CHRONOLOGY OF PART III
543–566 ce Pulakeshin I, Founder of the Chalukyas of Badami.
6th century ce Development of bhakti worship; rise of the Pallavas.
6th to 7th centuries ce Rise of multiple kingdoms.
606–647 ce Reign of Harsha of Kanauj.
609–642 ce Pulakeshin II of Badami.
630–643 ce Hsuan Tsang in India to collect and translate Buddhist scripture.
675–685 ce I Tsing arrives by sea via Sumatra and stays at Nalanda.
7th to 9th centuries ce Tamil poet-saints; displacement of Buddhism and Jainism.
Early 8th century ce Arabs conquer Sind, raid India.
788–820 ce Shankara reinvigorates Hindu thought, copies Buddhist organization.
Mid 8th century ce Founding of the Rashtrakuta dynasty; overthrow of Chalukyas.
871–907 ce Aditya I defeats the Pallavas, founds the Chola dynasty.
985–1016 ce Rajarajachola founds the Chola empire of south India.
1000–1025 ce Mahmud of Ghazni conducts seventeen raids on north India.
11th to 14th centuries ce Efflorescence of dharma texts.
1156 ce Turkic Muslims under Mahmud of Ghur destroy Ghazni.
1193 ce Mahmud of Ghur seizes Delhi.
1206 ce Qutbuddin Aibak founds the Delhi sultanate.
1206–1290 ce ‘Slave’ sultans.
1290–1320 ce Khalji sultans.
1320–1415 ce Tughluq sultans.
1292–1306 ce Mongol invasion attempts.
1327 ce Transfer of capital from Delhi to Daulatabad.
1334 ce Independent sultanate of Madurai.
1336 ce Separate sultanate of Bengal. Foundation of Vijayanagara kingdom.
1345 ce Foundation of Bahmani kingdom.
1451 ce Bahlul Lodi seizes the Delhi throne.
1489–1520 ce Bahmani sultanate disintegrates into five independent states.
Early 16th century Apogee of Vijayanagara kingdom.
1526 ce Babur defeats Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat, becomes first Mughal emperor.
1540–1555 ce Rule of the Surs between defeat of Humayan and his restoration.
1556–1560 ce Bairam Khan regent for Akbar.
1565 ce Downfall of the Vijayanagara kingdom.
1600 ce Charter of East India Company granted by Queen Elizabeth I.
1601 ce Revolt of Prince Salim initiates recurrent Mughal infighting.
1605 ce Accession of Jahangir.
1628 ce Accession of Shah Jahan.
1657–1659 ce Shah Jahan imprisoned and fraternal struggle for succession.
1658 ce Accession of Aurangzeb; period of religious orthodoxy begins.
1659 ce Shivaji the Maratha takes Bijapur sultanate.
1659–1707 ce Aurangzeb tries to regain control of the Deccan from Marathas.
1685 ce Blockade of Bombay by East India Company.
1688 ce Shambuji captured by Aurangzeb; Rajiram escapes.
1707 ce Death of Aurangzeb; decline of the Mughal empire.
1707–1726 ce Rule of Murshid Quli Khan in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.
1720–1818 ce Peshwa bureaucracy of the Marathas.
1739 ce Nadir Shah of Persia sacks Delhi and seizes Peacock Throne.
1770 ce Great Bengal famine.
1784 ce Establishment of Board of Control of East India Company.
1813 ce Abolition of East India Company monopoly over trade.
1824 ce Sepoy mutiny at Barrackpur.
1829 ce Abolition of sati.
1833 ce East India Company ceases to trade.
1837–1900 ce Succession of severe famines and epidemics.
1853 ce Beginning of construction railway.
1857–1859 ce Mutiny and Rebellion in north India.
1858 ce Company dissolved; Parliament takes direct control of British India. Last Mughal
emperor deposed.
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Medieval and Early Modern India
MEDIEVAL KINGDOMS
The early medieval age is also defi ned by new states and religious ideologies.
Evidence of these political and religious changes dates from the time of the
Gupta kings, beginning in the fourth century. That theirs was considered a
classical age for near contemporaries is suggested by the practice of some
succeeding dynasties of dating inscriptions in accordance with the Gupta era,
but for many modern historians the Guptas were special because many practices and ideas that were to distinguish Indian society for the next thousand
years are traced to the time of their age. Indeed, the medieval millennium
can be demarcated by the widely separated reigns of two kings:
Samudragupta, 335 – 75 ce , and Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagara, 1509 – 29.
Each represented a model in his own age and within his own dynastic
tradition, as well as in the judgement of modern historians.
FROM THE GUPTAS TO HARSHA
Samudragupta’s court poet, Harisena, declaimed the grandeur of his patron’s
conquests in a 360 ce inscription placed upon a pillar that already bore two
of Ashoka ’ s edicts. The use of the same advertising space as the original
world - conqueror is as magnifi cent a gesture of self - glorifi cation as the
actual words of the later inscription. The text itself records that forty kings
and kingdoms were conquered by Samudragupta: fourteen kingdoms were
incor-porated into the central portion of his own rapidly enlarging realm;
another twelve defeated kings were reinstalled as his subordinates, and these
included the Pallava kings of the southeastern coast of the subcontinent.
110
GHURIDS
Kabul
HINDU
SHAHIS
Core areas of states
KARKOTAS
Srinagar
Leading cities and sites
Ghazni
500 miles
GHAZNAVIDS
600 km
PUSHYABHUTIS
Delhi/Indraprastha
CHACHAS
VARMANS
Kathmandu
CHAHAMANAS
GAHADAVALAS
PALAS
Kashi
SOLANKIS
Khajuraho
GUJARAPRATIHARAS
CANDELLAS
SENAS
Ujjain
YADAVAS
KALACHURIS
RASHTRAKUTAS
Devagiri
EASTERN
GANGAS
CHALUKYAS
Kalinganagara
KAKATIYAS
Bay of
Bengal
Arabian
Sea
HOYSALAS
PALLAVAS
Kanchipuram
Tanjavur
CHOLAS
Madurai
PANDYAS
Anuradhapura
LAMBAKANNAS
Map 7 The regional states of medieval India.
Medieval and Early Modern India
The destinies of two other classes of defeated sovereigns were also noted
in the inscription. Some whose lands adjoined the Gupta capital at Pataliputra
(modern Patna) were permitted to retain their positions subject to their
attendance at Samudragupta’s court. From those in more distant lands, such
as Sri Lanka or the northwestern kingdom of the Kushanas, tribute was
demanded and apparently received instead.
Samudragupta attributed his conquests to the divine favour he enjoyed,
bringing to mind Ashoka, the Buddhist who claimed the title of ‘beloved of
the gods’, and whose pillar he shared. Samudragupta, for his part, boasted of
performing the royal horse sacrifice, which his panegyrist went so far as to
assert made him the equal of Indra and other gods. This claim, recited in the
Allahabad inscription, is mirrored in a contemporary dharma text, the Naradasmriti, as well. In one of the latest of the major dharmashastras, thought to
have been created around 300 ce, its author, Narada, went beyond Manu’s
prototypic dharma text by speaking of the king as a god and denying that
there was a difference between kings and brahmans: the protection that both
conferred upon mankind, he said, stemmed from karma earned through austerities in prior lives. The conception of a kingship made sacred by legendary
austerities, both in Samudragupta’s Allahabad inscription and the Narada
dharmashastra, harks anachronistically to a notion of ritual supremacy in the
ancient brahmana period, a millennium before. In any case, claims of divine
kingship were rarely made after Gupta times.
Samudragupta’s vaulting pretensions masked another political story. Contemporaneous with the king and his successors were several kingdoms whose
sovereignty endured as long or longer over a substantial part of the subcontinent. The Vakataka kings of the northern part of the Deccan plateau ruled
independently from around 300 to 525 ce, although they seem never to have
challenged Gupta hegemonic claims. Other kingdoms with similar autonomy
for much of fourth to sixth centuries included the Hunas in the far north, the
Shakas of the west and the Kadambas and Pallavas on the west and east coasts
of the peninsula respectively. And it was not long before yet other dynasties
arose, among them the Chalukyas and Cholas in the south, the Rashtrakutas
in the west, and the house of Harshavardhana in the western Gangetic valley
by the middle of the seventh century.
Between 500 and 1700 ce, several dozen kingdoms succeeded in extending
their sovereignty for a time at least beyond their linguistic and cultural heartlands. We may call these ‘imperial states’. Two of these were ruled by Hindu
dynasts, but the most durable was the Muslim Mughal kingdom, which persisted from the middle of Akbar’s reign, around 1580, to the reign of Muhammad Shah in 1730. Dominance in more than one cultural region by almost
all of these states was usually the accomplishment of a single ruler, a great
conquering warrior such as the sixth-century Huna invader Mihirikula, who
established a large realm in the northwest. Other examples are Pulakeshin II,
ruler of the seventh-century Chalukyan kingdom in the Deccan, and the midtenth-century Krishna III of the Rashtrakutas, also in the Deccan.
During those centuries, there was a steady, but small, migration of nomads,
such as the Hunas, from the Central Asian steppes. This trickle became more
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Medieval India
substantial and dangerous following conversion to Islam in the tenth century.
Between 1000 and 1450 ce, there were other conquerors as well: Mahmud of
Ghazni; Balban, the mamluk or ‘slave’ ruler of Delhi, and his two successors,
the Khalji Sultan Alauddin and Muhammad the Tughluq, who subdued all
of the Gangetic plain and much of the Deccan plateau.
In addition to these kingdoms, which for a time at least spanned two or
more large regions of the subcontinent, there were numerous others, the scale
of whose authority was far more limited but whose duration could nevertheless
be considerable. Inscriptions from this early medieval period reveal over forty
regional dynasties, and other literary sources confirm them. Among the latter
were the chronicles of temples (mahatmya or sthala purana) and royal genealogical texts (rajavamsavali). In some cases oral traditions persist about some
quite local and minor chiefly families who claimed royal status.
Though this multiplicity of rulers, with their dispersed sovereignties, testifies to a new state form which contributed to the dynamism of the early
medieval period, there is little agreement among historians about the character
of such states. Even those who have adopted the feudal conception for India
have never specified the structure of the ‘feudal state’ that crowned the socalled feudal relations and institutions, except by implication in the example
of the kingdom of Harshavardhana.
HARSHA AND HIS NEIGHBOURS: THE QUESTION
OF CENTRALIZATION
Harsha, who was apparently offered the crown by the magnates of Kanauj
(near modern Kanpur), came of a powerful chiefly family and ruled a realm
nearly as large as the Gupta kingdom during the first half of the seventh
century. His capital was in the fertile plain between the Ganges and Yamuna
rivers. Apart from the rich agricultural potential and the valuable trade that
entered the Gangetic plain at that point, the westward shift of the capital from
Pataliputra in the eastern Gangetic basin offered improved defence of the
entire plain from further despoliation at the hands of the Hunas who had
preyed upon the last Gupta kings.
Harsha ruled from 606 to 647, and his capital became the focus of struggles
among a succession of kingdoms until 1200, when Central Asian Muslims
established their hegemony. And although he claimed a territory as great as
that of the Guptas, Harsha’s real sway did not extend beyond a compact territory in the richly watered lands between the Ganges and Yamuna rivers. We
know this in part from a famous biography by the poet and playwright Bana,
to which was appended a description by the famous Chinese Buddhist monk
Hsuan Tsang, who spent thirteen years (630–43 ce) in the vicinity while collecting sacred texts and relics to take back to China. His scriptural translations
from the Sanskrit were accompanied by detailed discussions of the sacred
places he visited.
A set of inscribed copper-plates of 632 ce tells us something about Harsha’s
kingdom. Characteristically, these inscriptions recorded a gift of land to
two brahmans, and among the protectors of the gift were a set of political
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Medieval and Early Modern India
personages with state power. Some were mahasamantas, allied to the king but
of a subordinate status; others were ‘great kings’ (maharajas), independent
rulers who acknowledged Harsha’s overlordship; and still others served the
chakravartin, or emperor of the universe, as Harsha styled himself, in various
capacities, including military. Lowest among the guarantors of the gift was
the local community where the gifted lands were located. Donations to brahmans – and to Buddhists and Jainas before the time of Harsha – had usually
come from a royal prince or a provincial governor. In these copper-plates,
however, though the donor of the land was a soldier serving Harsha and the
executor of the grant was an accountant in the king’s service, the first of
the dignitaries to be mentioned was the mahasamanta who ruled a territory
adjoining the core tract of land around Kanauj.
It is tempting to compare the mahasamantas to the feudal vassals of medieval European kings. Like them, the mahasamantas were permitted to be
virtually autonomous rulers of realms near the core tracts of their overlords,
and may have paid them tribute as well as provided military service. But to
argue that their lands were grants in lieu of salaries accorded by the rulers is
to carry the analogy farther than the evidence warrants. In fact, the mahasamantas were territorial magnates in their own right, either by inheritance or
conquest, whether or not they were given lands to support their official duties.
Against these dubious assumptions concerning the sudden and growing
importance of samantas and mahasamantas it is possible to put forward a
simpler explanation. Titles and the land grants were a means by which higher
lords expressed ties to lesser rulers in an accretion of followerships that were
constitutive of the great kingships of early medieval India. Rulers of this time
spoke of their samantachakra, their circle of subordinates; the larger the circle,
the more august the overlord. Both superior and inferior lords enhanced their
security for a time, but while such arrangements can be reconciled with feudal
relations, they cannot in themselves justify the appellation ‘feudal’.
Whether Harsha’s kingdom was actually less centralized than the Guptas’
is uncertain. Most ancient historians agree that such centralized administration as may have existed – even under the powerful founder of the Guptas,
Chandragupta, and his conquering successor Samudragupta – was restricted
to the central part of the Gangetic plain between Pataliputra and Mathura.
Beyond that zone, there was no centralized authority.
A more certain contrast between Harsha’s polity and that of the Guptas
may have been that the latter had few formidable opponents in northern India
and, until quite late in their allotted time, no very formidable enemies beyond.
When Harsha sought to extend his authority southward into the Deccan,
however, he was humbled by King Pulakeshin II, the Chalukyan ruler of a
Deccan kingdom from which inscriptions had begun to be issued in the sixth
century. Inscriptions in Pulakeshin’s capital, Badami, celebrated that victory
by punning that his fighting elephants caused the mirth (harsha) of King
Harsha to evaporate. Harsha’s successor was summarily crushed by the king
of Bengal.
Yet even the redoubtable Pulakeshin was not the absolute master of the
southern peninsula, for during his long reign (610–42 ce) he was challenged
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Medieval India
by the Pallava kings, Mahendravarman and Narasimhavarman, who, for their
part, faced opposition from lesser kings and reluctant subordinates, the
Pandyan and Chola rulers of the far south of the peninsula. Incessant conflict
followed in the next several centuries, centring on Kanauj and Harsha’s rich
patrimony there. During that time, warlords from every direction – Bengal,
the Deccan, Rajasthan in the west and Kashmir in the north – strove to seize
and hold Kanauj. The competition was terminated by the conquest of the
entire Gangetic region by Central Asian Muslims during the thirteenth
century.
THE PENINSULAR KINGDOMS
Throughout most of India, even the feeble centralization of the Mauryan and
Gupta regimes was absent. In the peninsula during early medieval times, a
different state form took root in most of the extant kingdoms. The provenance
and duration of the kingdoms of the Deccan and the far south can be traced
by the distribution of inscriptions recovered during the past century of epigraphical collection in India. The kings of the Cholas and Pandyas, who are
mentioned along with the distant kings of Syria, Macedonia, Epirus (on the
Ionian coast) and Cyrene (in North Africa), were first noted in an edict of
Ashoka that spoke of the kingdoms to which he sent Buddhist missionaries.
By the early centuries of the present era, mention of the ancient Cholas
and Pandyas was joined by that of the Satavahana kings, whose domains
reached across the entire Deccan plateau, and, on the northeast coast of
modern Orissa, by the Chedi rulers of Kalinga. Scattered throughout the
peninsula were minor dynasties of all sorts. Some of these were to attain very
considerably greater sway by 500 ce, when the Guptas still ruled their core
Gangetic territory. The Pallava and Kadamba kings ruled over eastern and
western Deccan tracts, the Vakatakas over the central and northern Deccan,
and a set of small kingdoms were found along the Orissan littoral. By the early
seventh century, when Harsha’s kingdom flourished in the central Ganges,
the far south had come under the sway of the Pallava kings of Kanchipuram
and much of the central and eastern Deccan was under the Chalukyas of
Badami, Pulakeshin’s line. These peninsular kingdoms did not evolve from
within the Gupta political integument as the northern kingdoms supposedly
did, but their existence reflected conditions of society which affected all early
medieval kingdoms.
By the seventh century, then, a set of regional centres of power were well
established, and it was to be characteristic of the medieval political system
that there was no single imperial ruler, but many contenders striving for
control over a small part of what they claimed. Each of a number of kingdoms
was a loosely structured political system with sufficient resources of surplus
food and population to support military formations capable of defence as well
as predatory alliances with neighbours aimed at the conquest of distant others.
Harsha’s domains in the western Gangetic valley were subsequently overrun
by a succession of contending kings, some from remote places. One of these
was the Kashmiri Lalitaditya, whose place in history was made by defeating
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Medieval and Early Modern India
an Arab army that sought to invade the Ganges plain after having conquered
Sind in 711 ce. Lalitaditya’s campaigns against Kanauj were symptomatic of
his recognition that the centre of geopolitical gravity had shifted to the western
Gangetic plain under threats to the area from beyond the northwestern mountain frontier. The danger from Central Asia compounded threats to the
Gangetic overlords from Kashmir and from the southern Deccan realm of the
Rashtrakuta kings, who extended their rule to the Ganges region and to
Kanauj around 1200.
REGIONALIZATION
A defining and central process of the early Indian medieval age was the consolidation of regional societies, in which process political forms were more
important elements than hard territorial boundaries. The kingdoms of that
age had fluid boundaries; they were states defined less by administration than
by language, sectarian affiliations and temples. Political treatises continued
an older rhetoric of pragmatic alliances among polities aimed at averting the
violent swallowing of small states by larger ones. However, within the limited
regions defined by royal claims, new political, linguistic, literary and social
histories and boundaries were taking a shape that remains recognizable even
in contemporary modern India.
At the core of this regionalizing process were two forces: one was socioeconomic and had to do with the widespread displacement of pastoral by
agrarian economies and less stratified societies by more hierarchical ones; the
other was cultural, involving gods, temples, inspired poets and philosophers.
But political forms mediated these directive influences of the post-classical
world of India.
It is impossible to decide which of the components of the regionalizing
process was the most important or determining: political, religious or cultural.
It cannot be said that the emergence of smaller, more compact monarchies
caused the religious, linguistic and literary developments of these centuries.
At any rate, there is no evidence of any such intentions on the part of the new
monarchs, and it seems that these kings were as much made by as makers of
these developments. Possibly, the three aspects of regionalization were complexly related to other causal factors. Speculatively, it can be suggested that
this was an age of rapid and generalized development of commodity production and also of town life, both of which contributed to India’s reputation for
fabulous wealth and elegance. Its products were sought by traders of the
dynamic and expanding orders of the time in Tang China and the now Islamicized Arabian Peninsula. Traders from both areas found their ways to Indian
emporia or met Indian traders in other zones of commercial activity in the
Middle East and Southeast Asia.
In addition to the production of goods, there was the explosion of Indian
literary production, of Sanskrit productions of puranas and dramas, as well
as a flowering of literatures in other languages. Both forms of production were
attractive to people throughout and beyond the subcontinent. Where once
Buddhist and Jaina ideologies flourished, in part by providing a moral justi-
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Medieval India
fication for the pragmatic values of merchants and moneyed men, as well as
by providing an institutional framework that linked Buddhist and Jaina monasteries with the high commerce of the age, these functions were now readily
assumed by Hindu temples.
Buddhism and Jainism were displaced after Mauryan times, with considerable difficulty in some places. In Bengal, Buddhist institutions continued to
enjoy supporters until Muslim iconoclasts destroyed many of their holy places
in the twelfth century; a large proportion of Bengal’s Buddhists converted to
Islam; others were won to a form of regional devotional Vishnu worship. Far
away in the Tamil cultural region, religion had long before become involved
with both linguistic and political developments that moulded the regionalization process lying at the heart of medieval Indian historical change. And
driving the Tamil cultural process was a deadly struggle between a new sort
of brahmanical worship and the older religious hegemony of Buddhists and
Jainas.
Sectarians of both sorts found political support from some Tamil rulers
around the sixth century about whom little is known (and that mostly from
hostile commentators who decried them as ‘evil’ rulers). They may have been
hill chieftains who obtruded political control over the rich agricultural plains
in which they found and patronized Buddhist and Jaina institutions and teachers. Even when these so-called usurpers of plains authority were driven off by
kings such as the Pallavas, the victors continued to support Jainism until
converted by teachers of the new devotional faith. Pallava Mahendravarman,
for example, renounced his affiliation with Jainism, and turned against and
persecuted its followers after becoming a Shiva worshipper. Other Tamil
rulers followed suit as the Shiva cult armed itself with a powerful theology to
compete against Buddhists and Jainas.
HINDU RESURGENCE AND
LINGUISTIC FLUORESCENCE
A major formulator of the reinvigorated Hindu thought was Shankara, a
brahman who combined philosophical adroitness with impressive organizational acumen. To oppose what he castigated as blasphemy, he returned to
the ancient Upanishads (from which Buddhist doctrines had also evolved),
and offered explanations of salvation as compelling as those of the hegemonic
heterodoxies of his time and earlier. Besides incorporating and transcending
Buddhist doctrines, he mimicked their institutions by establishing the monastery (matha) as a key institution in a number of sites. Four of these held
special status as major missionary centres, each under a successor-teacher
(sankaracharya).
The religious reforms were not wholly intellectual. In addition to borrowing
and incorporating Buddhist and Jaina institutions, Shankara adopted a popular
song form to compose praises to Shiva. These hymns of devotion became the
foundation for the new and popular worship, one that has endured to the
present throughout India under the name of Hinduism.
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Medieval and Early Modern India
The religious devotionalism called bhakti which first took shape in Tamil
country during the sixth century was anticipated earlier by the Krishna devotionalism found in the Bhagavad Gita, composed around the first century ce
and incorporated into the Mahabharata around a century prior to Shankara’s
time. Further developments of the Tamil bhakti religion were the work of
later poet devotees and theologians. According to tradition, between the sixth
and tenth centuries, sixty-three Shiva- and twelve Vishnu-worshipping poets
created a large corpus of Tamil devotional songs, and all are now revered as
saints. Nor did theology lag far behind. Shankara’s work in providing an intellectual base for popular worship of Shiva was also intended to maintain and
strengthen brahman leadership, and this feature was imitated by the Vishnu
cult as well.
Religious developments spurred the development of first Tamil and subsequently other languages between 1000 and 1300 ce. In the twelfth century,
bhakti hymns were composed in Bengali by the saint Jayadev and in what is
now called Hindi by Nimbarka of Mathura. Nimbarka was originally a south
Indian brahman whose devotion to Krishna inspired him to a missionary vocation that helped to make Mathura the centre of the Krishna cult. In the same
period, literary works, along with such technical auxiliaries as grammars and
dictionaries, were written in Marathi, Bengali and several other languages.
Languages and literatures underwent a regionalization that made possible
the spread and particularization of popular devotion to Vishnu, Shiva and the
goddesses. Everywhere devotees imitated the Tamils, the first of the devotional worshippers to create a corpus of hymns in their own language. These
compositions launched the development of all the modern languages of the
subcontinent, those based on Sanskrit throughout the north, and others based
upon a mix of Dravidian and Sanskrit words and grammatical forms in the
south.
In addition to the bhakti songs, two other literary projects assumed special
importance. One genre preserved or invented myths about the gods who were
the divine objects of the songs and theology and were installed in temples
devoted to their worship. These temples, along with the mathas, gave institutional focus to the religious reformation. The other stimulus to the literature
of the early medieval age was the chronicles of ruling families of the time.
URBANIZATION AND THE COUNTRYSIDE
Temples and kings were crucial institutions of regional cultures during early
medieval times, and both had the further effect of stimulating urbanization.
Again, the Tamil country provides early examples. The major Shiva temples
of Tanjavur and Madurai became the royal chapels of the Chola and Pandya
kings respectively. Both ruling families lavished treasure on adorning and
worshipping the deities enshrined, attracting a large permanent population of
priestly officiants at each temple and throngs of pilgrims whose needs created
the foundations for substantial urban centres.
We know all this from documents inscribed on the stone basements and
walls of both temples and from the chronicles eulogizing the gods and dem-
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Medieval India
onstrating in the process that many of them were transformed local guardian
spirits who were assimilated by stories to Shiva legends found in Sanskrit
puranas or an even earlier time. This sort of ‘Sanskritization’, the assimilation
of previous territorial spirits to the most august of gods, was also a necessary
part of a process of ‘regalization’. Would-be kings intent on converting their
status from that of ambitious warriors and local chieftains into chakravartins
aided in the metamorphosis of often minor, popular gods and goddesses into
manifestations of Shiva or Vishnu, worthy of royal adoration.
In early medieval times, kings’ temples were also palaces where royal business was conducted and royal rituals were enacted. Political capitals inevitably
were or became temple centres, and many also became major urban centres.
Royal worshippers and their gods attracted subjects and devotees in large
numbers, and the servicing of both made each capital city an economic centre
as well. In due course, lesser chiefs – grandees and magnates to whom the
title ‘Samanta’ was applied and who maintained smaller courts in the scores
of kingdoms of the early medieval age – began to imitate their superiors; we
have another of India’s moments of urbanization to mark.
The early medieval, commercial- and religious-led urbanization is one
reason for scepticism regarding the notion of feudalism, which is conceptually
related to deurbanization and decommercialization, to India. Nowhere is this
clearer than in the manner in which the city of Kanauj in the western Gangetic
plain became the focus of north Indian politics for several centuries, during
which competing conquerors from the north, south, east and west strove to
seize and hold it: the city had become the emblem of the chakravartin. But
all over the subcontinent other cities were created as the centres of lordships;
in most of them still survive the impressive monumental ruins that have made
the archaeology of historical places a major intellectual enterprise in India.
The pronounced urban character of the early medieval age accounts in part
for the allure of India for the Turkic invaders from the steppes. For them,
cities could be made to provide the means to sustain the new institutions of
Islam and a new elite of Muslim fighters and rulers.
This was India’s third urbanization, if we take the first to have been that
of the Indus and the Indian northwest, and the second that of the Gangetic
plain in pre-Mauryan times. In contrast to the first two moments of urban
development, when towns were sparse and uniquely the sites of state-level
authority, those of the early medieval age appeared in rich profusion, reflecting
a wide dispersion of authority and close relations between political centres
and the community base upon which the states were founded.
The relationship was variably manifested over the length and breadth of
the subcontinent. In places relatively less well endowed by nature – such as
Rajasthan in the northwest or Karnataka in the central peninsula – there
appeared one sort of configuration of community and kingdom, while in the
Gangetic plain and the Coromandel plain in the south there was another. In
Rajasthan and Karnataka, the caste culture of the medieval age was known,
but the hierarchical practices of caste relations were attenuated by the principles of clan organization of the farming communities and their artisan and
priestly clients that now characterized the countryside.
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Medieval and Early Modern India
In the core zones of the early medieval age, Gangetic towns and communities from the sixth to the twelfth centuries, powerful landed groups had separated their identities from the older clan collectivities whence they emerged
or whom they conquered. Thereupon, the older penates and vedic rituals of
Aryan clansmen were shunned by the arriviste dominant peasantries of diverse
clan origins. Instead, large holdings of land were granted to learned and
priestly brahman adepts of the new bhakti faiths.
There is also evidence of the new enstructuration of communities in the
other major medieval riverine loci of civilization in the subcontinent, the
Palar and Kaveri basins in the south. Large rural settlements were created
during the reigns of the Pallava and Chola kings of the seventh to thirteenth centuries, sometimes by the kings themselves, but more often by
wealthy and powerful landed groups. The latter consisted of local communities of often hundreds of villages, who managed their economic, social
and political affairs through their councils. For them, connections with
brahmans conferred a status that others, such as artisans and merchants,
could not hope to attain until several centuries later. Then, around the
twelfth century, craftsmen and merchants organized an extensive oppositionary alliance and fought for a degree of parity with the landed. The
southern communities provide rich documentation on the complex and
competitive alignments of social groups of the early medieval age and also
on the increasingly complex commercial world that was intruding upon
medieval societies. Clan organization had no more importance here than in
the Gangetic countryside.
THE MERCHANT GUILDS
Beginning in the ninth century, inscriptions drew attention to another kind
of community whose function for many centuries was to provide trade links
among agrarian communities in Karnataka and Tamil country with Sri
Lanka and Southeast Asia. One group of traders called themselves the Five
Hundred Lords of Ayyavolu (modern Aihole), a town that was formerly a
subsidiary capital of the Chalukyas of Badami and a place with many temples
and brahmans, some of whom seem to have become involved in the trading
activities of the Five Hundred. But most of the Ayyavolu Lords were merchants, especially those who engaged in long-distance trade. Their inscriptions
between the ninth and fourteenth centuries record their endowments to
temples, and their gifts were often made in cooperation with the local merchant groups through whom the itinerant traders distributed their often exotic
commodities.
In hundreds of stone inscriptions, partly in Sanskrit and partly in one of
the southern languages, these prestigious itinerant traders who flourished until
the fourteenth century harked back to the Chalukya kings, who, in the heyday
of their rule over the Deccan in the seventh and eighth centuries, had capitals
at several places in Karnataka, including Ayyavolu. The following passage was
taken from a long inscription recorded by the guild of the Ayyavolu merchants
in 1055 ce:
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Medieval India
Famed throughout the world, adorned with many good qualities, truth, purity,
good conduct, policy, condescension, and prudence; protectors of the viraBananju-dharma [law of the heroic traders], having 32 veloma, 18 cities, 64
yoga-pithas, and asramas at the four points of the compass; born to be wanderers
over many countries, the earth as their sack, … the serpent race as the cords,
the betel pouch as a secret pocket, the horizon as their light;
… by land routes and water routes penetrating into the regions of the six
continents, with superior elephants, well-bred horses, large sapphires, moonstones, pearls, rubies, diamonds … cardamoms, cloves, sandal, camphor musk,
saffron and other perfumes and drugs; by selling which wholesale, or hawking
about on their shoulders, preventing the loss by customs duties, they fill up the
emperor’s treasury of gold, his treasury of jewels, and his armoury of weapons;
and from the rest they daily bestow gifts on pandits and munis; white umbrellas
as their canopy, the mighty ocean as their moat, Indra as the hand-guard [of
their swords], Varuna as the standard-bearer, Kubera as the treasurer, the nine
planets as a belt … the sun and moon as the backers, the 33 gods as the spectators; like the elephant they attack and kill, like the cow they stand and kill, like
the serpent, they kill with poison; like the lion they spring and kill … they make
fun of the gone Mari [last epidemic] … clay they set fire to, of sand they make
ropes; the thunderbolt they catch and exhibit; the sun and moon they draw down
to earth;1
The obvious model for this inscription was the famous declaration of Krishna
in the Bhagavad Gita, but it reveals that not only the entrepreneurial spirit
but the culture and road wisdom of the backpacker were current a millennium
ago.
Though the most flamboyant, the Five Hundred were not the only itinerant
merchants who became a community because of their operations within a
recognized if far-ranging zone. Another, called Manigramam, manifested their
cosmopolitanism in the earliest of their epigraphs, which was inscribed on
copper-plates still in the possession of the Syrian Christians of Kerala. Four
languages figure in this inscription and as many scripts: early Tamil, Arabic,
Hebrew and middle Persian. It sets out the conditions laid down for foreign
traders at the port of Quilon by agreement with the local rulers. Members of
both of these itinerant mercantile communities were found in ports and other
commercial centres; they endowed temples, fed brahmans and contributed to
the maintenance of irrigation works.
The traders’ inscriptions dot the entire southern peninsula, tracing an interregional and international trade nexus of merchants of whom some were
identified as nanadeshi, or of ‘many countries’, and others as local (swadeshi,
‘own country’). These traders’ groups provided one of the conduits for transporting Dravidian culture to Southeast Asia, an extension beyond the subcontinent of early medieval urbanization.
INDIAN INFLUENCES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
For the medieval kingdoms, the sea provided opportunities for political, religious and commercial influence to reach beyond the subcontinent. In one
direction lay western Asia and the energies of recently converted Muslim
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traders who penetrated the markets of the subcontinent during the eighth
century, even as the Arab Muslim horsemen were turned away by Lalitaditya
and other warriors. Trade with the eastern Mediterranean continued steadily
after that. War horses and metal goods were imported; black pepper, sandalwood and textiles were exported; and Chinese silk and porcelain, obtained
from Southeast Asia, were re-exported to the west. Hazardous individual
voyages between western Asian and western Indian ports during the eighth
and ninth centuries eventually gave way to a trade system among established
emporia inhabited by cosmopolitan communities of Arabs, Jews and Armenians from western Asia. These provided convenient economic linkages across
the Arabian Sea that enriched merchants on both sides.
Another ocean frontier opened to Southeast Asia. During the early centuries of the present era, three kingdoms emerged in the Indo-Chinese peninsula, covering parts of modern Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Kings with
Sanskritic names ruled these realms: Kaundinya and Jayavarman in the Funan
kingdom between 400 and 500 ce, and, in the same period, Sruta Sreshta
Varman of the Chenla kingdom, and Bhadravarman of Champa in the IndoChinese peninsula. These and lesser states that emerged before the seventh
century in what is modern Malaysia and Java attest to a profound Indian
impact upon its eastern neighbours.
The ‘Indianization’ of Southeast Asia was long thought to have been the
result of military conquests which created what a generation of Indian nationalist historians called ‘Greater India’. In more recent writings, these cultural
and political influences are understood as both multifaceted and bilateral. Not
only were merchants and especially religious scholars involved as well as soldiers, but exchanges took place at the behest of the Southeast Asians as well
as for the profit of Indians. In religious matters the initiative is actually thought
to have come more from Southeast Asians. They established extended connections with India and especially with south India during Pallava and Chola
times, and, later, when Islam was introduced into Malaya, Java and Sumatra,
it too was imported from south India.
True, Ashoka claimed to have sent missionaries to a number of places in
Asia. But the religious instruction he initiated was broadened as knowledge
of Sanskrit increased, opening the way into other forms of Indic learning,
including the dharma texts on society and kingship. Inscriptions record that
Southeast Asians sojourned in Indian seminaries in order to learn these religious innovations and translate them into their own tongues, and these learned
men from various parts of insular and peninsular parts of Southeast Asia were
certainly prime agents of cultural transfer. Having acquired Indian knowledge
through Sanskrit and Prakrit, at first in order to learn the tenets of Buddhism,
they soon found their way to the Sanskrit puranas that taught the still new
form of bhakti worship, and, along with that, the dharmashastras containing
models of social hierarchy and powerful monarchy. The devotional worship
first devised in south India thus was carried to Southeast Asia as well as to
the western and northern parts of the subcontinent.
At length the basics of the entire political and social system – a veritable
manual that defined ancient India – were disseminated over all of Southeast
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Medieval India
Asia, stimulating the development of new societies and cultures there, as well
as markets for Indian goods. Merchants from the southern coast of India
provisioned these markets in return for gold and for the Chinese commodities
that were valued imports in India.
Indian culture was changed in the transfer to Southeast Asia and one of
the changes involved the nature of kingship. The notion of the god-king
(devaraya) was developed in the Indo-Chinese peninsula by native monarchs,
perhaps after they themselves had been introduced to the idea by the Naradasmriti. Claiming divinity for themselves, Khmer kings created vast and
exquisite temple-palaces such as that at Angkor. Nevertheless, the idea was
never adopted in India at that period; rather the converse. Medieval Indian
kings were content to be only pious devotees, the first among the worshippers
of the dominant deities of bhakti: Shiva, Vishnu and the Goddess, Devi or
Durga, who were endowed with royal style. These deities had risen to prominence during the Gupta age, and they were to remain the most august of
sovereigns, lavishly sheltered in the magnificent palaces which Indian temples
after Gupta times became.
THE ROYALTY OF GODS AND THE DIVINITY OF KINGS
Though not gods themselves, Indian kings, like the kings of Southeast Asia,
were conquerors, successful warriors capable of inspiring lesser chiefs and
kings to ally with them in joint ventures undertaken as often for plunder and
glory as for territory. Royal authority also depended on persuading lesser
authorities – chiefly heads of peasant localities, small town markets and religious institutions – to accept their offers of protection in return for a portion
of their subjects’ wealth.
Early medieval Indian kingdoms were based in core territories over which
the ruler and his household, and his kinsmen and associated households,
exercised direct authority. There they adjudicated conflicts and collected
revenue. The size of this core depended on how many soldiers – mounted
and on foot – could be supported from its wealth, and on the relative strength
of neighbouring lordships. But everywhere during the early medieval age, it
was accepted that it was necessary to have a king, one who was close by if
possible, but a distant king if not. Accordingly, over forty substantial royal
lineages – kingdoms – left evidence of their authority between the seventh and
eleventh centuries; each issued royal inscriptions in accordance with forms
specified in the dharmic and puranic texts of the time. These records, in stone
or on copper-plates, glorified the ruling family and the accomplishments of
individual kings. They were placed on the walls of temples in order to make
them widely known yet protected from vandals; building a royal temple was
an obligation on any king who strove for greatness, according to the Vishnudharmottarapurana of Kashmir and other contemporary texts.
The principles of kingship from the seventh century on were stipulated in
the same texts that provided the basis for the devotional worship of gods. The
lot of mankind was vested in both divine and royal hands, and both kings and
gods were given charismatic biographies. The puranas that recounted the
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careers and attributes of the Gupta-period gods were written between the
fourth and the eight centuries, and served as manuals of worship as well. They
were transmitted by learned sect leaders who associated closely with great and
small kings and local chiefs. The credentials of even the most powerful rulers
who supplied the resources to sustain sectarian institutions were expressed in
and justified by an ideology of religious devotion.
Kings and their divine patrons ruled large agrarian communities whose
sedentary farming institutions and practices continued to expand during the
medieval age. Pastoralists and forest people alike were drawn into agrarian
society as their ancient hill and forest-covered homelands were converted to
field agriculture and they themselves into field hands to meet the labour
demands of more intensive cultivation. Surpluses of food and commodities
such as cotton became increasingly available for ordinary as well as aristocratic
households, and also for an explosion in cultural production.
THE ROLE OF THE SOUTHERN KINGDOMS
During the first two centuries of the present era, a dynasty of kings who called
themselves Satavahanas exercised a sprawling sway over the land called Dakshinapatha, the Deccan plateau between the Narmada and Godavari river
basins. They claimed universal dominion just as did their contemporaries in
the north, the Kushana and Shaka kings, and all justified such claims by the
conquest of minor rulers from whom homage was demanded, but very little
else. Some of the minor principalities under Satavahana suzerainty were
nothing more than chieftaincies, and these included the Chola, Pandya and
Chera mentioned in Ashokan records.
Later, some of the minor principalities became more impressive. The
Pallava kings ruled around the important trade centre of Kanchipuram on the
southeast coast, which was known to Chinese merchants, as it had been to
the Romans. However, it is likely that the Pallava kingdom owed its existence
to the prosperous irrigation and dense agrarian settlement around Kanchipuram as well as to its trade. Along with the rise of the northern Tamil
kingdom of the Pallavas, the Cholas and Pandyas in their respective river
valley domains became more concentrated authorities, the smaller, more
compact and wealthier monarchies that were the mark of the medieval era.
The Pallavas at their height ruled a region of 7000 square miles, the largest
realm seen in the southeastern peninsula to date: they seem to have arisen
from the northern fringes of Tamil-speakers. From the flourishing trade centre
of Kanchipuram, they extended their sovereignty over all the Tamils during
the seventh and eighth centuries. The core of their kingdom, however, was a
region called Tondaimandalam, which had formerly been divided into twentyfour localities, each called a kottam, which had been dominated by two ancient
chiefdoms before they were swept aside when the first Pallava proclaimed
them as his realm in the late sixth century. Kottams were agrarian communities, prepared to share some of their wealth with the new line of Pallava kings
and also to serve these kings as soldiers when, during the seventh century,
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Medieval India
Pallava sovereignty was extended far into the south, incorporating the domains
of the Cholas.
Each kottam was a sub-region of pastoral and agrarian organization, inhabited by sets of village-based farmers, herdsmen and artisans who acted together
to maintain the precious irrigation upon which cultivation depended. They
constructed reservoirs resembling small lakes connected to the fields by channels. They also built small temples, among the earliest ‘structural’ temples in
the subcontinent, to house the guardian spirits they propitiated against disease
and other misfortune, and the chiefly families began to invite brahman families
to settle among them and worship the puranic gods in return for livelihoods
derived from the most productive lands. The peasantry of the kottams had
earlier supported learned Jaina teachers in the same manner.
Pallava attempts to expand northward were thwarted by the rising power
of the Rashtrakuta kings of Karnataka and Maharashtra. The latter conquered
most of the southern peninsula during the eighth to tenth centuries, and at
one point, under their king Krishna III in the middle of the tenth century,
they joined the competition then in progress among the northern ruling families for control of Kanauj and the western Gangetic plain.
By the seventh century, and possibly earlier, Tamil-speaking people had
not only internalized the ideas of royal sovereignty and legitimacy, but held
that the previously unimpressive chieftaincies of the Cholas, the Pandyas and
the Cheras – the last confined to the present Kerala region – had actually
constituted three royal traditions of equal and legendary standing. The notion
of the ‘three kings’ was expressed in Tamil poetry and inscriptions, and by
the tenth century local magnates proudly claimed to be muventavelar, the
soldiers who by their valour sustained the three kingships.
Under the Pallavas and the Chola kings who succeeded them in the ninth
century, royal authority was strongest in two widely separated zones: the
countryside surrounding Kanchipuram in the basin of the Palar River, and
the Tanjavur region, watered by the Kaveri River. The respective capitals of
the Pallavas and Cholas were centred in zones defined by extensive irrigation
systems, on which kings and their agents drew for support. In those core areas
of their authority, temples were built and provision was made for large contingents of the priests and retainers whose role was to conduct the appropriate
worship of the high gods Shiva and Vishnu. Accordingly, colonies of learned
brahmans, supported by income from prosperous villages, were founded by
kings and, in a process of imitation, by local chiefs who often referred to
themselves as muvendavelar.
Most of the rest of the Tamil plain and its upland extensions were beyond
the direct administration of the Pallava and Chola kings. There, minor kingdoms and chiefdoms were under the control of ruling lineages drawn from
the dominant land-holding groups. Hundreds of territorial assemblies spoke
for agrarian communities and were locally ruled by chiefs. These magnates
also aped their betters by inscribing records of their grants to brahmans on
the walls of their local temples, extending a kind of homage in the form of a
largely symbolic subordination – and occasional service – to the Pallava and
Chola kings.
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An example of this kind of transaction was found in a set of copper-plates
inscribed in 764, during the reign of Pallavamalla (Nandivarman II) in the
village of Pullur, near modern Madras. Like other Pallava inscriptions it opens
with the standard Sanskrit verses eulogizing the king, introducing a young
chieftain and recording a gift to 108 ‘poor and pure’ brahmans, for whom he
sought the king’s protection. The gift itself consisted of four riverine villages,
including Pullur, that were to constitute a new settlement for the brahmans.
Gifts of villages to brahmans (brahmadeya) conferred merit upon the chief and
the king alike, for the latter was enjoined to protect it for all time. The Tamil
language plates with which the inscription continued were presumably
addressed to ordinary local people; these set out in detail the boundaries of
the new settlement, which were to be demarcated in a public ceremony by
the representative body of major local cultivators (nattar, people of the nadu,
or agrarian locale) and recorded by accountants employed by the nattar. The
grant ends by naming the brahman recipients of this prodigious grant of
around 1000 acres of riverine land.
The record defined two communities. Each brahman beneficiary was punctiliously identified according to the sub-caste and the learned tradition (sutra)
he was responsible for transmitting. The large number of brahman residents
of the new villages enjoyed political autonomy from the surrounding villages
of cultivators, pastoralists, traders and artisans. Their privileges and immunities were specified. For example, none save ‘clean’ castes could live within
the village precincts, even though untouchables worked the fields that supported the brahman households. On the other hand, schools under brahman
teachers were opened to shudras who might receive tuition in rhetoric, logic
and warfare, among other subjects. (In the south, the kshatriya and vaishya
varnas were largely missing, and these roles were often assumed by shudras.)
The young chief and his peasant subjects in many villages around Pullur
were placed in a special relationship with the king. As a community, the villagers around Pullur gained status from their munificence, for it placed them
in the prestigious position of patrons of brahman savants, along with the king
whose protection was extended over their generous gift.
IDEOLOGY AND AUTHORITY IN SOUTH INDIA
In south India, royal authority was claimed both within the riverine cores of
realms and sometimes also at considerable distances from the royal capitals.
The Chola kings boasted of their overseas conquests, including the northern
portion of the island of Sri Lanka, the Maldive Islands located to the west of
India and the kingdom of Srivajaya in southern Sumatra. Rajarajachola
boasted of the treasure taken from overseas and the more remote parts of the
Indian peninsula, with which he built a magnificent royal temple in his capital
Tanjavur. (The god of this shrine was Rajarajesvara, meaning the Shiva
phallus worshipped by King Rajaraja.) His son Rajendrachola I claimed to
have sent an army to conquer the Ganges, so that its sacred waters could be
added to, and thus sanctify, the tank of his royal temple at Gangaikondacholapuram, on the north bank of the Kaveri River. Again, the name com-
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Image not available in the electronic edition
Plate 10 The Minakshi-Sundareshvara (Shiva) temple at Madurai. By a south Indian
artist, on European paper, watermarked 1820. Captioned in Telugu (BM OA. 1962.
12-31. 013(69), Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum).
Medieval and Early Modern India
memorated the conquest: it means ‘the city of the Chola that seized the River
Ganges’.
Despite these overweening claims, and apart from the immediate hinterlands of their royal precincts, the subjects of the Pallava, Chola and other
southern kings between the seventh and the twelfth centuries managed their
own affairs. Community institutions were the means of autonomy. Some were
ancient institutions, such as the village and locality assemblies and chieftaincies; others, such as temples and the seminaries often attached to them, were
more recent. In both the older and newer institutions, diverse customary
arrangements were recognized and preserved, and most locales allocated a
part of their wealth for the support of brahmans and the worship of both
august puranic gods and humble, local guardian deities, who were principally
goddesses.
An instance of the process of cultural generalization and elaboration was
the incorporation by ‘marriage’ to Shiva of the autonomous goddess Minakshi. Marriage meant that Minakshi became assimilated to Shiva’s consortdeity Parvati. The same example illustrates a second mechanism as well, for
Minakshi’s ‘wedding’ was first celebrated in a temple festival sumptuously
sponsored by the kings whose capital, Madurai, was built around Minakshi’s
temple. This sort of synthesizing of religious, cultural and political elements
was a central feature of regionalization and produced a diverse medieval cultural heritage that contrasts with the assumed unity of the classical Gupta age.
Tamil devotees of Shiva had been the first to transform the stories of the
gods in Sanskrit puranas by retelling them in ordinary Tamil beginning in the
sixth century; by means of hymns in praise of Shiva, places and stories previously sacred to some tutelary deity were transformed into loci in which Shiva
himself was manifested. One of the earliest of the Shiva hymnists was the poet
Appar who, around 600 ce, had renounced the Jainism he had previously
professed and went on to persuade the Pallava king Mahendravarman I to
abandon his Jaina teachers. Somewhat later, Sambandar, another Shiva
hymnist, reputedly converted the Pandyan king in Madurai and persuaded
him to rid his capital of the numerous Jaina teachers previously honoured and
supported there by royal generosity. Sambandar may even have convinced the
king to complete his conversion by impaling the heads of 8000 Jaina teachers,
an event long celebrated at the major Shiva temple of Madurai.
The Chola kings were especially devout Shiva worshippers and may even
have engaged in the rare religious persecution of the worshippers of Vishnu,
who had meanwhile been carrying out a similar programme of hymn-making
and theology. The traditions of Tamil Vishnu devotees refer to the desecration
of some Vishnu temples by the late Chola king Kulottunga III. However,
priestly and lay followers of Vishnu found other royal houses more sympathetic. One of the major theologians of Vishnu devotionalism, the Tamil
brahman Ramanuja, succeeded in converting the king who was later known
as Vishnuvardhana of the Hoysala dynasty of Karnataka, which was then
engaged in displacing the Cholas in the far south. Nevertheless, Jainism – its
doctrines and its shrines and seminaries – continued to enjoy support for a
lengthy period in Karnataka, similar to the widespread support it enjoyed in
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Medieval India
Rajasthan owing to the patronage of the Solanki–Chaulukyan dynasty of the
middle of the twelfth century.
Devotional worship became a major ideological element throughout early
medieval India. Doctrinally, theism opposed itself to the ethical and atheistic
traditions of Jainism and Buddhism, while at the same time incorporating
elements of both. But there was a signifi cant difference in practice: personal
devotion was offered to gods whose daily life was celebrated as if they were
kings, and this worship was conducted within buildings constructed to shelter
the god as a palace sheltered a king. Devotions of this magnitude and the
conspicuous support of devotee kings found favour in all parts of the subcontinent, as kings between the seventh to twelfth centuries sought ways to extend
their sovereignty beyond the often narrowly circumscribed core territories of
their realms. There was little evidence of awareness among most of the major
kings of the subcontinent that a new and vigorous political force in the shape
of Islam was establishing itself in northern India. Soon there would be a shift
in historical developments substantial enough to warrant the designation of a
new phase of medieval Indian history.
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