas, the Cholas, the Pallavas, and the Pandyas, continued to fight one another. The lack of an established infrastructure coupled with a complex topography and native armies denied Islam access to any district south of the Narmada River. Hence, native rulers continued to control southern India, where native religions continued to flourish.

Hindu Revival

Among these native faiths, bhakti Hinduism flourished under the protection of local rajas. During the seventh to the tenth centuries, bhakti Hinduism took root in the south before spreading north throughout the Indian subcontinent as part of a major religious revival. Bhakti became the most popular form of Hindu worship as it developed into a devotional faith that offered the hope of salvation in a single lifetime. Bhakti Hinduism had multiple gods and saints. The major gods were Vishnu, Shiva, and Devi. Vishnu the god of continuity and life, took many forms in his nine incarnations; he became the bhakti deity that was most popular in the north. Shiva was the god of discontinuity, death, and creation and proved most popular in the south. Devi was a mother goddess that functioned as the female aspect of male divinity. Sixty-three Shaivites (devotees of Shiva) called Nayanars, and twelve Vaishnavites (devotees of Vishnu) called Alvars, composed the earliest Indian bhakti saints. Centered on temples instead of Vedic sacrifices, the rise of this devotional form of Hinduism constituted a renewal of Indian religiosity just as Islam invaded the subcontinent. Protected in the south by independent native rulers, bhakti Hinduism functioned as a religious barrier to the Islamic onslaught, even as this form of Hinduism spread north. This religious renaissance marked a cultural flowering of Indian civilization that, for the first time in Indian history, spread from south to north.

Hindu sacred picture. In this image Sri Chaitanya, who was born in 1486, is shown performing a ‘kirtan’, a devotional song, in the streets of Nabadwip, Bengal.

Since the south had not developed as strict a sense of social division as the north, southerners did not absorb all the castes of Hinduism. In much of the south the main distinctions between Brahmins and non-Brahmins were not as clearly drawn. Hence, southern Indians did not adhere to the issues of karma and reincarnation so rigidly as those in the north. This loosening of caste distinction encouraged devotional faiths, which is why bhakti Hinduism developed so quickly in the south. Once established, bhakti fed an emotional need that supported life during very difficult times; while internecine warfare, foreign invasion, and religious conflict increased in intensity during the years between 600 and 1526, the monistic detachment of a devotional faith sustained Indians throughout the subcontinent.

By the 1400s, bhakti took root in the north, where it spread and inspired significant variations. In the Punjab, Nanak (1469–1539) rejected the caste system of his youth and founded the Sikh religion. Sikhs follow a devotional faith that proposed the existence of a monotheistic god, a nirguna deity (one free of any specific qualities and universal), who welcomed all converts. Nanak was the guru who had access to this deity, but all other Sikhs followed a more monistic faith and approached their god as an ineffable being.

Joining Nanak in creating a new devotional faith was Chaitanya (1485–1533), a religious leader who also rejected caste and inspired intense celebrations filled with singing and dancing aimed at generating an ecstatic state. Chaitanya’s god was saguna, one imbued with attributes that appealed to the worshiper on a personal and individual level. Both Nanak and Chaitanya armed the north with religious passions that buffered native Indians from the spread of Islam.

Delhi Sultanate

While Hinduism enjoyed a revival in the south that eventually spread north, the Muslims established an Islamic regime that became the focus of their political dominance in India from 1206 to 1526. Called the Delhi Sultanate, this feudalistic government did not generate a single dynasty. Rather, it produced five unrelated royal lineages: the Slave Sultans (1206–1290), the Khalijis (1290–1321), the Tughlugs (1321–1398), The Lodi (1398–1414), the Sayyids (1414–1451), and the Lodi once again (1451–1526). For three centuries these Sultans ruled northern India with their capital in Delhi. During its height of power, the Delhi Sultanate ruled almost all of India; at its low point, it barely controlled its own capital.

The Sultanate traced its lineages from the Turko-Afghani military clans that initially forced their way into India under the Mahmud of Ghrazi and the Ghurids. In theory, the Sultans derived their authority from the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258) who ruled from Baghdad. In practice, however, these Turko-Afghanis ruled independently. Yet even this theoretical subordination to an external power collapsed when the Abbasid Dynasty fell to the Mongol invasions led by Genghis Khan and his three grandsons, Hulegu, Batu, and Kublai (1206–1409). These three Mongol grandsons conquered their respective targets: Persia-Mesopotamia, Russia, and China (see chapter 13). The Delhi Sultanate survived this Mongol threat, but such powerful nomads on the northern frontier returned India to its sense of cultural isolation.

The authority of the Delhi Sultans derived from their ability to blend into India’s political fabric. Just as the native dynasties that preceded the Muslim invasions maintained power by constant warfare, alliances, and feudatory bonds, these Muslim rulers built their regimes on precisely the same political style. Added to the violence of each campaign season, subordinate kings, state officials, courtiers, wives, sons, and daughters posed a constant threat to each Sultan. They engineered rebellions, coup d’états, and assassinations that any Sultan faced. The shifting sands of power seemed to be the only certainty that the Delhi Sultans knew because their power waxed and waned from season to season. Wherever they extended their authority, the Delhi Sultans appointed Muslims as vassal-officials, so that the rule of Islamic overlords became general. But since these appointments relied on personal bonds of loyalty, many such subordinates led to the coups and rebellions that undermined power for a particular Muslim lineage. Nonetheless, the use of Muslim subordinates was how Islam spread throughout western and northern India.

The first Delhi dynasty, the Slave Sultans, got their name from their founders, the mamluks. Mamluks were soldiers who had been captured as boys just before puberty, enslaved, and trained in special military schools to dedicate their lives to warfare and their masters. The Ottoman Turks developed the same technique of military training, but called their soldiers janissaries. Both mamluks and janissaries proved to be ideal soldiers, the enslaved boys developing a love for their masters who had imprisoned them. The special schools that trained the boys converted them to Islam, and talent in these schools was rewarded with extraordinary promotions.

The mamluk founder of the Slave Dynasty, Qutbuddin Aibak (reigned 1206–1210) took control of the first Muslim state of northern India from the Ghurids when his master, Muhammad Ghori, died and his sons became locked in a power struggle. Prior to Muhammad Ghori’s death, Qutbuddin was his master’s most trusted general, one who had captured Delhi in 1193, adding northern India to his master’s realm. Qutbuddin also combined these new conquests with Afghanistan and Pakistan to establish the first Islamic administration in all these lands. When the last of Muhammad’s sons was assassinated, Qutbuddin finally proclaimed himself sultan, but he met with death shortly thereafter.

When Qutbuddin died in a polo accident, impaled on the pummel of his saddle when his horse fell, Qutbuddin’s son-in-law, Shams ud din Iltutmish (reigned 1211–1236) rose to power. He secured the new kingdom’s northern frontier even as Genghis Khan was overrunning the realms of the old Ghurid holding in Central Asia. Iltutmish reaffirmed the Sultanate’s control of Sindh, Rajasthan, and Bengal after all three threatened rebellion prior to his rise to power. He pacified the Hindus by granting them dhimmis status. His daughter Raziyya (reigned 1236–1239) succeeded him after his death in 1236, but she died by an assassination carried out by her palace guards. Raziyya had risen to power as the only Muslim female to rule in India because Iltutmish had realized that his two sons were incompetent. Her ascent to power led to riots of protest that she put down, but she never really gained control of the realm. One of her assassins, Ghiyas ud din Balban (reigned 1265–1287), took control of the Sultanate and proved to be a competent ruler, but his sons failed to follow his lead. Now, Jalal ud din Firuz Khalji (reigned 1290–1296) established the Khalji dynasty.

The Khaljis, of Turkish descent, had long settled in Afghanistan, rising in power in the service of the Slave Sultans. The Khaljis expanded into the Deccan and spent much of their energy protecting India from the Mongols to the north by repelling repeated attacks from 1299 to 1306. The Khaljis’ campaigns in the south allowed Muslim power to penetrate as far as Madurai on the southern tip of India; now the rulers changed their title to the Turkish term, Shah. But Khalji command of the subcontinent did not last beyond the reign of their most successful Shah, Alauddin Khailji’s (reigned 1296–1316). Immediately after his death, his realm, beset by rebellion, began to break apart.

Ghiyas ud din Tughlug founded the next dynasty, the Tughlugs, and restored the title of Sultan in 1320, but he ruled for only five years. His son Muhammad proved more enduring (reigned 1325–1351). He spent his life fighting, trying to integrate his winnings into a firmly based empire and even attempted, but failed, to move his capital 500 miles south into the Deccan. Despite all his efforts, his administrative innovations and his extensive plans to consolidate his hold on India, Muhammad’s realm was still riddled with rebellion and warfare. After Muhammad died in Sindh in 1351 trying to quell one such rebellion, his cousin Firuz Shah (reigned 1351–1388) took command of the Sultanate. Firuz Shah proved competent: he won support in his court by restoring many of the estates confiscated by Muhammad to pay for his administrative experiments, but Furiz alienated India’s Brahmins by forcing them to pay the taxes that all other Hindus had to pay. Previous Muslim rulers had exempted these high-caste Indians from this financial burden. After Furiz, no other Tughlug proved competent, and the dynasty fell to the Sayyads.

After a brief Lodi episode of sixteen years (1398–1414), The Sayyads took power in 1414. A Turkish clan, the Sayyads remained in power as Shahs until 1450, when the Delhi Sultanate broke into regional rule. During this time the Muslim vassal-lords of India’s various provinces managed to establish their independence, though still acknowledging the titular command of the Sultanate. Sindh, Gujarat, Malwa, the Deccan, and Bengal became separate Muslim states. The Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar recovered native control of the southern peninsula, and autonomous Indian Rajput rulers took command of Rajitana. The Rajputs formed a major Kshatriya group who took their name from Rajutana, a province on the Pakistan frontier that they reclaimed. During the reign of the last Sayyad Shah’s reign, Alam Shah (reigned 1414–1451), the Delhi Sultanate barely controlled the lands surrounding the city of Delhi itself.

The Lodi followed the Sayyads and reigned from 1451 to 1526. A provincial governor, Buhlul Lodi (reigned 1451–1489) replaced the Turkish Sayyads with Afghani rulers when he took command of the Sultanate in an effort to restore central authority. He succeeded in displacing Turkish influence at court with Afghani supporters, which increased his immediate command of the state and then began to expand outward. His successor, Silanadar (reigned 1489–1517) once again extended the Sultan’s rule to the Indus and along the Ganges rivers. Bengal, however, remained independent. Despite these efforts, Silanadar’s son, Ibrahim (reigned 1517–1526) proved incompetent. He alienated Afghani support at court, undermined his power base, and invited rebellion. His Afghani nobles enlisted the aid of Zahir ud din Muhammad Babur, a Turk who claimed descent from Genghis Khan to invade India, and the Delhi Sultanate came to an end in 1526.

Dhimmis, Being Cared for by the Faithful

As Muslims sought to consolidate their hold on the subcontinent during the Delhi Sultanate, a new relationship between Islam and Hinduism matured. Recognizing the indispensable value of Indian farmers as a tax base, and Hinduism as a far more sophisticated faith than simple paganism, the Delhi Sultanate came to terms with these idol worshipers by bestowing the status of dhimmis (Arabic for “being cared for”) on all their subjects.

All dhimmis (non-Muslims living within Muslim realms) were members of an officially tolerated religion such as Christianity and Judaism. As dhimmis, Islamic law protected Hindus by bestowing specific rights, obligations, and restrictions on them. These rights included protection of life, dignity, and property, the privilege of residing in Muslim territory, the power to choose their own religious leader, freedom to work and trade, and the ability to remain free from slavery. In return they were required to pay the jizya (head tax) and kharaj (land tax). The restrictions denied dhimmis the right to build any new temples, display their religious symbols outside their territories, engage in public prayer, perform their rituals, or wear visible signs of their faith. Nor could they publish or sell their religious texts, seek converts, or marry Muslim females.

Still, the Indian dhimmis were not Christian or Jews, meaning that unlike the former, Hindus did not share a common religious text, the Bible, with the Muslims. Despite being indispensable as taxpayers, these Hindus also persisted in their determination to worship idols. Hence, the Muslims required that they pay an extra heavy jizya and kharaj. As a substitute for conversion, these taxes allowed Muslims to exploit the productive energy of Hindus to provide the food surpluses needed to rule their new territories. Yet, unlike other Islamic provinces where light taxes (meaning lighter than the alms required of Muslims), the jiyza and the khanaj of India came to 6 percent of a Hindu total net annual worth, making it the first income tax in world history.

Beyond this new income, Muslim sultans found Hindu rulers useful after their conquest. To administer the vast space of the subcontinent, the sultans and shahs of Delhi Sultanate learned to exploit rajas as puppet monarchs in their local kingdoms to keep the remaining Hindus quiet. This type of rule made tax collection more efficient, while Hindu monarchs could be weakened to the point where they did not represent a military threat. Thus, Muslim rulers slowly began to spread their influence south after the initial intolerance of Islam adjusted to the tenacity of Hinduism as the dominant religion of India.

At the same time, the Delhi Sultans and Shahs proved too weak to command India as absolute rulers. Always too few in number, the slave-soldiers commonly used by Turko-Afghani adventurers did not provide the Delhi Sultanate with sufficient military resources to impose their power at will. This forced the Delhi rulers to rely on their Hindu allies to maintain control. To this military weakness must be added the court intrigues common to Islamic history in India.

As mentioned above, the Delhi Sultans and Shahs had a history of instability in their court from 1206 to 1526. As absolute rulers, they felt they had to create an environment of fear to secure their power. Intolerant of any form of dissent, the rulers classified criticism as treason and demanded obedience from submissive courtiers as a sign of loyalty. Swallowing their anger, these courtiers harbored deep resentments as they eagerly plotted revenge. Assassination became commonplace in this Muslim realm, with coup d’etats, rebellions, and civil wars plaguing its history. To make matters worse, no agreed upon method of selecting a new heir became standard in the long history of the Sultanate. Rather, transfer of power usually followed some palace plot wherein poison or the assassin’s dagger ended one reign and began another.

Also mentioned above, the Sultan’s or Shah’s only hope of maintaining power lay in his military. In a style of recruitment used by the Ottoman Turks and the Fatimids of Egypt, the Delhi rulers captured young boys and raised them as slave-soldiers. Called mamluks in India and Egypt or janissaries in Turkey, these recruits constituted a full-time professional military with no other loyalties than to the state. As a military force, their discipline under fire grew legendary, but as a body they were easily corrupted. Periodically the military joined in partnership with courtiers to keep the throne open to ambitious and ruthless personalities.

Such a weak central authority made control over India fitful. The ruthlessness and frequent cruelty of a new Sultan or Shah spread the idea of revolt outward. And the taxation required to maintain such an ambiguous political environment doubled the burdens of life among the peasants. Routine coups and counter-coups, bribes and pay-offs, rebellion and civil war made life an unsettling affair; only India’s monistic faiths offered solace to the long-suffering Indian population.

Indeed, the state seemed to be an instrument of karmic punishment for something India had done. Hindus, Janists, and Sikhs felt that government, in general, and Islam in particular, belonged to some hidden monistic message that could only be understood in a religious trance. Hence, meditative escape proved attractive to devotional Hindus, Jainists, and Sikhs. Turning deeper into themselves, they continued to tolerate the illusions of this world while deepening their distrust of politics for having produced a hostile, oppressive state. Unlike anywhere else in the Middle East where Muslim authority prevailed, in the Indian subcontinent only a weak fusion of Islam and Hindu culture occurred. The arts, poetry, music, architecture, and language saw Muslim influences penetrate, but a deep rift developed in political and military affairs.

Meanwhile, as we have seen, the Sultans and Shahs of the Delhi Sultanate maintained titular control of the subcontinent. They produced numerous dynasties that vied with one another, and they managed to keep India free of the Mongol invasions generated by Genghis Khan and his kin. They ruled in a style typical of native kings: internecine warfare, alliance, feudal bonds, rebellions, and assassinations. The one time that they did fail in maintaining their over lordship of India occurred during the era of Timur the Lame (1336–1405).

Also called Tamerlane, Timur the Lame rose to power in Central Asia among a band of Mongols that had adapted to Turkish culture. Timur aspired to duplicate the achievements of Genghis Khan and rampage throughout Central Asia, the Middle East, and India to achieve this goal. As a Turkish-Mongol leader whose life of plunder terrorized the interior of Eurasia, Timur represented a Muslim more interested in pillage than political consolidation. Sensing the weakness of the Delhi Sultanate, Timur swept through India, leaving destruction in his wake.

After plundering the Punjab and sacking Delhi, he slaughtered anyone he did not enslave. Taking vast supplies of wealth, food, and people when he retreated, famine and then disease followed his withdrawal. The Delhi Sultanate never fully recovered from the blow Timur dealt them, and political fragmentation resumed. Thus, the common and chronic feature of its political history, internal division and chaos, emerged during the last days of the Delhi Sultanate.

As mentioned above, Ibraham Lodi (1517–1526) proved incompetent and found himself confronted with rebellion throughout his territory. A powerful confederation of rebels critically weakened the Lodi Dynasty. When one of the rebels in the Punjab invited the Turkish-Mogul adventurer, Babur the Tiger, into the struggle, the end of the Sultanate quickly followed.

Babur (1483–1530) claimed to be a descendent of Timur the Lame, and, through him, a distant relative of Genghis Khan. Like these violent predecessors, Babur lived off the tradition of raid and plunder so cherished by Mongol nomads. Yet, Babur’s ambitions exceeded the simple goal of raid and pillage that seemed to satisfy Timur the Lame. Babur wanted to create a realm of his own and jumped at the chance of entering India at the invitation of a Punjab ruler who had rebelled against the Delhi Sultanate. Once in the subcontinent, Babur began a conquest that he later claimed had always been in the forefront of his mind: the capture of Hindustan. India simply represented too much of an opportunity for this adventurer to ignore.

Babur took a small army into India and crushed whatever force the Sultan sent against him. As part of the sixteenth-century gunpowder empires that included the Ottoman Turks and the Safavids of Persia, the czars of Russia, and the modernizing states of Europe, Babur used cannon to great effect in his war of conquest. Defeating the Sultanate decisively at Panipat, Babur occupied Delhi in 1526 and began the Mogul Empire (1526–1857). The word Mogul itself is a name that came from the Persian word for Mongol, to which Babur attributed the lineage of his new dynasty.

The Mogul Empire represented a new era of Indian unity, the successes of which seemed to equal those of the Mauryas and the Guptas. Belonging to a later story, the Moguls represent here a culmination to an era of political chaos. Before their ascent, India staggered through nearly a thousand years of internal division both in politics and religion. India’s recovery from the fall of the Gupta Empire did not generate a new era of cultural order; rather, India suffered the opposite extreme, becoming a civilization with ancient faiths like Buddhism and Hinduism that tried to cope with the unmistakable and intolerant presence of a powerful new faith, Islam. The former ceased to exist on the subcontinent, and the latter survived through the imposition of a new and heavy tax burden.

The seemingly endless lists of names and places caught up in the complex dynastic struggles that plagued Indian history from the fall of the Guptas to the rise of the Moguls reveal the level of political disorder that accompanied religious conflict during these middle years of world history.

CHAPTER 14

India and Islam

Internal Fragmentation

The Arrival of Islam

Hindu Revival

Delhi Sultanate

Dhimmis, Being Cared for by the Faithful

Suggested Reading

India