India

D

Gupta Empire

In 320 a Magadha raja named Chandragupta I (reigned 320-330), who had conquered the neighbouring territories, founded a new imperial regime and the Gupta dynasty. His grandson Chandragupta II (reigned 375-413) vastly expanded the realm, subjugating all of the subcontinent north of the River Narmada. Under the Gupta dynasty, which lasted for 160 years, Indian culture reached new heights. The period was one of sustained peace, steady economic advance, and intellectual accomplishment, particularly in art, music, and literature. Equally importantly, Hinduism, which had long been in decline, experienced a robust renaissance through absorption of some features of Buddhism.

Towards the close of the 5th century, Hunnish invaders, often referred to as the White Huns, pushed into India from central Asia. The Gupta Empire broke up under the attacks of these invaders, whose supremacy went unchallenged for nearly a century. Foreign military reverses, notably at the hands of the Turks in about 565, finally undermined the power of the Huns in India. Among the contemporary descendants of the Huns who remained in India are certain tribal groups of Rajasthan state. Another powerful kingdom was founded in northern India in 606 by Harsha, the last Buddhist monarch of consequence in Indian history. Harsha’s reign emulated the Gupta period in its patronage of the arts, and the cultural achievements of this period can be seen in the chronicles of the great Chinese pilgrim, Xuangzang (Hsuan-tsang or Tripitaka). During his reign, Harsha secured control of almost the entire mainland and attempted, without success, to conquer the Deccan. After Harsha’s death, his realm disintegrated into a multiplicity of warring petty states and principalities. This anarchic state of affairs, which was also generally characteristic of the situation on the peninsula, prevailed throughout India until the beginning of the 11th century.

E

Muslim and Mongol Invasions

The prolonged period of internal strife drew to a close as a new power, solidly united under Islam, arose in western Asia. This new power was Khurasan, previously a Samanid province that had been transformed into an independent kingdom by Mahmud of Ghaznī (reigned 999-1030). A capable warrior whose sovereignty over Khurasan had been recognized by the caliph of Baghdad, Mahmud in 1000 launched the first of 17 consecutive expeditions across the Afghan frontier into India. These incursions were marked by victories over the disunited Indians. By 1025 Mahmud had sacked many western Indian cities, including the fabulously wealthy port of Somnath, and had annexed the region of Punjab to his empire.

The most successful of the Muslim rulers after Mahmud was Muhammad of Ghur, whose reign began in 1173. Regarded by most historians as the real founder of Muslim power in India, he initiated his campaigns of conquest in 1175. In the course of the next three decades, he subjugated all of the Indo-Gangetic plain west of Benares (now Varanasi). On the death of Muhammad of Ghur, Qutb-ud-Din Aybak, his viceroy in Delhi and a former slave, proclaimed himself Sultan. The so-called Slave dynasty founded by Qutb-ud-Din, its only outstanding ruler, endured until 1288.

Another capable Muslim, Ala-ud-Din (reigned 1296-1316), was the second ruler of the succeeding Khalji dynasty. He consolidated the Indian realm by conquering the Deccan. However, before the end of his reign, the Mongols began to infiltrate the northern frontiers of his dominions. Muhammad Tughluq, the last Delhi sultan of importance, completely alienated both Muslims and subject Hindus by his cruelty and religious fanaticism. The empire was torn by revolutionary strife and some provinces, notably Bengal, seceded.

The turmoil increased after Tughluq’s death. In 1398, when the Mongol conqueror Tamerlane led his armies into India, he met little organized resistance. Tamerlane completed his victorious invasion by sacking and destroying Delhi, and massacring its inhabitants. He withdrew from India shortly after the sack of Delhi, leaving the remnants of the empire to Mahmud (reigned 1399-1413), the last of the Tughluqs. Mahmud was succeeded in 1414 by the first of the Sayyids, a dynasty that was later driven from power by Bahlol (reigned 1451-1489), founder of the Lodi line of kings. The Lodi dynasty, generally weak and ineffectual, ended in 1526. In that year Babur, a descendant of Tamerlane and the founder of the great Mughal dynasty, carried out a series of raids into India which ended with the defeat of the Lodi army. Babur occupied Agra, the Lodi capital, and proclaimed himself emperor of the Muslim dominions. Within four years of his initial victory, Babur controlled a large part of the Indian mainland.

F

Mughal Empire

Akbar, Babur’s grandson, was the greatest Mughal sovereign. During his reign (1556-1605), he subdued rebellious princes in various regions, including the Punjab, Rajputana (modern Rajasthan State), and Gujarat. He added Bengal to his realm in 1576, conquered Kashmir between 1586 and 1592, and annexed Sind in 1592. Between 1598 and 1601 he subjugated a number of the Deccan Muslim kingdoms. In the administration of his vast dominions, Akbar revealed remarkable organizational abilities. He secured the allegiance of hundreds of feudal rulers, promoted trade, introduced an equitable system of taxation, and encouraged religious tolerance. The Mughal Empire reached its cultural peak under Shah Jahan, Akbar’s grandson. Shah Jahan’s reign (1628-1658) coincided with the golden age of Indian Saracenic architecture, best exemplified by the Taj Mahal.

He was driven from the throne in 1658 by his son, Aurangzeb, who took the title of Alamgir (“Conqueror of the World”). Treacherous and aggressive, Aurangzeb murdered his three brothers and waged a series of wars against the autonomous kingdoms of India, sapping the moral and material strength of the empire. During his campaigns in the Deccan, the Marathas, a Scytho-Dravidian people, inflicted numerous defeats on the imperial armies. The stability of Aurangzeb’s regime was further undermined as a result of popular antagonism to the religious bigotry he fostered. During his reign, which ended in 1707 with his death in exile, the Sikh faith gained a strong foothold in India.

In the half-century following Aurangzeb’s death, the Mughal Empire ceased to exist as an effective state. The political chaos of the period was marked by the rapid decline of centralized authority. Numerous petty kingdoms and principalities were created by Muslim and Hindu adventurers, and large independent states were formed by the governors of the imperial provinces. Among the first of the large independent states to emerge was Hyderabad, established in 1712. The tottering Mughal regime suffered a disastrous blow in 1739 when the Persian king Nadir Shah led an army into India and plundered Delhi. Among the loot seized by the invaders, the sixth Muslim force to overrun India, was the mammoth Koh-i-noor diamond and the fabulous Peacock Throne, made of solid gold inlaid with precious stones. The Persian king soon withdrew from India, but in 1756 Delhi was again captured—this time by Ahmad Shah, Emir of Afghanistan, who had previously seized the Punjab. In 1760 the Marathas and the Sikhs joined forces against the armies of Ahmad Shah. The ensuing battle, fought at Panipat on January 7, 1761, resulted in complete victory for the invaders. In 1764, following the withdrawal of the invaders from India, the Mughal Emperor regained his throne. His authority, like that of his successors, was purely nominal, however. With the defeat of the Marathas and the Sikhs, the possibility of the reunification of India into a strong, single state had vanished—and the country, long the arena of bitter colonial rivalry among the maritime powers of Europe, fell increasingly under British domination.

G

Portuguese and Dutch Colonialism

Muslim control of the trade arteries between the Mediterranean and India, led various European powers to dream of a new route to the Far East long before Babur founded the Mughal Empire. The Portuguese devoted remarkable zeal and initiative to the search for such a route. In 1497 and 1498 Vasco da Gama, one of the royal navigators, led an expedition around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean. On May 19, 1498, da Gama sailed into the harbour of Kozhikode (Calicut), on the Malabar Coast, opening a new era of Indian history. Establishing friendly relations with the dominant Deccan kingdom, the Portuguese secured a monopoly of Indian maritime trade and maintained it for a century. The Portuguese monopoly was broken early in the 17th century by the Dutch East India Company, an amalgamation of private Dutch merchant traders set up in 1602 under the auspices of the Dutch government. Two years earlier, the English monarch Elizabeth I had granted a charter to a similar merchant organization, the first English East India Company. Company negotiations with the Mughal ruler, Emperor Jahangir, were successful, and in December 1612 the English founded their first trading post at Surat, on the Gulf of Khambhāt. On November 29 a Portuguese fleet had attacked a number of English vessels in the Gulf of Khambhāt and the English had triumphed in the ensuing battle.

During the next decade the Portuguese were defeated in several more naval engagements with the English, who thereafter encountered little opposition in India from that quarter. The Dutch, already entrenched in the Malay Archipelago, also endeavoured to drive the English out of India, but were themselves eliminated as a serious competitive force before the end of the 17th century. Meanwhile the English East India Company steadily expanded its sphere of influence and operations. It secured a foothold in Orissa in 1633, founded the city of Madras in 1639, obtained trading privileges in Bengal in 1651, acquired Bombay from Portugal in 1661, and arranged a commercial treaty with the Maratha ruler Shivaji Bhonsle in 1674; in 1690 it established Kolkata after forcibly suppressing local opposition to the move.

H

Growing French and British Rivalry

During the first half of the 18th century the French, who had begun to operate in India about 1675, emerged as a serious threat to the growing power and prosperity of the British East India Company. The friction between France and the newly formed Great Britain reached an acute stage in 1746, when a French fleet seized Madras. This action, a phase of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), and the subsequent fighting in India ended in a stalemate; in 1748 the French returned Madras to the British. Within three years the smouldering feud between the European rivals again flared into armed conflict. Robert Clive, a British East India Company employee, won distinction and victory in the fight for control of Hyderābād and the Carnatic.

The final stage of the contest between the French and British for dominance in India developed as an extension of the Seven Years’ War in Europe. In the course of the hostilities which lasted from 1756 to 1763, and involved large contingents of Indian partisans, the British won several decisive victories and effectively ended French plans for political control of the subcontinent. The most important event of the war was Clive’s victory at Plassey in 1757, which made the British virtual masters of Bengal and allowed them to tax the lucrative province—an important step in the consolidation of their power in the subcontinent. By the terms of the general peace settlement following the Seven Years’ War, French territory in India was reduced to a few trading posts. See also Carnatic Wars.