India Before Europe

by Catherine B. Asher and Cynthia Talbot

Completed: February 7, 2021

• History
• 313 pages
• ISBN: 9780521005395
• Goodreads page

★★

While I did otherwise enjoy reading this relatively quick read & I did learn some things, unfortunately the low rating is primarily for two reasons - i) this is a personal preference, but the book discusses architecture and art at length while drawing unreasonably strong conclusions based on this alone. The discussions of economics or even administrative matters is quite superficial. The authors do discuss this up front in the preface, but it worth noting, and ii) at times, the strong conclusions quite obviously don’t necessarily follow from the evidence - it was too easy to come up with many alternative interpretations that the authors don’t address. And worse, while not frequent, there do appear to be logical missteps in a couple of places.

That said, here are some excerpts I found interesting.

Situating India

Historically, there was far more contact and communication between the people living around Delhi and Kabul, separated by only 1,000 kilometers, than between the major cities of north and south India, separated by 2,000 kilometers or more; even Mumbai is 1,400 kilometers distant from Delhi.

At the same time, South Asia has been characterized as a place that was exceptionally susceptible to invasion beginning with the migrations of Indo-Aryan speakers into the subcontinent sometime around the early second millennium BCE. This stands in marked contrast to China, which is typically said to have assimilated its numerous nomadic invaders and thus triumphed over them, or Europe, despite its history of invasion and colonization by Rome, the Huns, Vikings, Magyars, and Arabs.

[Rajaraja’s] successor Rajendra [of the Chola dynasty] completed the conquest of Sri Lanka and went on to dispatch a naval expedition against Shrivijaya, a maritime trading kingdom based on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The victory of the Chola fleet led to fifty years of Indian dominance over the Strait of Malacca, the vital sea passage between the Malayan peninsula and Indonesia through which all trade to and from China was funneled. This was the apex of Indian influence in Southeast Asia, which had assimilated many elements of Indian civilization over the past six or more centuries, including the Sanskrit language, south Indian scripts, and the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism.

In the years immediately after the death of the Prophet Muhammad (d. 632), Muslims had given their allegiance to a single caliph or head of state. Under the Umayyad dynasty of caliphs (661–750) based in Damascus and then the Abbasids of Baghdad, much of the Islamic world had been politically unified, at least in theory. This unity had fragmented by the tenth century, with three different rulers – one in Umayyad Spain, another in Abbasid Baghdad, and yet another in Fatimid Cairo – each claiming to be the sole caliph. While all Muslims would never again be brought together in one state, the tenth-century fear that Muslim dominance was on an irreversible decline proved to be wrong. Instead, the influx of a new group of people, the Turks, would politically reinvigorate much territory ruled under the banner of Islam. From the ninth century onward, Muslim rulers had increasingly relied on personal troops composed of enslaved Turks from the Central Asian steppes. These military slaves or mamluks were considered more loyal than other soldiers because they were taken captive at a young age and owed loyalty only to their master. Many mamluks went on to become prominent generals and leaders in the Islamic world in this era; at the same time, various tribes of Turks were gradually migrating into Muslim lands and becoming Islamicized. Due to their nomadic background, the Turkic peoples were skilled at cavalry warfare.

Some people believe Mahmud was driven mainly by religious zeal while others argue his reasons for attacking Somanatha and other temples were purely economic. It is likely that he was motivated by a combination of incentives – a desire for additional territory and glory for both himself and Islam. What is most significant, however, is that from Mahmud’s time onward we see an increasing amount of rhetoric in literary texts produced by both Muslims and Hindus. India becomes the bastion of idol worshippers in Muslim eyes, whereas Muslims are depicted as evil iconoclasts in Hindu sources; each is cast as the other’s enemy. As we will see, there was in fact much peaceful and fruitful interaction between Muslims and Hindus in the centuries after Mahmud of Ghazni. But a polemical tradition is initiated by Mahmud’s incursions that has been repeatedly claimed in the past century as typical of precolonial Hindu–Muslim relations.

Although Arab sailors and merchants, as well as the early Muslim Arabs who conquered Sind, were no strangers to South Asia, the Muslims who became politically dominant in the subcontinent would typically be Turco-Mongol in ethnic background, horse-riding warriors in occupation, and Persian in cultural heritage.

The expansion of Turkic power, 1180-1350

Muhammad Ghuri was based in Ghazni, the former capital of the renowned Mahmud, and from there he turned his attention eastward toward India beginning in 1175. Like Mahmud, Muhammad Ghuri spent years campaigning in the Indian subcontinent and won victory after victory. Unlike Mahmud, however, Muhammad’s goal was to annex territory and not merely to carry out profitable raids.

Muhammad’s two chief targets in north India were the powerful Hindu kings Prithviraj Chauhan of Ajmer and Jayachandra Gahadavala of Kanauj. After their victory in 1192 against Prithviraj Chauhan at the battlefield of Tarain, about 120 kilometers northwest of modern Delhi, the Ghurid armies immediately set off toward Prithviraj’s capital at Ajmer, seizing forts along the way. In the following year, Ghurid forces under Qutb al-Din Aibak set up a permanent garrison in Delhi, which would become the future center of Muslim power in north India but was then a town of minor military and political significance. The Ghurid forces next moved into the Gangetic valley and defeated King Jayachandra by 1194. While Muhammad Ghuri directed these major battles himself, most of the other campaigns in the heartland of north India were directed by his Turkic slave-general, Qutb al-Din Aibak. Bengal and Bihar in the east, on the other hand, were acquired by a military adventurer, Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji.

Muhammad Ghuri was an aristocrat from a people who were culturally and linguistically Persian; he was a member of the urbane, civilized world. Other elite men from Ghur served as commanders for Muhammad Ghuri in his early years of expansion, but they were replaced almost entirely by military slaves of Turkic origin like Qutb al-Din Aibak after the Battle of Tarain in 1192. Military slaves were more reliable in their loyalties than aristocratic warriors because they had no family allegiances. They were typically non-Muslims enslaved as young boys and converted to Islam. Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji, on the other hand, was a member of a nomadic people who lived to the east of the Ghur region of Afghanistan and were considered of humble social status by others.

Recent historical scholarship instead attributes the victory of the Ghurid armies to a number of concrete advantages that gave them a distinct military edge.

The Ghurids were in a better position than Indian rulers in this age of cavalry warfare both in terms of the supply of horses and of trained manpower. Coming from Afghanistan, the Ghurids had easy access to the high-quality horses of Central Asia, Persia, and the Arabian Peninsula. The Indian subcontinent was, in contrast, ill suited for the breeding of horses. Since indigenous horses were inferior, Indian rulers had long imported horses from the regions to its west by various overland and maritime routes. Imported horses soon deteriorated in quality, however, because most of the subcontinent lacked good fodder and pasture lands. The Ghurids (and the later sultans of Delhi) were highly skilled in deploying horses in warfare. Employing a classic nomadic tactic of the Central Asian steppes, their light cavalry could fan out and flank the enemy from all sides, but still retreat quickly out of range of the enemy’s heavy cavalry charge. The damage inflicted by the mounted archers of the Ghurid light cavalry was considerable, whereas Indian armies had few men accomplished enough to wield a bow while riding, according to the recent work of André Wink. Indian armies instead generally engaged in mass frontal attacks and employed rows of war-elephants to break enemy lines. Slow and cumbersome, the elephant, if panicked, might also inflict serious damage on its own troops.

Other factors also worked to the benefit of the Ghurid forces. Foremost among these was the highly centralized organization of their armies, for the Ghurids had a permanent core of professional soldiers who were accustomed to fighting together. Indian armies, on the other hand, were coalitions composed of the separate fighting forces under individual lords who were called for duty when required. As a consequence, they often failed to coordinate on the battlefield. All of these elements in conjunction resulted in a superior military system or complex that enabled the Ghurid armies to extend the political and cultural frontiers of the crossroads zone of Afghanistan, eastern Iran, and Uzbekistan well beyond the Punjab, where it had remained stationary for nearly two centuries.

By the time of its completion in the thirteenth century, the Qutb Minar was about 83 meters high, making it the tallest minaret in the world, and it served multiple purposes. Too tall for the call to prayer, its practical function was as a watch tower from whose top any approaching army could be seen for miles. Second, it may have been intended as a warning to those who did not convert to Islam, for the Arabic inscriptional bands that embellish its façade tell of the doom that awaits disbelievers on the day of judgment. But the fact that the script was alien in a land where only Brahmins were literate suggests its message went largely unnoticed.

Muhammad Ghuri’s sudden death in 1206 precipitated an intense contest for power among the leading Turkic military slaves upon whom Muhammad had so heavily relied. Because the Indian portion of the Ghurid empire was severed from the home territory in Afghanistan in this power struggle, historians generally view 1206 as the beginning point of the Delhi Sultanate, a solely South Asian kingdom. The true architect of the Delhi Sultanate was Aibak’s son-in-law and successor, Shams al-Din Iltutmish (r. 1210–36).

Paralleling his desire for visual prominence, he also wished to make Delhi a center of learning and culture. He invited the elite, poets, scholars and others, from Central Asia to come to Delhi, where he rewarded them with land and patronage. Many were eager to do so, despite the Delhi Sultanate’s frontier status, once the Mongols began their devastating attacks on regions that formed part of Islamic civilization, starting with Transoxiana (modern Uzbekistan) in 1219. The Mongols, descended from the feared warriors Genghis Khan and Khubilai Khan, twice entered South Asia during Iltutmish’s reign but remained outside the Delhi Sultanate’s territory. As a result, Delhi quickly became a safety net in a time of turmoil.

The last strong ruler of the early Delhi Sultanate was Balban, who wielded effective power from 1249 until his death in 1287…. The greatest threat faced by Balban was the incursions of the Mongols, who by the late 1250s had reached the Punjab. Fortunately for Delhi, internal tensions within the Mongol empire split it into several competing groups around 1260, and the Mongol armies were never again as large. The Mongols were the most reviled enemies of the Delhi Sultanate, described in far more vitriolic terms than ever were any Hindus. In spite of a similarity of language and style of warfare shared by the Turks and Mongols, the Turks had migrated to the Persian cultural sphere much earlier and were now Muslims, whereas the Mongols were still true nomads and followed a shamanistic religion. Eventually the Mongols who migrated to southern Russia, Iran, and greater Afghanistan converted to Islam and assimilated into the Turkic populations of those areas. But in the thirteenth century, the Mongols epitomized the pagan barbarian in the minds of Delhi’s ruling elite. The Mongols compounded their offense when they sacked Baghdad in 1258 and killed the Abbasid caliph, symbolically the ruler of all Sunni Muslims.

The Delhi Sultanate reached its peak during the reign of Ala al-Din Khalji (r. 1296–1316). He was the strongest of all Delhi sultans, centralizing power and ruthlessly suppressing all threats to his authority. The greatest military triumphs of the Sultanate were achieved under the direction of Ala al-Din, who called himself a second Alexander the Great, that is, a world conqueror.

After becoming sultan, Ala al-Din first targeted Gujarat in western India, a prosperous area both because of its agricultural fertility and its maritime trade. In 1299 his army raided the Somanatha temple on the Gujarat coast, well known in the Islamic world since Mahmud of Ghazni’s raid on it in the early eleventh century. Next Ala al-Din besieged the formidable fortress at Ranthambhor in northern Rajasthan, which was ruled by a descendant of Prithviraj Chauhan. As the home of Rajasthan’s most powerful kingdom, Ranthambhor was a logical starting point for Ala al-Din’s bid to subjugate this region strategically situated between Delhi and the route to Gujarat as well as to the Deccan. After capturing Ranthambhor in 1301, Ala al-Din quickly seized the other celebrated fort of Rajasthan, Chittor, in 1303 and in 1305 Mandu, the capital of the neighboring Malwa kingdom in central India.

The critique by contemporaries that Ala al-Din lacked sufficient interest in religion may be accurate, for the sultan’s main concerns were pragmatic. In order to maintain an effective large standing army, he introduced a number of economic and administrative reforms. Many of the new measures sought to increase the amount received by the state in taxes, while others attempted to control the cost of living so that the wages paid to soldiers could be kept low. So, for instance, Ala al-Din greatly enlarged the area directly taxed by the sultan’s own treasury and raised the land tax to the high rate of half the estimated yield. He also enforced strict price controls in the Delhi area on vital items such as grains, cloth, sugar, oil, horses, and cattle.

It is evident from Amir Khusrau’s account that Ala al-Din’s major objective was to acquire booty. Khusrau makes much of the gold, gems, and other precious items offered in tribute by the conquered kings of the Indian peninsula…. So, for example, Khusrau tells us that 20,000 horses and 100 elephants were given up by the Kakatiya king, along with the famous diamond later known as the Koh-i Nur, meaning Mountain of Light.

Although the repeated incursions of Delhi armies had weakened the states of the peninsula, only the Yadava kingdom had been taken over during the reign of the Khalji sultans. Under the Tughluqs (1320–1412), the next dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate, the political and cultural landscape of peninsular India was irrevocably altered. Decisive military actions were carried out by Muhammad Tughluq while he was still a subordinate of his father, Sultan Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq (r. 1320–24). Ghiyas al-Din came to prominence as a fighter against the Mongols and seized the throne after court intrigue led to the death of the last Khalji sultan. He further fortified Delhi by building an immense fortress, Tughluqabad, to the east of the original city of Delhi and Ala al-Din’s city of Siri. Nineteenth-century British engineers who usually scorned Indian military fortifications had nothing but praise for Ghiyas al-Din’s Tughluqabad.

Muhammad’s ambition to directly rule peninsular India and his various visionary projects were a considerable drain on the treasury. In response, Muhammad raised the land tax to an even higher level than had Ala al-Din Khalji, and he added several new taxes. The burden of this increased demand for revenue led the peasantry to rise up in revolt in 1332 and 1333.

The unsettled conditions in the Sultanate’s north Indian heartland may have encouraged people elsewhere to break away from Delhi’s control, for a series of rebellions occurred in the distant provinces from 1334 onward. In a little more than a decade after he became sultan, all the regions that Muhammad Tughluq and his father had added to the empire – Bengal and the former territories of the Kakatiyas, Pandyas, and Hoysalas – became autonomous once again.

The Delhi Sultanate’s military establishment was allowed to gradually decline from Firuz Shah’s reign onward. Its weakness was fatally exposed in 1398, when the great Central Asian warlord Timur invaded India. The Sultanate could muster no more than a force of 10,000 cavalry in defense of the capital, which was easily seized and sacked by Timur’s army for days. After centuries of struggle, Delhi had finally been defeated by the Mongols, for Timur, or Tamerlane as he is known in English literature, was a member of a minor Mongol tribe that had long been settled and undergone Turkic influence. A Tughluq sultan survived Timur’s invasion and lived until 1412, and two subsequent dynasties – the Sayyids (1414–51) and the Lodis (1451–1526) – continued to rule from Delhi. The glory of the Delhi Sultanate had passed, however, and after 1398 it was no more than one among numerous states contending for power in north India.

Moreover, because the authority of the Delhi sultans was often internally contested, it was in a ruler’s best interests to promote himself as pious and therefore legitimate. Hence, military campaigns were described in chronicles not as expeditions for the purpose of amassing plunder but as attempts to spread the religion of Islam. Because of the many political advantages of adopting a militantly Islamic discourse, we must be careful not to take such statements at face value.

It is difficult, however, to get beyond the rhetoric – both of the Sultanate sources that cast its actors as warriors for the cause of Islam and of Indian language sources that portray indigenous leaders as defenders of dharma (righteousness) – and assess the actual impact of Sultanate rule on the people of north India. The group that suffered the greatest loss was undoubtedly those who had occupied the uppermost layer of political authority: the indigenous kings, along with their families and chief followers. These individuals were ousted from political control and their place was taken by Turk, Persian, and Afghan military leaders. Few Indians were permitted to attain high rank in the Delhi Sultanate until the fourteenth century and even then they were almost exclusively Muslims, albeit sometimes recently converted. The Sultanate commanders were few in number; they stayed mainly in the garrisoned cities while the countryside was left largely in the hands of local chiefs and lords. Since the Sultanate consisted of a thin veneer of personnel overlaid on the pre-existing rural power structure, its disruptive effects were experienced mainly by the most elite Indians. For less powerful Indians, life must have continued much as it had prior to the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate. Suggesting this are, for example, graffiti carved by indigenous masons in obscure places on Delhi’s Jami mosque that give the sultan good wishes or thank the Hindu deity Vishvakarma (Divine Architect) for its fine workmanship.

A second group that was most probably adversely affected by the imposition of Sultanate rule were religious specialists like Brahmins, Hindu temple priests, Jain monks, and sectarian leaders. Though not actively persecuted, they were dependent on the patronage of kings, chiefs, and other local magnates and the amount of financial support available to them declined notably with the elimination of the indigenous ruling elite. Learned Brahmins and Jains had alsooften served as ministers and counselors in the courts of indigenous kings, an opportunity that similarly diminished during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. However, the influence of some Hindu and Jain groups apparently reemerged as they began to serve as money lenders and bankers to royal houses, both Muslim and non-Muslim.

Though technically infidels, Indians had been classified as zimmis by the first Islamic rulers in the subcontinent, the eighth-century Arabs of Sind, and this practice was followed by subsequent Muslim kings. Because it was originally a category reserved for Christians and Jews who, as “people of the book,” had a shared religious tradition with Muslims, those defined as zimmi were allowed to practice their own religions without interference.

Despite the supposedly protected status of zimmi religions, Hindu and Jain temples in India were sacked, damaged, and even destroyed on occasion. The most serious accusation made in modern times against the Delhi sultans, as well as subsequent Muslim rulers in India, is that they deliberately engaged in a policy of plundering Hindu temples and destroying images of the gods. It is well known that Islam prohibits the worship of idols and that the destruction of religious images by Muslims has been an intermittent feature of Islamic history.

A consequence of Sultanate rule that may have had the worst repercussions on the life of the Indian masses was an increase in the scale of slavery. This cannot be attributed to the Islamic affiliation of the new kings, for slavery had been practiced in the Middle East prior to the advent of Islam. The acquisition of slaves was a major objective in South Asian campaigns of the Mongols who at that point had not yet converted to Islam. Nor was slavery unknown previously in India. But both the volume and character of slavery changed during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In earlier times, people in India became slaves mainly because they were in debt and also sometimes out of religious devotion to a god or goddess. Slavery as a result of being captured in warfare seems to have been rare until the Sultanate period. Because Islam condoned the enslavement of non-Muslim captives at times of war (although not of Muslim captives), people in areas that were hostile to the Sultanate militarily or which refused to pay taxes were enslaved in considerable numbers. Rather than remaining within their localities, as had been the case with those enthralled in debt bondage in the past, slaves in Sultanate territory might be sold in the flourishing slave market of Delhi and sent to destinations as far off as Central Asia. But the majority probably remained in India, where only a few achieved the elite status of a military slave, while the rest worked in domestic settings. By the fifteenth century, slavery was once again on the wane in India, evidently due to the availability of cheap skilled labor.

What happened in India beginning in the late twelfth century was part of a larger trend occurring throughout much of Eurasia, in which nomadic peoples migrated from the steppes of Inner Asia and became politically dominant over sedentary agrarian societies. Rather than characterizing the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate as the “invasion” or “conquest” of India by a foreign group, it is more useful to understand that the entire settled world of West and South Asia was being transformed in this era through the influx of people of nomadic background and their military technologies.

The last, and greatest, wave of nomadic migration occurred in the thirteenth century, when the Mongol tribes were united by Genghis Khan and rapidly expanded out of Mongolia and Inner Asia. This time the course of history was altered not only in West and South Asia but also equally in China, Russia, and Eastern Europe. Although internal dissensions among Mongols are the primary reason that India was spared greater devastation, the Sultanate’s ability to mobilize large numbers of fighting men with some expertise in the cavalry tactics of Central Asia, used to maximum effect by the Mongols, must have been a contributing factor. Had the Ghurid armies not successfully established themselves in the subcontinent by the late twelfth century, it is possible that at least the northwestern sections of South Asia would have come under the dominion of a Mongol or other Central Asian power.

Southern India in the age of Vijayanagara, 1350-1550

Because a separate state headed by Central Asian Muslim warriors known as the Bahmanis was founded in the Deccan in 1347, the Islamic religion and culture that had taken root in the Deccan under the Tughluq sultans of Delhi continued to flourish in subsequent times.

While the Sangama brothers were probably local warriors from Karnataka who first served in the army of the Hoysala king, they neither converted to Islam nor were they affiliated with a Hindu sage. Instead, they appear to have voluntarily given political allegiance to Muhammad Tughluq during the years when he was based at Daulatabad. Once Tughluq power waned in the Deccan, the Sangamas sought to establish their own state and held a major ceremony in 1346 to celebrate their conquests up to that time; this probably marks the true commencement of their kingdom, rather than the traditional date of 1336. Because the Sangamas were but the first of four ruling dynasties, we call the kingdom not after the kings but after the new name coined for the capital, Vijayanagara or “City of Victory.” Today the site is known both as Vijayanagara and also as Hampi, a variation on the name of the goddess, Pampa Devi, long associated with the region.

In the first half of the fifteenth century, the state finally began to grow after power was consolidated within one lineage of the Sangamas. Under Devaraya II (r. 1432–46), generally considered to be the greatest of the Sangama dynasty of rulers, Vijayanagara controlled both the eastern and western coasts of the Deccan and was the pre-eminent state of the peninsula.

Vijayanagara’s chief rival during its first century of existence was the Bahmani Sultanate, established as an independent state in 1347 after a revolt among the officers of the Delhi Sultanate stationed in the Deccan…. The Bahmanis held sway in the western Deccan north of the Krishna river, while Vijayanagara was dominant in the western Deccan south of the Tungabhadra river. The alluvial zone in between those rivers, known as the Raichur doab, was hotly contested by the two states; both also tried to extend their influence into the fertile Krishna-Godavari river delta of the Andhra region to the east. A third area of conflict between the two states was the western coast, which would confer direct access to the maritime routes of Indian Ocean trade and thus to the most important military supplies of the time: war horses imported from Arabia, Persia, and Central Asia.

A second major competitor for power from Devaraya II’s reign onward was the Hindu dynasty of the Gajapatis, who had usurped the throne of northeastern Andhra and southern Orissa in the 1430s…. After Devaraya II’s death in 1446, his less capable successors could not contain Gajapati power and the Gajapatis began to overrun Vijayanagara’s eastern lands, eventually reaching as far south as the Kaveri delta in the central Tamil country. They also wrested portions of northern Andhra away from Bahmani control. By the 1480s, the Vijayanagara kingdom had lost so much territory to the Gajapatis and the Bahmanis, who had overrun much of the west coast, that it was scarcely larger than it had been at its inception. This led Saluva Narasimha, the most active general in the struggle against Vijayanagara’s enemies, to usurp the throne in 1485. The short-lived Saluva dynasty was ousted in turn in 1505 when another general, this time from the Tuluva family, seized power. Under the Tuluvas, the third royal dynasty of Vijayanagara, the kingdom not only regained its strength but went on to achieve its greatest glory.

Krishnadeva Raya (r. 1509–29), the second of Vijayanagara’s Tuluva rulers, is largely responsible for making Vijayanagara the paramount polity in the peninsula…. Krishnadeva Raya’s Orissa campaign has been called “one of the most brilliant military episodes in the history of sixteenth-century India.”

Vijayanagara is widely acknowledged to be the most militarized of the non-Muslim states of south India. Much of this militaristic orientation was a result of its origins as a polity created by an upwardly mobile warrior lineage in the Deccan. The semi-arid environment of the peninsular interior had long hosted peoples engaged in slash-and-burn agriculture, herding, and trade. The upland economy was precarious, encouraging the development of martial skills and the emergence of warlords. Since the late twelfth century, warriors from the semi-arid zone had become politically dominant throughout the peninsula.

The Vijayanagara kings did not see themselves as engaged in mortal combat for the survival of Hinduism and south Indian society. However, the rulers of Vijayanagara did attempt to act as righteous kings behaving according to dharma, that is, who lived up to traditional Indic expectations of rulers. An important aspect of kingly duties in classical Indian thought was the protection of the social order and most particularly the upholding of Brahmin privilege. Hence, the Vijayanagara kings sought to portray themselves as champions of the ideal hierarchical society envisioned in Brahmin law books by claiming the title “upholders of varnashrama dharma” (the moral duties of class and stage of life). The early Vijayanagara rulers also sponsored Brahmin scholarship, including a series of commentaries on Vedic literature. Throughout the Vijayanagara era, Brahmins continued to be employed by the court in considerable numbers, and Brahmin lands received preferential tax treatment, not unlike the manner in which the sultanates favored Muslim theologians and institutions. Increasingly from the early medieval period onward, however, notions of royal legitimacy came to rest on linkages with temple deities rather than with Brahmins. It was in the combined role of servant and patron of the gods that the Vijayanagara kings excelled.

In the first millennium CE, both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu had contained major political and cultural centers from which waves of influence had radiated outward into other areas. The situation became more fragmented during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the regional kingdoms of the Yadavas (in Maharashtra), Kakatiyas (in Andhra Pradesh), Hoysalas (in Karnataka), and Pandyas (in Tamil Nadu) each fostered the development of a different literary language and temple architectural style. What happened during the Vijayanagara period was unprecedented in that parts of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu came to share a common culture at the elite level – this melding of Deccan and far southern ways and people lingered on well into the colonial era.

The Bahmani kingdom was also like Vijayanagara in having a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual elite, but this diversity proved to be a greater problem for the Bahmanis…. The Indian-born nobles known as Deccanis felt threatened by the Afaqis, the foreign-born nobility, most of whom came from Iran or Central Asia. Although wise kings and counselors tried to mitigate these problems by, for example, maintaining an equal balance between the two groups when appointing governors, the problems were never adequately resolved. The differences between these groups were exacerbated by the fact that many of the Afaqis were Shia Muslims and the Deccanis were Sunnis, thus adding fuel to the fire. Hindus too were included in the administrative and military system, but generally they did not hold ranks as high as the Afaqis or Deccanis.

The center of the maritime empire the Portuguese established was Goa, a port seized in 1510 which was further north on India’s west coast than the Malabar region. Portuguese Goa was in direct competition with Calicut, which declined in importance over the long run. The introduction of Roman Catholicism and the emergence of a mixed population through intermarriage between the Portuguese and local women were two of the most important consequences of the Portuguese arrival, adding even more to the cultural diversity of India’s west coast.

At least eighty major trade centers are mentioned within Vijayanagara territory, a clear indication that urbanization was on the rise. The greatest of all was the Vijayanagara capital, with an estimated population of 300,000 to 400,000. It sprawled out over a huge area – the central city was an estimated 25 square kilometers in size, while the greater metropolitan area, encompassing the outermost fortifications as well as the city’s waterworks, covered as much as 650 square kilometers.

North India between empires: history, society, and culture, 1350-1550

Islam entered eastern India in the very early thirteenth century under Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji, who led raids on local inhabitants in the name of Muhammad Ghuri…. Almost immediately after Bakhtiyar Khalji declared victory in the name of his overlord, the governor who had been left in charge asserted his own authority until Iltutmish was able to rein him in. A similar pattern of initial imposition of Sultanate rule and its subsequent overthrow was seen until the mid fourteenth century, when Shams al-Din Ilyas Shah (r. 1342–57) established the first of several independent dynasties in Bengal at the twin cities of first Pandua and then Gaur, a site which today is literally half in India and half in Bangladesh. The first phase of the Ilyas Shah house lasted about fifty years until Raja Ganesh, a powerful Hindu, was able to wrest virtual control. In 1414 Raja Ganesh placed his convert son Jalal al-Din Muhammad (d. 1432) on the throne, thus restoring the Ilyas Shah dynasty. By the late fourteenth century the Husain Shah dynasty (1493–1538), often viewed as the initiators of Bengal’s golden age, came to the fore, eventually making way for the establishment of Mughal authority.

Bengal is unusual in that its agrarian community, especially in the areas east of the Ganges, by and large adopted Islam. In contrast, both outside the subcontinent and elsewhere within the subcontinent, Muslim populations tended to congregate in urban areas. In his recent work, Richard M. Eaton has argued convincingly that Islamization occurred, not as is commonly believed through the threat of the sword or promise of social betterment, but with massive land reclamation and rice cultivation on what was formerly jungle and swamp.

Gujarat became independent of Tughluq Delhi about the turn of the fifteenth century, although the official date is 1407, when Zafar Khan assumed the title Muzzafar Khan. The dynasty, generally known as the Ahmed Shahs after Zafar Khan’s grandson and successor, who founded the city of Ahmedabad in 1411, lasted until the Mughals incorporated Gujarat as part of their ever-expanding empire in 1573.

Because the term Rajput is derived from the Sanskrit raja-putra or “king’s son,” Rajputs have typically claimed the status of kshatriya or ruling warrior in the four-fold varna classification of traditional India. However, recent research suggests that Rajput did not originally indicate a hereditary status but rather an occupational one: that is, it was used in reference to men from diverse ethnic and geographical backgrounds who fought on horseback. In Rajasthan and its vicinity, the word Rajput came to have a more restricted and aristocratic meaning, as exclusive networks of warriors related by patrilineal descent and intermarriage became dominant in the fifteenth century. The Rajputs of Rajasthan eventually refused to acknowledge the Rajput identity of warriors who lived farther to the east and retained the fluid and inclusive nature of their communities far longer than did the warriors of Rajasthan.

Some of these temples were damaged in raids from Muslim armies. They were always quickly rebuilt, and again Jain biographies of temple builders offer insight into this process. In these stories the Jain patron always first asks permission from the Muslim king to build or repair the temple, which is never denied. In fact, in some of these biographies, the sultan realizes that he will obtain merit for helping others. As explained earlier, it is not Muslims who are blamed for temple destruction but demi-gods.

Between the fall of the Delhi Sultanate after Timur’s sacking of the capital in 1398 and the rise of Mughal power during the sixteenth century, north India was divided into a series of independent sultanates and Rajput states. In each of these kingdoms we witness the emergence of distinctive regional literatures and highly individualistic architectural and painting styles. These developments laid the groundwork for the cultural transformations that would begin in the later sixteenth century under the stimulus of the Mughal empire, the second large polity in north India since 1000. Society in north India was hardly monolithic for, as we have seen, each regional power had multi-cultural, multi-religious populations who in one capacity or another were vital components of the state. A growing interest in bhakti, that is, an intense personal form of devotionalism that had earlier commenced in south India, was seen across north India during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; bhakti, despite significant changes, remains important to this day. So too Sufism, popular since at least the thirteenth century, began to spread through the subcontinent in ever larger waves, as Delhi contracted as an important center and the various orders, including the Chishti, established their own headquarters in towns and cities north, south, east, and west.

Sixteenth-century North India: empire reformulated

A visitor touring South Asia in the year 1500 would have found a land divided into many different polities and a variety of elite cultures. By 1600, on the other hand, virtually all the northern half of the sub-continent had been brought under the umbrella of one state, the Mughal empire. This empire was a top-down enterprise: the many local societies it ruled were not eliminated or merged but rather kept together through the imposition of a set of administrative practices and a class of ruling nobles. Over time, however, imperial ideology and institutions were disseminated throughout its many constituent units and served as a catalyst for the growth of a new kind of elite Indian culture and society, one that was both composite and widespread.

Timur’s sack of Delhi in 1398 left the traditional capital of the north Indian Sultanate a mere shadow of its former self. Both the Sultanate and the city of Delhi gradually regained some of their former status under three rulers of the Afghan Lodi dynasty, most notably during the reign of Sikandar Lodi (r. 1489–1517).

…the Lodi dynasty came to an end on April 20, 1526, when the Central Asian prince Babur defeated the last Lodi sultan, Ibrahim, at the famous Battle of Panipat. Babur was descended from the mighty warlord Timur (d. 1405), who had conquered a huge swathe of territory extending from Central Asia to the shores of the Mediterranean. Although they thought of themselves as belonging to Timur’s lineage, Babur and his family became known as Mughals, the Perso-Arabic term for Mongols, since they were also descended from the great Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan.

Only one year after his return to Delhi in 1555, Humayun fell from the steep steps of his library in the Din Panah, dying shortly thereafter. He was succeeded by his eldest son, the 12-year-old Jalal al-Din Muhammad Akbar, whose reign lasted for nearly fifty years, from 1556 to 1605. The achievements of Akbar were many; until his death he was continuously refining his ideology of the state, as well as the practical means through which this concept was executed. Through his reforms of administration and taxation Akbar created a sound and enduring foundation for Mughal governance, while his tolerant attitude and inclusive policies toward Hindus and Jains helped create a state that was more Indian in character. Akbar’s court patronage of the arts placed Mughal art and architecture on a par with that of the contemporary Safavids and Ottomans.

In the aftermath of the Mughal victories at Chittor and Ranthambhor, all aristocratic Rajput lineages except the Sisodiyas of Mewar submitted to Mughal authority. Thereafter, the Rajput princes performed a dual role. On the one hand, they were inducted as nobles in the Mughal military machine and represented the Mughal emperor in whatever capacity and locale they served. On the other hand, they also acted as figureheads of their own states and maintained their own customs, religious and social, in their homelands (watan jagir). However, not until the eighteenth century was it possible for Rajput princes to expand the size of their ancestral lands, since they remained under the direct jurisdiction of their Mughal overlord.

Mansabdars (rank-holders) were either assigned an agrarian landholding known as a jagir, the income from which would provide the noble’s salary, or they were paid directly from the royal treasury. The jagir can be compared to the earlier iqta revenue assignment of the Delhi Sultanate, with two crucial differences. The jagir-holder or jagirdar had authority only over the revenue of the lands he was assigned, with administrative and military matters delegated to a separate authority. The holder of an iqta, in contrast, had wielded all aspects of state authority within his territory. Secondly, Akbar further enhanced the relative strength of the center in relation to its officers by frequently changing the size and location of jagirs, according to an officer’s performance. The jagirdar thus had considerably less power than had the iqta-holder before him. Because the Mughal army paid its cavalrymen well, at a rate approximately three times higher than that of the Safavid army of Iran, the costs to the empire were enormous. An estimated 80 percent of all imperial revenues, during Akbar’s reign, was allocated to the salaries and jagirs of the mansabdars, for their personal expenses and those of their troops.

Akbar’s last area of expansion was the Deccan, in which he took an increasing interest during the 1590s. By the time of his death in 1605, the Mughal empire extended from Bengal in the east almost to Herat in modern Afghanistan in the west and from the Godavari river in the south to the mountains of Kashmir in the north. The additional conquests of the third and final phase of Akbar’s career, from the 1580s onward, set the basic geographical contours of the empire for the next fifty years.

While a number of Akbar’s policies, such as the state sponsorship of pilgrims going on the Hajj to Mecca, were supportive of orthodox Islam, the genuine interest Akbar showed in non-Muslim practice and belief systems offended highly placed devout Muslims. The orthodox also resented the steps that Akbar increasingly took to lessen the differences in the state’s treatment of its subjects, especially the rescinding of the jizya and other taxes on non-Muslims. Akbar’s extension of tax-free lands to Hindu and Jain temples, for instance, was thought to have occurred at the expense of Muslim institutions. Then in 1579 a decree was introduced that gave the emperor ultimate authority in religious decisions when ambiguity prevailed. By about 1580, non-Muslims were officially accorded the same rights as Muslims in a policy known as sulh-i kul, which translates freely as universal toleration. Abu al-Fazl, the mastermind of Akbar’s state, saw sulh-i kul as the state’s keystone. In order to effectively institute a policy of universal toleration, however, Akbar had to diminish the authority of the ulama, the orthodox Islamic scholars.

Expanding political and economic spheres, 1550-1650

By the time of Akbar’s death in 1605, a qualitative change in the scale of political and economic activities in the Indian subcontinent had occurred. The sheer size of the empire Akbar left behind is an important factor, for an estimated 110 million people resided within its borders out of a total South Asian population of slightly less than 150 million. Akbar implemented a more systematic and centralized form of rule than had prevailed earlier, which led to greater uniformity in administrative practices over a vast territory. At the same time, Akbar’s economic policies stimulated the growth of commercial activity, which interconnected the various parts of South Asia in increasingly close networks. His stipulation that land taxes be paid in cash forced peasants into the market networks where they could obtain the necessary money, while the standardization of imperial currency made the exchange of goods for money easier. Above all, the long period of relative peace ushered in by Akbar’s power, and maintained by his successors throughout the seventeenth century, contributed to India’s economic expansion.

Jahangir had married the woman he came to call Nur Jahan, or Light of the World, in 1611 when she was a widow in her mid thirties. Rumored to be beautiful and certainly brilliant, she eventually took over the reins of state once Jahangir became incapacitated due to poor health caused at least partially by excessive consumption of wine and opium. She was the only woman of the Mughal court ever allowed to mint coins in her own name, a royal prerogative. Her influence was so great that several members of her family, including her father and brother, were appointed to the highest official positions. While Nur Jahan remained absolutely faithful to Jahangir’s causes throughout his life, by 1619 she had begun to fear that Khurram would diminish her exalted position once he ascended the throne. The queen, in an attempt to thwart this situation, married her daughter from her first marriage to Jahangir’s youngest son, signaling the break between her and Khurram and this prince’s fall from favor. Even after Khurram took the throne as Shah Jahan, however, members of Nur Jahan’s family remained prominent at court, and Shah Jahan’s beloved Queen Mumtaz Mahal was herself Nur Jahan’s niece. It is incorrect, however, to assume that all these family members acted as a homogeneous block, as is commonly believed, for they differed, for example, in which prince they supported as Jahangir’s successor.

Shah Jahan was a more militarily vigorous ruler than had been his father, whose indolence and passivity has often been criticized. Under Shah Jahan’s rule (r. 1628–58), the Mughal empire was at the height of its power, wealth, and international glory. He pursued frequent military campaigns, particularly during the first twelve years of his reign, when he subjugated recalcitrant nobles and made some minor territorial acquisitions in eastern India, Sind, and the northwest. In 1636 a moment breakthrough was made in the ongoing Mughal campaign to take the Deccan. At that time the Mughals signed a treaty with the two major Deccan houses, the Adil Shahs of Bijapur and the Qutb Shahs of Golkonda, bringing relative peace between the Mughals and the Deccan Sultanates for the next twenty years.

Shah Jahan was militarily less successful in the second half of his reign, when he tried on several occasions to reclaim land belonging to his Central Asian ancestors. The thinly populated and barren lands of Central Asia could offer little in the way of added resources to the wealthy Mughal empire. But the dream of reconquering the Timurid homeland had persisted since the days of Babur, and no subsequent Mughal emperor was more fervent in this desire than Shah Jahan. His Timurid ancestry was critical to Shah Jahan’s perceptions of himself as emperor, so much so that upon ascending the throne Shah Jahan assumed a title used by Timur, proclaiming himself to be a world conqueror. Similarly, in the opening pages of the official chronicle of his early reign, the Padshahnama, Shah Jahan had his own portrait face that of his illustrious ancestor, Timur. In pursuit of his ambitions, Shah Jahan twice sent Mughal armies to Balkh in northern Afghanistan, but in the end had to withdraw. Equally humiliating were Mughal efforts to regain Qandahar, in south-central Afghanistan, which had been lost to the Safavid dynasty of Iran during Jahangir’s reign. Qandahar was a more valuable place than Balkh or any other Central Asian city, since it straddled the main overland trade route from South Asia to Iran, via the Bolan Pass. Once again, the Mughals expended tremendous effort to no avail, and Qandahar remained under Safavid control.

Shah Jahan, on the other hand, assumed a much more traditional attitude toward Islam and abandoned the royal cult of discipleship. These moves toward orthodoxy on the part of Shah Jahan may have partly been necessitated by a backlash that had grown over the years against the liberal attitudes of Akbar and Jahangir. Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624) was an influential critic of the Mughal government’s failure to strictly follow the sharia (Islamic religious law, including the teachings of the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, that governs all aspects of a Muslim’s life). His ideas continued to spread even after his death.

Not until the conquest of Gujarat in 1572 did the empire reach the ocean – Akbar, who led the Mughal army in this campaign, is said to have ridden to the Gujarat coast specifically in order to get his first glimpse of a sea. The Mughals never did create a navy, leaving them at a great disadvantage against the Portuguese and later the Dutch and English. And the coastlines of the subcontinent continued to be regarded as a frontier, with all the social diversity and deviance from norms that are associated with the far reaches of empire. But, over time, both the royal family and the high court nobles became involved with the trade that was taking place over the seas, first in Gujarat and later in Bengal.

The Mughal ships were based mainly at Surat, which had become the most important maritime city of Gujarat as the waters near Cambay grew difficult to navigate. During the seventeenth century, Surat was not only the premier port of the Mughal empire but also the largest coastal city along the entire western Indian Ocean. In 1660 it probably had a population of 100,000 and may have doubled in size by 1700. Surat owed much of its prominence to the fact that it was the terminus of a major overland route from Agra and Delhi. It also had a fertile hinterland from which to secure food and other resources, as well as a wealthy banking community. Situated on the Tapti river, Surat had a mediocre harbor, but its other advantages ensured it the foremost place among Indian port cities on the west coast. When the first Europeans other than the Portuguese sought to establish trading posts in Mughal India, Surat was the site in which they were most interested.

When the Dutch and English first tried to conduct trade at Surat, they were violently opposed by the Portuguese. The Mughal emperor, who was reluctant to provoke Portuguese anger and thereby jeopardize the safety of Indian ships, at first turned a deaf ear to Dutch and English pleas for trading rights. Several years of conflict on the waters between the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and India’s west coast ensued. After the northern Europeans demonstrated that they could inflict substantial damage on both Indian and Portuguese vessels, the Mughal court realized it was in its own best interests to welcome these counterweights to Portuguese power. The first English “factory” (a compound including warehouses and residences) in Surat in 1613 was built with the permission of local authorities, and by 1617 they had received official permission from Emperor Jahangir himself to establish factories in several parts of the empire. The Mughals clearly understood the value of maritime commerce and wanted to keep the sea routes to and from India open; they consistently tried to maintain freedom of trade along India’s coasts to the best of their ability, although hampered by the lack of a navy.

An important consequence of the Iranian presence was the spreading of the Shia faith of Iran’s Safavid dynasty, which had many more adherents in the Deccan than in contemporary north India. Shia Islam received the unwavering support of the Qutb Shahs of Golkonda, where it was established as the official state religion. The Shia allegiance of the Qutb Shahs is especially evident in their new capital, Hyderabad, founded in 1591 right next to Golkonda city. Hyderabad, replete with palaces and gardens, was a planned city designed with the enormous Char Minar as its centerpiece….

People of all walks of life, both Hindu and Muslim, were attracted to the spiritual power (baraka) that was supposed to emanate from the sites where famous Sufis, venerated as saints, were buried and were believed to be intercessors to god. Through such influences, segments of the Deccan population gradually came to adopt increasingly Islamic lifestyles over several generations. By the early twentieth century, roughly 10–20 percent of the people in the Deccan identified themselves as Muslims. Compared to north India, however, the Islamic segment of Deccan society was always small.

The most valuable item Golkonda exported was diamonds, for it had the largest alluvial diamond mines in the world at this time. Golkonda’s high-caliber iron and steel were also in great demand. But the item most closely associated with Masulipatnam port’s maritime trade was cotton textiles. Although the Golkonda region produced muslin (a thin fabric with open weave and finely spun yarn), it, and the rest of the Coromandel coast, was best known for its chintz. Chintz is a general term for cotton fabrics whose designs are produced after the cloth is already woven; these designs could be block printed but often were hand applied with pen and brush or a combination of both techniques.

The unique cultures of the Bijapur and Golkonda Sultanates, blending both Indic and Islamicate traditions with a strong Iranian overlay, continued to flourish throughout much of the seventeenth century. Their fellow Bahmani successor states farther to the north fared less well, under pressure from the Mughals. By the mid 1630s, the Mughals had annexed northern Maharashtra and forced the Adil Shahs and Qutb Shahs to sign a treaty acknowledging their overlordship. For the most part, however, these two Deccan Sultanates were left undisturbed and, with their northern borders now secure against Mughal attack, they went on the offensive against territories to their south. Bijapur acquired southern Karnataka and the fortress of Senji (also spelled Gingee) on the Tamil coast, thereby terminating several Nayaka states that had arisen in the aftermath of the Vijayanagara empire’s collapse. Golkonda, for its part, annexed all of southern Andhra and put an end to the last dynasty of Vijayanagara rulers. Eventually both Bijapur and Golkonda were defeated and incorporated within the Mughal empire in the 1680s.

While indigenous merchants participated in the booming international trade of seventeenth-century south India, an increasing share went into the hands of Europeans. The Coromandel coast was studded with European enclaves: the Portuguese were at Nagapattinam in Tanjavur territory and at São Tomé-Mylapore in the Chandragiri realm by the early 1500s; the Danes were in the Tanjavur port of Tranquebar as well as Golkonda’s Masulipatnam by the 1620s; and in 1640 the English finally settled in Madras (Chennai), within the Chandragiri kingdom, after first trying several other sites. By far the most dominant group among the European traders were the Dutch, who arrived on the Coromandel coast during the first decade of the seventeenth century. They soon came to an agreeable arrangement with the Qutb Shahs of Golkonda, but their trading post at Masulipatnam ranked second to their primary settlement at Pulicat, on the central Coromandel coast near Chandragiri.

It was the Dutch who mounted the first serious challenge to Portuguese naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean, because they were better financed and equipped than the English. Like the Portuguese, the Dutch wanted to corner the European market in fine spices. Their strategy was quite different from that of the Portuguese, who had based themselves in southwestern India and tried to monopolize the spice trade through controlling the ships that carried spices for sale. The Dutch decided instead to monopolize spices at their sources, the places where they were actually produced. This meant that their main area of interest was Indonesia rather than India. From their base at Batavia (modern Jakarta) on the island of Java, the Dutch systematically attacked all competing interests. The official Portuguese presence in Southeast Asia was well-nigh eliminated when in 1641 the Dutch captured Malacca, the renowned entrepôt that had been in Portuguese hands for a century. The Dutch then started to deprive the Portuguese of their possessions in South Asia, taking Sri Lanka in 1658 and ports on the Malabar coast in the 1660s.

Even before the 1640s, when the Dutch became the foremost of the European traders, they encountered the same problem the Portuguese had faced earlier. The islanders who grew spices were not interested in exchanging them for European goods or even necessarily for precious metals. The main item they sought in return for the sale of their spices was Indian cloth, and so the Dutch had no alternative but to set up trading posts in the subcontinent. One reason for choosing the Coromandel coast initially was its proximity to Southeast Asia. But it also appears that Southeast Asians of the seventeenth century preferred textiles from the Coromandel coast to those from Gujarat or Bengal.

Elite cultures in seventeenth-century South Asia

The Mughal empire was India’s most powerful and prestigious polity throughout the seventeenth century. The Mughals remained superior in wealth and overall power to their closest contemporaries, the Ottomans of Turkey and the Safavids of Iran, who were also Muslim dynasties. While Jahangir did little to expand Mughal territory, under the generalship of his son Prince Khurram (the future Shah Jahan), the Mughals were able to defeat the last of the powerful independent Rajputs of west India, the Sisodiyas. Carved images of the Sisodiya king and prince were installed outside the Mughal palace, a visual reminder to all of the Mughals’ ultimate authority. Some hinterland territories, including parts of the Deccan, that had been able to resist Mughal domination earlier under Jahangir were incorporated into the empire during Shah Jahan’s reign. While Shah Jahan’s campaigns in Central Asia and Qandahar were unsuccessful, the vast empire consisting of twenty-two provinces had untold wealth and a massive army by the middle of the seventeenth century.

While it is possible to see how Mughal imperial ideology was perceived and often misunderstood by Europeans in India, how the Mughal elite and ordinary subjects perceived Mughal ideology is less clear. The writings of Bernier, Peter Mundy, Niccolao Manucci and other Europeans in India during the seventeenth century indicate that bazaar gossip about the imperial family and their elite was rampant. In the common view, Shah Jahan was perceived as lascivious, arrogant, and intolerant, certainly not characteristics he wished to project in his official image, thus suggesting that imperial propaganda may not always have hit its intended mark.

Like the Mughals, the Rajput courts practiced polygamy and sequestered their women. Polygamy may have been the result of a number of traditions, but certainly a major motive for it was the desire to gain political allies and to further territorial expansion. However, unlike the Mughals who had much freedom in marrying their sons, Rajput kinship rules limited eligibility. While each party had to belong to the same caste, the bride and groom had to come from different clans. Aristocratic women kept the name of their paternal clan after marriage, revealing its continuing importance in the alliance formed through marriage.

In some respects Rajput and Mughal culture remained separate. One of these was in the matter of education in the Rajput courts, which remained relatively unimportant for most males and was considered a detriment for women. Attitudes toward widowhood are another case in point. Islam allows for the remarriage of widows; in fact, Nur Jahan herself was a widow before her marriage to Jahangir. High-caste Hindus, on the other hand, opposed widow remarriage, with some believing that the wife should immolate herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, a practice known as sati.

Challenging the central authority, 1650-1750

The Naqshbandis had been befriended by Jahangir when he was still a prince hoping to become the next emperor. But Jahangir could not tolerate the criticism of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi, a Naqshbandi Sufi leader who was highly popular among Indo-Muslim conservatives. Sirhindi was outspoken about the government’s failure to follow strict Islamic sharia law and his bluntness so offended the emperor that Sirhindi was imprisoned for about a year. Sirhindi’s impact is not to be underestimated, for he wrote hundreds of letters expressing his views on how Islam was being corrupted in contemporary South Asia. He blamed Akbar’s religious policies, the evils of the widespread Chishti practice of sama which incorporated music into worship, and the insidious infiltration of the Shia faith espoused by leading Iranian immigrants. His letters were widely distributed, and so Sirhindi’s influence increased rather than diminished after his death.

Shah Jahan also somewhat curtailed the construction of new Hindu and Jain temples, in accordance with a strict interpretation of sharia, which limits the privileges of non-Muslims. But he maintained the sponsorship of religious institutions and people that his father and grandfather instituted; here, there was no change in policy. And the two most famous instances of temple destruction ordered by Shah Jahan were both in response to political opposition. Bir Singh Deo’s Chaturburj temple at Orchha, in central India, was partially destroyed in response to difficulties that Shah Jahan was having in quelling Bir Singh’s rebellious successor. Likewise, Shah Jahan’s destruction of temples in Mewar in 1654 resulted from the Mewar ruler’s rebuilding of the Chittor fortification without Mughal permission.

Aurangzeb’s allegiance to orthodox Islam and his personal piety are indisputable and led to some change in court ceremony. In the late 1660s and the 1670s, Aurangzeb’s court became more austere as he prohibited the use of gold in men’s garments, stopped being weighed against gold on his birthdays, and ceased the practice of presenting himself to the public in his jharoka-i darshan (public viewing window) because it was not in accordance with the sharia. He also banned music at court and dismissed the literary men who compiled the official histories of the dynasty. Painting was an art whose patronage declined in the Mughal court, but because painters left that court for others, it continued to flourish in the Deccan and at Rajput courts.

An example of poor logic:

Aurangzeb’s increased religious orthodoxy has been considered a death knell to the arts under the Mughals, but this too is an exaggeration.

Ethnomusicologist Bonnie Wade has suggested that rather than condemning Aurangzeb for his marginalization of the arts, he should be credited for causing a dispersal of patronage from the imperial center to many regional centers, which in the end encouraged new musical forms – to this we might add new literary and visual ones as well.

There is an element of “rather than criticizing Nazi Germany and Hitler, we should commend them for causing the disperal of genius Jewish scientists around the world thus leading to great world-wide scientific progress.”

Under the earlier Mughals there was a uniform land tax, but this is not in conformity with the sharia. Aurangzeb reintroduced separate taxes for Muslims and Hindus; the jizya tax on non-Muslims, levied from 1679 onward, is mandated by the sharia but led to a higher tax burden on non-Muslims and thus created considerable dislike of Aurangzeb’s economic policy. The complexity of the rules and the number of exceptions must have created considerable confusion, especially compared to the uniform tax code established since the time of Akbar.

Perhaps most detrimental to the popular Indian memory of Aurangzeb is the accusation of temple destruction. Although he issued orders to destroy temples throughout the realm in 1669, in fact only some were damaged. In general, these were recent temples built by Hindu mansabdars that were destroyed in retaliation for serious discord caused in Aurangzeb’s administration. For example, the Kesava Deva temple in Mathura, built about fifty years earlier by the noble who had assassinated Abu al-Fazl, was destroyed in reaction to serious riots at Mathura in which the chief Mughal officer of the city was killed. In the same manner, the famous Vishvanatha temple in Benares (Varanasi) built by Todar Mal, Akbar’s finance minister, was torn down to punish Hindus who were supporting Aurangzeb’s arch enemy, the Maratha Shivaji.

Although the Mughal empire had absorbed the Ahmadnagar Sultanate and signed a treaty with the Adil Shahs of Bijapur and Qutb Shahs of Golkonda in 1636, the Deccan was by no means pacified at the outset of Aurangzeb’s reign. The Bijapur and Golkonda sultans acknowledged Mughal sovereignty by striking coins with Mughal titles, reading the emperor’s name in the Friday prayers, and even remitting an annual tribute, while continuing to act as independent kings within their own territories. And neither they nor the Mughal officers in the former Ahmadnagar kingdom had firm control over the countryside and its local warrior leaders. It was this indigenous warrior community, the Marathas, who were to prove the greatest threat to the established states of the Deccan in the second half of the seventeenth century.

Maratha identity today is inextricably linked to the memory of the great Shivaji Bhonsle (1630–80). Shivaji’s father had acquired rights to land in the area near modern Pune, during the course of an ambitious but checkered career that included military service for the Ahmadnagar and Bijapur Sultanates, a brief spell as a Mughal officer, and even an unsuccessful bid for autonomy. From his home base in Pune, the charismatic Shivaji was able to carve out a small realm in the frontier regions of Bijapur and Ahmadnagar. One of Shivaji’s renowned exploits occurred in 1659, after the Adil Shahs dispatched the general Afzal Khan to subdue him. The predator became the prey at a meeting near Pratapgad, one of Shivaji’s fortified strongholds in the hilly terrain of the Western Ghats, where Shivaji killed Afzal Khan using a pair of iron claws. By the following year, Shivaji occupied forty forts and controlled eight passes through the Western Ghats.

In 1681 Aurangzeb shifted his court from Delhi to the Deccan, with Aurangabad serving as his headquarters; he remained there until his death in 1707. His goals were to incorporate into the Mughal empire the semi-independent sultanates of the Deccan, which were accused of aiding Shambuji, Shivaji’s son and successor, as well as to put an end to Maratha power. By 1686 the Mughals were able to defeat the Adil Shahs of Bijapur, the following year the Qutb Shahs fell, and Shambuji was captured and executed early in 1689. This should have been a moment of great glory for the Mughals, who had finally seemingly removed all obstacles to their full assertion of authority in the Deccan. But, in fact, 1689 was to prove a high tide mark from which the fortunes of the Mughal empire quickly receded. The empire had reached the limits of its expansion, for it was never able to digest the new territories successfully into the body politic. Nor was Maratha resistance quelled by the killing of Shambuji, for the mantle of Maratha leadership was assumed next by his brother.

While Aurangzeb’s personal attentions were focused on the Deccan and south India, he had left his sons and grandsons to deal with the territories to the north. Problems with Jats, a peasant group involved in agricultural cultivation, arose in the area around Agra, as they engaged in wide-scale marauding and plundering, including the murder of important Mughal nobles. In eastern India problems again surfaced when irregularities in the revenue system were spotted by a young upstart, Kartalab Khan. He determined that imperial officers were keeping funds intended for the royal coffers. Upon rectifying the situation, Aurangzeb awarded him with the title Murshid Quli Khan, in reference to a noble of the same title earlier in his reign who had resolved a crisis in the revenues of the Deccan.

The Mughals tried to entice Maratha leaders to their side by offering them entry into noble circles, while high-ranking officers from Bijapur and Golkonda had to be incorporated into the empire upon the annexation of those states. The ninety-six new Maratha mansabdars and sixty-four from Bijapur and Golkonda represented over a quarter of the court nobility in the second half of Aurangzeb’s reign. Their sudden ascendance was greatly resented by members of the older Mughal nobility, some of whom were facing real economic hardship in this period. Had all the conquered territory of the Deccan been available to share among the growing ranks of mansabdars, the problem of insufficient jagirs might have been alleviated, but Aurangzeb decided to keep much of it as crown land reserved for the maintenance of the imperial household. In addition, the system for assigning jagirs was becoming inefficient and corrupt, resulting in long delays between the promise of a jagir and the actual obtaining of one.

How were the Marathas able to pose such a prolonged military challenge to the powerful imperial Mughal forces? Perfecting methods of warfare first developed by troops of the Ahmadnagar Sultanate while resisting the Mughal advance, Shivaji developed a light cavalry that was highly mobile…. in its traditional setting on an open plain. The Marathas avoided meeting the formidable Mughal army on the field and resorted instead to a form of guerilla warfare, relying on their superior mobility…. The Marathas excelled at cutting off the enemy’s supply lines, thus greatly curtailing their ability to function. If pursued, they would retreat into their fortified strongholds high up in the mountainous terrain of the Western Ghats.

According to Stewart Gordon, the term Maratha once meant all people who spoke the Marathi language, but between 1400 and 1600 it acquired a more specialized meaning, referring only to the warrior chiefs who served the Bahmani Sultanate and its successors. That is, the Marathas were a community that arose from among the peasant masses but who gradually became differentiated from them by their martial tradition. The Maratha warriors became an elite through the rights to land revenues they acquired in return for their military service. Often they became either village headmen or deshmukhs, the chiefs of twenty to a hundred villages who also had the responsibility of supplying troops. Because Maharashtra was thinly populated and its climate made agriculture a risky venture, being a deshmukh could involve organizing a group of people to colonize a new agrarian settlement. The relationship between the deshmukhs and the peasant population was exceptionally close, and any central government’s control of the countryside was dependent on the degree to which they could control the deshmukhs and their clients.

Shivaji’s legacy today is much greater than it was at his death in 1680. Throughout the twentieth century and increasingly into the twenty-first, Shivaji has been admired on a popular level for his role in resisting Mughal aggression. As the first non-Muslim to do so successfully on a sustained basis, he is regarded as a hero, not only for the Marathi-speaking people but for many Indians today. There is no doubt that Shivaji’s desire for autonomy was deep and sincere. Nor can it be disputed that he was conscious of his own identity as a Hindu in a political universe dominated by Muslims. Shivaji is widely believed to have been personally devoted to the goddess Bhavani, and he had a traditional Indian coronation ritual performed in 1674 in order to validate his status as a true king.

The Marathas, along with many peasant cultivators throughout the subcontinent, were considered members of the fourth or shudra varna in the four-fold class system of orthodox Brahmin thought. Traditionally, however, the only legitimate kings were those born into the kshatriya varna, ranked just below the Brahmins. The solution to the problem of Shivaji’s status was a new genealogy created for the occasion that traced Shivaji’s ancestry back to Rajput roots, for Rajputs were widely accepted as aristocratic kshatriyas.

Here is another unnecessarily opinionated sentence that doesn’t make much sense:

Today every village, town, and city in Maharashtra features a large bronze statue of Shivaji garlanded as a hero, who stands as a symbol of Hindu nationalism rather than as the representative of India’s composite Maratha culture he originally was.

In 1719, a treaty was signed between the Marathas and the Mughals which gave the Marathas considerable independence. The Mughals conceded to the Marathas the right to a chauth or a quarter of the government’s revenues throughout the six Mughal provinces of the Deccan, acknowledging the reality that these lands were now in Maratha hands. The Maratha leader also received another 10 percent of revenues in the Deccan, in return for his role as the head of all the deshmukh families. In addition, the Mughals also gave the Marathas the right to collect chauth in Malwa and Gujarat, territories to the north and west of the Maratha homelands. This was in recognition of the conquests made by Maratha warbands which had roamed far and wide. In essence, this was the ending of direct Mughal power over most of the Deccan.

The treaty was negotiated by Balaji Vishvanath, a Chitpavan Brahmin from Maharashtra who had been appointed in 1713 by Shahu, Shivaji’s grandson, to be the peshwa and chief financial officer.

The Marathas finally met their match in 1761, when they were defeated by the Afghan invader Ahmad Khan Abdali at Panipat, near Delhi. Yet the Battle of Panipat was only a setback for the Marathas, who remained the dominant military power of the western part of the subcontinent until their final conquest by the British in 1818.

From 1707 when Aurangzeb died, to the end of 1719, there was a rapid succession of five sovereigns. Rampant factionalism at court was the main cause of this instability, exacerbated by the suspicious nature of those who did attain the throne. It was a marked change from the long era of stability that had ensued upon Akbar’s ascent to the throne, with only four emperors in a period of 150 years. By the time things settled down under the relatively long rule of Muhammad Shah (r. 1719–48) it was too late; the forces of political fragmentation had already transformed the empire into a loosely bound association of states.

To counter Maratha attack, the emperor sent a seasoned general, Nizam al-Mulk (known later as Asaf Jah), to serve as viceroy of the Deccan in 1713, a post he held intermittently until 1721. During this era Nizam al-Mulk also spent a short stint at the imperial center in Delhi, where he tried to institute reform of the now wholly corrupt system by which jagirs were assigned, making himself very unpopular with those who stood to lose power and wealth in the process. Disgusted with the situation at court, Nizam al-Mulk defied the emperor’s wishes and in 1724 headed toward the Deccan. There he confronted in battle a former Mughal official who had been controlling the eastern Deccan as an independent lord for some years. After his victory, Nizam al-Mulk no longer felt allegiance to the Mughals and established his own Asaf Jah dynasty, better known as the Nizams of Hyderabad. The Asaf Jah line would head the subcontinent’s wealthiest and most powerful princely state, lasting until 1948.

Within the regions of Bengal, Hyderabad, and Awadh, capable rulers were consolidating power and creating more efficient administrations at the regional level. This was in part made possible by the smaller scale of the new states, which made surveillance and incorporation of local communities more feasible. For these Mughal successor states, formed through the defection of former top officials, the eighteenth century was no decline but rather an era of regional development.

The internal process of disintegration that resulted in the formation of new states and political centers was accelerated by raids on Delhi by outsiders who sensed the empire’s growing impotence. Rulers from Central Asia and farther west had long seen India as a treasure trove worthy of periodic sacking as a quick way to acquire untold wealth. We saw this in the eleventh century with Mahmud of Ghazni and in the fourteenth century with Timur. So too the Iranian king Nadir Shah, greedy for territorial gain and wealth, was able to pass through the Punjab to Delhi, which he sacked and plundered in 1739, killing possibly as many as 20,000 people. The coup de grâce, however, was the booty he took upon his departure, including Shah Jahan’s famed Peacock Throne, along with an endless number of jewels from the Mughal personal treasury. Today many of these jewels can be seen in the vault of Tehran’s National Bank (Bank-i Melli). This huge room literally dazzles and gives an idea of the Mughals’ former wealth. The acquisition of this wealth also changed the Iranian concept of how kings should appear. Formerly they wore virtually no jewelry, but after Nadir Shah’s return, portraits of Iranian kings show them heavily bejeweled in almost a caricature of Mughal fashion.

The Mughal emperors had virtually no army left and were dependent on the protection of the Marathas, who fought both with local Indo-Afghans and with Ahmad Khan Abdali (later Ahmad Shah Durrani), the Afghan king of Kabul from 1747 onward. Delhi was attacked by Ahmad Khan in both 1752 and 1757, inspiring a new literary poetic genre that lamented the ruin of this once brilliant city. Ahmad Khan entered India for a third and final time in 1761, defeating the Marathas and shattering their hope of dominating the former Mughal territories. In all but name, the empire of the Mughals was now a thing of the past.

Changing socio-economic formations, 1650-1750

The Dutch and English trading companies, who had begun their activities in India at the outset of the 1600s, made a major contribution to the Indian economy by supplying the bullion that enabled the twin trends of monetization and commercialization to gather steam. Desire for their bullion and for revenues arising from trade led the Mughals and local rulers in the far south to permit and even encourage European traders to settle within their realms. The number and size of European trading posts went up steadily during the hundred years between 1650 and 1750; so too did the volume of trade in which they engaged.

By the 1680s, Indian cotton had become hugely fashionable in Europe, not only as a covering for furniture and walls but also for clothing. Cotton was cheap and comfortable compared to linen or wool, and Indian dyes produced colors that were much brighter and longer-lasting than those of Europe. The rapidly expanding market in Europe led to a very quick rise in the volume of imports of Indian textiles. In 1682, according to K. N. Chaudhuri, the East India Company ordered 2.8 million pieces of cloth from India, a ten-fold increase over what they had ordered just two decades previously. The importance of textiles soon came to overshadow that of spices, the Asian trade item that had originally been most coveted by Europeans.

Although Madras was the most successful of their trading posts between 1650 and 1700, the East India Company also had settlements in other regions of India. Bombay was a Portuguese possession acquired by the British crown and given outright to the Company in 1668; like Madras, it enjoyed a good deal of autonomy. Lying off the coast of the western Deccan, Bombay consisted of a series of small islands that were drained and joined together by the English. A number of Indian merchants were quickly attracted from the main Mughal port at Surat, which was subject to Maratha attacks, to the relative safety of Bombay; within ten years its population had risen to 60,000. After its initial spurt of growth, Bombay’s population increased only at a moderate rate. Political instability in the western Deccan sometimes hampered access to food supplies from the mainland, and it was difficult to obtain goods for export nearby. Its fine harbor and good defenses gave Bombay considerable military significance for the EIC, however.

The VOC did much more business in Bengal than the EIC in this era. Although British trading activity in the region grew substantially, the value of the goods they exported from Bengal was still half that of the Dutch in the last decade of the seventeenth century.

Both Bombay and Hugli, unlike Madras, were situated within Mughal territory, and the East India Company believed local imperial officials were constantly putting obstacles in the way of its trade. In an effort to force better terms of trade, the Company sent a well-armed fleet of ten ships to India in 1686 and, in effect, declared war on the Mughal empire. They seized numerous Indian ships off the west coast and blockaded Surat port, leading to Mughal retaliation and an attack on Bombay. Things went no better for the English in the Bay of Bengal, where the objective was to capture the port of Chittagong, advance to the Mughal provincial capital at Dhaka, and negotiate a new trade agreement. The war ended instead in total failure and the peace treaty of 1690 required the EIC to pay a hefty indemnity. Continuing piracy by English freebooters off India’s western shores kept tensions high, however. The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb was further irritated by a new coin issued by the East India Company at Bombay. This silver half-rupee coin was similar to Mughal coins in weight and design, but had the names of the British monarchs, William III and Mary, inscribed on it in Persian. It was seen as a direct challenge to Mughal authority, since issuing coins was the prerogative of a sovereign in the Islamic tradition. The Company was soon forced to discontinue the coin and assume responsibility for the safety of Indian ships in the western waters.

By 1700, the East India Company had thus acquired the three sites of Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta that were to become the great centers of British power in the colonial era. It had also caught up to the VOC in terms of dominance in the Indian Ocean trade, although it would be several more decades before the Dutch were finally eclipsed. In the Coromandel, the English and, to a lesser extent, the French, possessed trading enclaves that were well on their way to becoming independent city-states, secure from the demands of the Indian kingdoms surrounding them…. Within the Mughal empire, however, the political power of the European trading companies was still negligible. The ease with which the East India Company’s attacks on Mughal ports were crushed demonstrates how English ambitions far surpassed their ability to attain them in the 1680s. Only after the final collapse of the Mughal empire did the balance of power between Indian states and the East India Company change radically.

Although the cities were still firmly under the control of the Mughal state, the countryside seemed to be slipping out of its hands as peasant rebels increasingly refused to pay their taxes and took up arms during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The large highways that joined the three great Mughal cities of Lahore, Delhi, and Agra – all with populations as large as 400,000 – were rife with bandits and outlaws, making travel and the transport of goods along this central axis of empire more and more hazardous.

Allegiance to the Sikh faith was the bond that rallied the men who fought with Banda Bahadur in this uprising, which began right after the death of Guru Gobind Singh in 1708. Gobind Singh was the tenth and last of the Sikh leaders in a direct line of spiritual transmission from the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak (1469–1539). Like Kabir, Guru Nanak was part of the Sant tradition, discussed in chapter 4, that rejected institutionalized forms of religion while stressing the equality of all individuals before god. Nanak’s god was without form but pervaded by light, to be worshipped through meditation on and repetition of his name. From early on, special emphasis was placed on congregational activities, particularly singing hymns and eating together.

Violent opposition to the imperial state and hostile attitudes toward Muslims became more widespread between 1675 and 1708, the period when Gobind Singh was the Sikh guru. He was the most militant of the gurus, engaging in numerous battles himself and advocating the use of force on the part of his followers.

In 1699, Gobind Singh founded a new order, the Khalsa, which reflected the militaristic orientation the religion had taken under his leadership. Male initiates into the Khalsa order adopted the surname Singh, meaning lion, a royal symbol. They were physically differentiated from the general populace by five emblems – a dagger, bracelet, comb, soldier’s undershorts, and unshorn hair on the head and face – that had strong martial nuances.

Many people who considered themselves followers of Guru Nanak did not join the Khalsa, however. Notable among them was a large segment of the Khatri community to which all ten of the Sikh gurus had belonged, along with most of their fifteenth- and sixteenth-century adherents. Khatris were a high-caste group based mainly in urban centers, where they made their living as shop-keepers, traders, moneylenders, clerks, and administrators. Over time people from other backgrounds were attracted to the Sikh religion, lessening the Khatri role in it. First were the Jats, who became Sikhs in large numbers during the seventeenth century; later on, Arora merchants, various untouchable groups, and artisan-craftspeople also joined the religion in smaller numbers.

In Habib’s view, the greater efficiency of the Mughal fiscal system made it possible for the state to extract agrarian revenues from cultivators at ruinously high levels. The situation was made worse by the practice of frequently transferring jagir revenue assignments, since there was no incentive for Mughal nobles to protect peasants or promote long-term agricultural development in any given locality if their association with it was to last for only a few short years. The Sikh and Jat peasant uprisings are attributed by Habib to this callous disregard of the lower classes, who could no longer endure their economic oppression. Strong support for Habib’s position comes from European travelers to Mughal India, who repeatedly comment on the abject poverty of the countryside.

The Mughals never, even at the height of their power, fully controlled the zamindar class. The foremost among them were co-opted into the mansabdar system. The Rajput chiefs, for instance Raja Man Singh discussed in chapter 5, were given watan jagirs or homeland territories in addition to the normal type of jagirs, in recognition of the power they wielded in their home regions. The imperial center was able, by this means, to secure the loyalty and military services of the Rajput chiefs as well as their kinsmen, retainers, and dependent clients. No such effort was made to incorporate the less powerful zamindars, whose writ ran only over a small locality. Instead, they were typically held responsible for the collection of tax revenues in their village or villages, which would be transmitted to provincial Mughal officials and then redistributed either to the imperial court or to those mansabdars who held jagirs in the area. Military force was sometimes needed at the provincial level to make zamindars comply with state revenue demands, but the state apparatus never penetrated individual villages or established direct ties with the peasantry. All relations with peasant-cultivators were conducted through this intermediary layer of zamindars.

The Deccan also had a rural gentry similar to the zamindars of north India. In the Maratha territory, they were known by titles such as deshmukh or patil, depending on the number of villages they controlled. Shivaji, discussed in chapter 8, came from a newly ascendant deshmukh family and enjoyed the support of many of the petty gentry: the smaller deshmukh families as well as village headmen and other minor office holders. In his rise to power, Shivaji fought against the large, elite deshmukh families of the western Deccan, who had long-established privileges granted by the Bijapur or Ahmadnagar Sultanates. The Maratha movement initiated by Shivaji was therefore a struggle not only against the Deccan Sultanates and the Mughal empire, but also against the entrenched local power structure, which included a number of aristocratic Maratha clans.

…everywhere, as the grip of empire loosened, locally based interests tried to overthrow the existing power structure for their own benefit. The disintegration of the Mughal empire was brought about not only by the disaffection of its nobility at the center but also through widespread incidents of defiance or rebellion at the local level.

Transport costs must have been quite low, for artisans in certain areas came to depend largely on supplies from distant regions. Bengal was the source of most of the raw silk used by Gujarat’s important silk textile industry, while Coromandel weavers relied heavily on raw cotton from the western Deccan.

The two linchpins of the extensive markets in finance and commodities were the cities of Agra and Surat. Goods from all over north India were transported to Agra: items like the high-quality indigo of nearby Bayana, or saffron from Kashmir far to the north, or fine muslin cloth from Bengal to the east. These commodities were distributed from Agra into the hinterland or sent westward to Lahore and southward to Surat. Surat was the main maritime outlet for goods from the imperial heartland that would be shipped out to foreign destinations or along the coasts of the subcontinent. This port also became the hub of India’s financial markets because the large volume of international trade that flowed through its port brought in vast quantities of bullion.

The notion of an economic breakdown accompanying political disorder was promoted by the East India Company, which justified its growing involvement in internal Indian affairs during the late eighteenth century on these grounds. In the past two decades, however, several historians have challenged the assumption that imperial decline led to a weakening of the Indian economy. C. A. Bayly, for example, suggests that the devolution of imperial political and economic power to smaller domains was a largely positive phenomenon, resulting in long-term growth and stability in several regions of the subcontinent. Others believe the Mughal state’s impact on local economies has been overstated and point to the encroachment of the European trading companies as a more significant development for the economy than the collapse of empire.

The areas that suffered most from the decline of Mughal power were the former hubs of the diffuse, but closely intermeshed, imperial economy. The Agra–Delhi corridor was the first to be affected, due to the Jat insurrection. By 1690, large numbers of merchants and weavers had fled Agra for safer surroundings, and a Dutch trader traveling to Agra needed 300 guards for his protection. Travel between Agra and Surat became hazardous in the early eighteenth century, as internal struggles for power broke out at court after Aurangzeb’s death, the Sikhs of the Punjab revolted, and Maratha power grew in western and central India. Dutch traders traveling from Agra to Surat in the entourage of the Surat governor’s son reported repeated attacks by peasant-bandit armies as large as 5,000 men. As a result, Surat bankers refused to issue hundis for Agra, causing the Dutch trading company to close its trading post there in 1716. The severing of the road link to Agra and the imperial heartland led to a permanent decrease in trading activity at Surat. The number of ships based there dropped sharply and many merchants moved to other parts of India, especially Bengal.

The Punjab, one of the wealthiest provinces of Mughal India, was also badly affected by the events of the early eighteenth century. Much of the Punjab’s prosperity had come from the vigorous trade with Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran along the grand highway that ran from the Gangetic region through Agra to Delhi. From Lahore, the Punjab’s main city, one trade route went to Qandahar and on to Isfahan, the commercial center of Iran…. Some of these textiles were produced within the Punjab, one of the four main regions in India manufacturing cotton goods for export along with Gujarat, the Coromandel coast, and Bengal. The disintegration of Iran’s Safavid empire (1501–1722) and the growing strength of Afghan tribes also had a detrimental impact on Surat, whose major export markets by 1700 were in the Middle East.

Other regions of India that had not been as central to the imperial networks of exchange had a different experience in the eighteenth century. The Maratha homeland in the western Deccan, now under the direct control of the Brahmin peshwas, witnessed an expansion of agricultural cultivation. Agriculture was extended in eastern Rajasthan as well, where the leadership of the Kachhwaha Rajput rulers led to improving economic conditions.
…
The economic picture is hence quite mixed. The waning of imperial power led to an economic recession lasting well into the eighteenth century in the Delhi–Agra region, the Punjab, and Gujarat. Whether regions outside the imperial system like the far south suffered any economic repercussions is unclear; nor is there a consensus on economic conditions in the central Gangetic valley or eastern Deccan. In areas like the western Deccan or eastern Rajasthan, the efforts of the new rulers actually stimulated economic growth. Bengal, a province that was already prosperous in the second half of the seventeenth century, continued to experience a boom in the early eighteenth century….

The weakening of the Mughal imperial state, on the one hand, and the spreading commercialization of the economy, on the other, therefore led to the rise of people who occupied an intermediate status in society between the peasantry and the great nobility. Zamindars appropriated lands and income that had formerly been possessed by the state, revenue-farmers took the place of state officials and controlled the flow of revenue from the localities to regional political centers, and the services of merchant-traders became vital to all sectors of society. All three groups – zamindars, revenue-farmers, and merchant-traders – wished to enlarge their own wealth and power at the expense of the imperial officials and local kings. Their interests could sometimes clash but at other times could coincide when confronted by regional rulers attempting to consolidate central power. The support of large merchant-banking firms proved especially vital to the rise to power of the English East India Company, who shared their commercial interests and perspectives.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed a tremendous expansion of agriculture in eastern Bengal. It was a land full of jungles and swamps whose sparse population had previously mainly been fisher-folk and hunter-gatherers. Colonists, mostly Muslims, had gradually been arriving from the long-settled regions to the west, and their numbers swelled after Bengal was incorporated into the Mughal empire. As the pioneering colonists cleared the eastern Bengal wilderness and turned it into cultivated land, settlements of local people coalesced around them. These local people were introduced to agriculture at the same time that they were introduced to their first world religion, Islam. Agriculture and Islam thus came to be associated along Bengal’s agrarian frontier, and a large Muslim peasant community emerged in what is now Bangladesh….

By 1690, the same year that Calcutta was founded, the Mughal elite had largely withdrawn from Bengal’s commerce. Local shipping declined as a consequence, along with the largely Muslim community of merchants who had engaged in overseas trade. Mounting problems within the empire and disruptions in the internal circulation of goods did not diminish Bengal’s prosperity, however. Its trade networks had already begun to orient themselves more toward the sea than toward the internal waterways, and the entrepreneurial role formerly occupied by the Mughal elite and its Muslim merchant associates was increasingly filled by the European trading companies. They worked in conjunction with the numerous Jain and Hindu mercantile families who had migrated to Bengal in the Mughal heyday, mainly from Gujarat and Rajasthan. These Indian merchants had supplied the ports with export goods, purchased imported commodities on a wholesale basis, and acted as bankers for the Mughal elite; they continued to do so for the Europeans.

The European trading companies had been active in Bengal for some decades, but earlier in the seventeenth century it was less important to them than the Gujarat and Coromandel regions. Bengal did not produce the spices that Europeans coveted nor the cheaper variety of textiles that were exported in bulk to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Aside from various foodstuffs and raw materials, Bengal’s main export was expensive cloth, both cotton and silk, aimed at the high end of the market. Unlike the Coromandel coast where the expertise was in the dying of textiles, Bengal was known for its high-quality weaving that resulted in thin, diaphanous muslins and other fine fabrics. Only after European interest in Indian textiles was aroused, and an enormous new market created, did Bengal become critical to the commerce of the foreign trading companies. Their growing dependence on Bengal’s textiles was spurred by recurrent shortages of supply in the Coromandel as well as rising costs there. The Dutch were the first to turn to Bengal as the primary source of textiles for Europe. While the VOC had purchased only slightly over a quarter of the cloth destined for Europe from Bengal in 1675, by 1700 Bengal provided three-quarters of its textile exports to Europe. The English were slower to shift their focus from the Coromandel, but almost half of the Indian cloth they sent to Europe came from Bengal by 1710 and by the mid eighteenth century most of it did.

Fifteen zamindar families like those based at Rajshahi, Nadia, and Burdwan (all located strategically on major rivers) accounted for almost half of the region’s revenues in 1727. Both Murshid Quli Khan and his successor, Shuja Khan (r. 1727–39), continued to send about 10 million rupees annually to Delhi, a massive tribute that served to mask the reality of Bengal’s self-governance. Assisting the rulers of Bengal in collecting and remitting these huge sums was the Jagat Seth banking house. Jagat Seth, meaning “merchant of the world,” was a title conferred on the head of the family by a Mughal emperor, indicating the favor he had curried at the imperial court. The Jagat Seth firm had a monopoly over the minting of coins in Bengal and functioned in essence as the banking arm of the regional government. Only with the cooperation of the large zamindars and banking firms could the Bengal state run smoothly.

When Siraj al-Daula heard that the EIC was improving its fortifications at Fort William in Calcutta, he took that as a threat to his sovereignty and ordered the successful capture of the fort. The East India Company, the Jagat Seth and other banking families, important officials in the regional administration whom he replaced with his own men, and several leading zamindars were now among Siraj al-Daula’s many enemies.

Even a decade or two earlier, the East India Company might have needed a long time to regroup and take back their critical base at Calcutta. But the English and French trading companies had been at war with each other for some years in south India, and so a British fleet with British soldiers had been sent out to Madras in order to aid the East India Company there. This British force now sailed from Madras to Bengal and soon retook Calcutta. It was commanded by Robert Clive, who had achieved distinction in the south Indian wars between the English and French traders.

Back in Bengal, the East India Company therefore joined the Jagat Seth banking family and others in a plot to get rid of Siraj al-Daula. In the famous Battle of Plassey, fought in June 1757, few of Siraj al-Daula’s soldiers were willing to engage the British troops, and he was killed soon afterward. One of Siraj al-Daula’s generals, who was in on the plot and whose contingent had stood on the sidelines during the battle, became the new ruler of Bengal. But the English had realized that the riches of Bengal were now readily available to them and pressed hard for cash payments, trading monopolies, and zamindar rights. They put a second, even more amenable, puppet ruler in place in 1760, who also proved unsatisfactory to the East India Company. In 1764, the Company won a resounding victory against an army sent by the king of Awadh and the Mughal emperor in support of this ruler of Bengal. The East India Company had, in just a few short years, become the dominant political player within Bengal, with the backing of influential mercantile and zamindar interests operating in an environment where power was already heavily commercialized.

How was it possible for the English to attain this position of power by the mid eighteenth century, when just eighty years earlier they could so easily be vanquished by the Mughals, even on the seas where they were strongest? An obvious answer lies in the disintegration of the Mughal empire, resulting in the emergence of numerous smaller states in its place. Yet that explanation does not suffice, for at least several of these new states were strong enough, had they wished, to oust the East India Company from their realms. The East India Company, and the other European traders, represented a valuable internal source of income to the rulers of regional states which they wanted to retain. The Europeans by this time also controlled almost all of the long-distance overseas shipping, which had largely superseded the overland trade routes, and so were the only significant conduit through which items like bullion or textiles could enter or leave India. Over the hundred plus years that the English in particular had been operating within India, they had formed numerous associations with Indian merchants that were intensified by the complexity of procuring textiles. The economic opportunities provided by working with European trading companies aligned Indian mercantile interests with their own and could, as we have just seen in the case of Bengal, give these Europeans a decisive advantage in any confrontation with an Indian state.

Here’s another unnecessary sentence:

The situation is no better today, as Hindu nationalists refute any contributions Indian Muslims may have made, while their common South Asian heritage is often denied in Pakistan. Note the strong usage of “refute any contributions.”

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